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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with choosing platform for moral — instead of practical — reasons.

Platforms that are known for making moral judgments will likely keep making moral judgments in the future. Eventually, they'll make a judgment that you heavily disagree with.

This is why communities founded on ideology tend to shatter, while those founded on a shared goal tend to survive. Linus doesn't care whether you're a GPU expert at AMD, a 16-year-old in Nairobi, or a nazi with a swastika tattooed on your arm. He cares about the quality of your kernel patches.

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He does have some choice words for you if you're Russian, though:

> As to sending me a revert patch — please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be ‘supporting’ Russian aggression?

(from https://therecord.media/linus-torvalds-russian-linux-kernel-...)

I think this shows that there is a blurry line between moral and practical judgment, and that the type of judgment might not even matter in the way you think. Sure, this episode may have been started by OFAC sanctioning various Russian companies, but Linus is happy to invoke more personal moral terms; and ultimately whether it's practical or moral doesn't matter, a bunch of Russian folks found themselves without a commit bit seemingly at random and the same could happen to anyone regardless of a particular platform's or company's judgment.

his personal stance did not lead to anybody being excluded though.

yes it did? He banned a bunch of developers with russian email addresses.

You are saying this like pursuing profit above anything else is not a moral judgment one can heavily disagree with.

No; they aren’t making a judgement. They’re just describing a relationship between the nature of a platform and its likely future behaviour.

Who is “they“ is your sentence, I’m not following, sorry

The person you were disagreeing with.

Ah but I never said they made a judgment?

Pursuing profit is not a moral judgement.

It's at best neutral, and at worst considered to be immoral.

Nobody says "I need to make a billion dollars because of my morals".

It is, especially the “above everything wise” definitely is an ethical decision, and one many often disagree with.

Is Linux really about "profit before all else?" That seems like a moral judgement that many would disagree with.

I didn’t say Linux is about this? I’m not following you.

Perfectly summarised. Also recently saw so many people moving from GitHub to Codeberg because of anti-US and sovereign European tech movement and I wonder now which platform they are going to move again

They need to self host if they want sovereignty. This thing about relying on an external service and demanding total privacy and control is irrational.

I think this would be a good time for another European alternative to present itself. Outside the US, but more pragmatic than Codeberg.

It will exist if you create it

I might. But I'm currently looking at CodeFloe. It sounds a lot like what my best attempt might end up as.

Deciding that you "won't make moral judgments" is also a moral judgment. It's just a less obvious one. All platforms have made moral judgments in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. Some of them just don't realize it.

Is the fact that churches are some of the longest surviving communities accounted for?

(and of course Linus cares, like any unaccountable asshole he can be triggered by a way more trivial thing than a swastika (see the side comment for an example)

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