Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for clarifying that you don’t want to run code written by people that support authoritarianism regardless of their public stance on that.

I’m confused though, if you’re very adamant about not running code that was written by authoritarians, how do you use a computer at all?

I appreciate that you switched to Linux — it being open source means you (or your team) can audit it to make sure that it isn’t supporting genocide. That isn’t something that you could do with closed source software like Windows, so it makes sense with your ideological goal.

Considering the Herculean effort it takes to track the political leanings of contributors to the Linux kernel and the multitude of various packages, is there any open source software that you suggest people not run that doesn’t happen to be a Reddit competitor?

Edited for clarity

This is where I come back to pointing that your arguing in bad faith here.

You're trying to argue to absurdity.

Here I have a concrete example of a group that is explicitly politically extreme. They are explicitly in contrast to the values of open source.

Linux, meanwhile, is an absolutely massive project with billions of eyes on it every day which is head and resisted multiple attempts to compromise it.

I'm confident that the software I'm running still has bugs holes and inroads to malicious actors.

But, like you said, you basically can't use a computer if you want to avoid them all together.

So you avoid the obvious cases, you do what you can, and you keep on going forward.

Same story with buying stuff made in China. You don't do it when you can, you do it when you have to. You support laws and regulations that encourage people to move away from it.

Be pragmatic, focus on what you can accomplish, and don't worry about being perfect.

Is there a single other piece of open source software that you feel this strongly about? Just one example?

What exactly does “bad faith” mean?

Edit:

To make myself clear: You propose that your issue with the Lemmy software is based on your strongly held principles. I have asked you about how those strongly held principles apply to your usage of software.

If your principles only apply to one piece of software, my response is that they are not principles at all and that you are working backwards from not liking Lemmy and creating justifications to support that. My point is that your argument appears to be either

a) incoherent Or b) itself in bad faith

That is all.

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