I’m not sure I catch your drift here. As I define it, virtue signaling is the act of projecting your beliefs (or rather, the performative aspect of your beliefs) in a public space. So, yeah, when people place the placard of “open source” all over their projects, they may as well be saying “Free Range, Organic”. It’s a label that signals to others that care about that label.

Whether it’s done under the auspices of Twitter Spaces or VCs promoting certain projects over others implicitly by kingmaking projects with massive seed rounds, the result is the same.

This is why I say in the post that nuance is important.