Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

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What if your goal is not being successful in term of absolute number of users no matter what but instead to promote something?

It's fortunate that sometimes people refuse to build big tents and instead push for a better world.

> They need to understand that contributions and use are driven by utility and convenience and economics, not morality

You are wrong. GNU's whole existence is for moral reasons, and their tools are pervasive and you "typically" depend on them. It might not be everybody, even most people, but it's still a thing.

> I frankly do not care about the ethos of FOSS enough

You need to understand that some people do, and will promote it.

> I don't want to learn a different UI for contributing to FOSS

And I don't like to have to use proprietary software to contribute to FOSS [1]. How do we do? Do we please you and go for GitHub, or do we work towards this goal?

I personally won't optimize for convenience no matter what. Convenience is killing our planet. We actually need to take our fingers out to make the world work. We can't live forever effortless. This is the pragmatic path, actually. I'm not arguing against convenience, I'm the first to like it, but things have various aspects worth taking in account, convenience only being one of them.

Not that I don't find Forgejo not convenient. Pretty much the opposite. I like its UX.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

>It's fortunate that sometimes people refuse to build big tents and instead push for a better world.

In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure. We don't all agree on what makes the world better and what makes it worse.

That said, I don't have a problem with this particular project. It's absolutely fine to create a git hosting solution specifically for open source as open source is itself a very big tent spanning a wide range of ideologies and groups that are otherwise hostile towards each other.

It is in fact commercial closed source software that is increasingly subject to political restrictions that are justified by supposedly making the world a better place.

You cannot remove politics from IT infrastructure. Politics is everywhere. Politics is deciding how we live together as a society; the very fact we're having this discussion is politics.

It's the fable of being apolitical that is a mistake, because in doing so you are strengthening the status quo and prevent others from thinking about the situation and changing it.

I agree that nothing is completely free of politics. What I'm advocating is to tolerate a wider spectrum of political opinions regarding access to IT infrastructure than we may be willing to tolerate in other contexts.

I believe that this stance can be justified on a technical level that is only very remotely linked to the main political ideologies of our time.

> In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure

You need to make choices that will have tradeoffs anyway. Unless you find a consensual choice, which is very rare, you might be picking mainstream ones, which are not neutral.

Neutrality does not exist. For instance, for any software you need to choose, it will be either proprietary or open source. Both have political implications.

I agree that some choices cannot be avoided, but others can and should be avoided.

In my opinion, we should avoid linking the use of IT infrastructures to political issues such as systems of government, wars, climate change, gender identity, religion or anything else that is unrelated to the technical aspects of that infrastructure.

Open source licences themselves are a good example of how I think it should be done. They do not impose any unnecessary political restrictions. They only impose specific rules related to source code. I think that's a good idea and we should apply this idea to other IT infrastructures as well.

What makes IT infrastructures special compared to anything else that we should avoid political matters?

For me they are critical and omnipresent. So crucial, in fact, that they are somewhat at the center of political matters nowadays. They are probably a core part of many policies.

And I believe the way they are done cannot avoid politics.

Trying hard to project into myself into your perspective, I'm trying to compare them to roads, which are infrastructure too. You could say they should be neutral and let anybody use them without discrimination...

... but they are not neutral. The way they are built consume more or less energy, have various environmental implications, they more or less encourage usage of cars or trains or planes depending on how the network is organized, how they are maintained, which facilities are nearby roads… And many roads are not very usable without cars so they actually discriminate.

I believe the same kind of things apply to IT infrastructure. Most choices will have political implications and therefore you'd actually be careful when designing them.

Now, regardless of whether IT infrastructure can be kept neutral (which I don't think is possible), I actually think that we should not and that we'd better work hard to leverage, and design them the best we can to limit our environmental footprint (for instance).

I already conceded that it is not possible to avoid all politics. There are political decisions to be made that are directly related to the infrastructures themselves, their functioning, their economics, their accessibility, the power structures they enable, etc. I did not mean to exclude these political aspects.

What I meant very specifically is that access to IT infrastructures in the widest sense of the word (including source code) should not be restricted based on political opinions or fault lines.

Going further, I would not even restrict access to criminals as long as the criminality is not related to the functioning of the infrastructure itself. I believe that such restrictions would threaten the infrastructures themselves, make them worse for everybody or at least cause unacceptable levels of collateral damage.

I agree that absolute neutrality doesn't exist. But throwing out the whole concept of neutrality just because neutrality has its limits would be a bad idea. E.g., network neutrality has a very specific meaning. It doesn't mean that networks can be neutral in absolutely every way.

So we can arbitrarily label whatever we dislike as "political" and then demand people to "their politics out of $thing"?

That's not how it works. There are no neutral positions.

What I mean by "keep out" is that I don't want political opinions or fault lines to determine access to IT infrastructures.

I worry that this is where we're headed, but as I said, hosting open source git repositories is not that and I have no problem with it whatsoever.

I think we can and should be neutral with regard to _some_ distinctions in _some_ specific contexts. That's not the same as saying there is a neutral position in general.

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> I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure.

I find it interesting that people only ever say this when talking about free software initiatives. Nobody moans about software getting 'political' when talking about closed-source companies enforcing intellectual property laws that were literally written by politicians.

> I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure.

>> I find it interesting that people only ever say this when talking about free software initiatives. Nobody moans about software getting 'political' when talking about closed-source companies enforcing intellectual property laws that were literally written by politicians.

I'm sorry, but I find your extremely selective quoting offensive. You are distorting the meaning of my comment, in fact turning it into its exact opposite. You even left out the first two words of the sentence you are quoting just to make your point.

I said "In general I prefer..." followed by two paragraphs justifying why I think that this general principle doesn't apply to open source and to this project in particular.

If your 'general principle' doesn't apply to the most important and popular software in the world (open source) then perhaps it is not very general, and not very principled.

My general principle is that political opinions as well as political conflicts and fault lines should not determine access to IT infrastructures.

Now, open source licences themselves as well as distribution platforms such as public git repositories guarantee access to some very important global IT infrastructures.

Perhaps you can see why my general principle cannot apply to open source in the same way it applies to other things that fall under "their politics" - the rather sloppy term I originally used.

It's the same reason why the principle of tolerance cannot apply to tolerance itself in the same way it applies elsewhere.

I think principles are always contradictory in the absolute. They only make sense as directions along specific dimensions and can rarely be applied to themselves.

> My general principle is that political opinions as well as political conflicts and fault lines should not determine access to IT infrastructures.

Then you're going to be disappointed, because politics is intrinsically intertwined with software and IT infrastructure. The fact that so much IT infra is built on top of open source and free software means that discussion is inescapable.

The fact that corporations need to track the licensing of the software they use (both for proprietary and open source software) is enough proof of that.

Regardless of what you said in your later paragraphs, statements of the form "I prefer to keep politics out of X" are often naive, as is the case here. Unfortunately, politics is everywhere, and ignoring that only serves to ignore important aspects of reality that can affect outcomes you care about.

Politics is a part of IT infrastructure, full stop. Ignoring that won't make it go away. The discussion on this post is proof of that.

> In general I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure.

Fine, then go somewhere else and don't use Codeberg. Your criticism is part of bringing politics into this. It's about freedom and choice. You have the choice to go somewhere else, nobody is forcing you.

Quoting myself: "That said, I don't have a problem with this particular project. It's absolutely fine to create a git hosting solution specifically for open source..."

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