FOSDEM: Open-Source Is Political – Resist Organize Protect

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44 points·obeleh··9 comments

After sitting through the first two minutes of hysterics, I started skipping around and the video is just the opening ceremony for FOSDEM. Probably see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46846970 (or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845103) instead.

Talk link with video:

Welcome to FOSDEM 2026 - Richard "RichiH" Hartmann

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SFKNTZ-welcome_to_fos...

No, it's not. Free/Libre software is, open source is just the corporate version of free/libre software minus politics.

Neither is.

But there are those who seek to destroy them by co-opting politics in.

We need to firmly reject these cancerous elements which try to poison open source with politics.

It will led to even more damage if left to fester.

Open source, free software, the hacker ethos itself, have all been political from their very inception. And they've always been "liberal", in the broadest sense of that word, spanning libertarianism to neoliberalism to latte liberals to left-liberals to fully automated luxury gay space communism. But it's all political.

> Open source, free software, the hacker ethos itself, have all been political from their very inception

Prove it.

> But it's all political

It's not, it's technical.

Yes, it's cost freenode and many more scissions, X.org going crazy, discussing rolling back 1.5 years of commits just to eliminate a contributor from history, it's ridiculous.

There's always one side that wants to impose their ideology to the other. And it's always the same side.

The guy seems very upset about something, but it's really unclear what exactly that is. He talks about a crossroads and the loss of democracy - is this about the EU re-aligning itself away from the US and towards China?

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