The "omarchy" stuff is getting weird and weirder | Hacker News Reader

The "omarchy" stuff is getting weird and weirder

opensourcewaswrong.neocities.org

8 pointsfadious11 comments

Title is actually "Close the Door: Open source was wrong"

What does this have to do with omarchy?

my feelings, perhaps wrong - but all this bs about fascists, white males, i've heard it recently is kind of there... "fascist white male, slapping his name and his logo on her work" sounds lot of like "bunch of dhh's dotfiles called distro"

  Open source, where anyone can compile it and use it as they want must be destroyed. It's not open when the "openness" is used against you. We must be in charge, we must be those who decide who can use the fruit of our work.

  I admit it won't be easy or nice, but it's necessary. We need to background check everyone. Every user of our work. Get back to the roots. You allow your friend to use your code and your work. You allow trusted people only. It will still be free to use in terms of money, not free in the terms it's for everyone. Because "free speech" in only a tool to inject fascism to our society. Free as in "free beer" not free as in "bring your fascism"

  We will need centralized registry of all users, which would have another benefit in driving corporations out. Are you from Amazon? Supporting zionist genocide in Palestine? Sorry, you are not welcome here, you are not "free" to use our code.

Assuming that this isn't a setup, this article and this author and this sentiment exactly validates the fears of the "keep politics out of open source" people. This is where it leads, taken to its logical conclusion, if you don't do so.

The whole thing reads like an odd parody. “A modest proposal.”

the more i'm thinking about this... it cannot be serious...

The essay takes the anti-Omarchy arguments and pushes them to deliberately absurd conclusions:

>> “You don't want fascists benefiting from your code?”

> Then don't publish source.

> Background-check every user.

> Maintain a centralized approved-user registry.

> Monitor people's browsing.

> Use AI to detect unacceptable politics.

> Abolish encryption.

Seems like someone trying a reductio ad absurdum.

it's funny, because next to the politics it's the AI-first enthusiasm that drives people away from that distro :-/

Honestly, I hope it's setup. Got this in telegram group and I think it's completely out of anything. But sharing this anyway - given the recent sentiments around floss, I won't be surprised it was meant seriously :-/

"Background checks" is loaded language. Should GIT repo owners have some reason to trust people before accepting pull requests? What does that look like? Is it about their politics or about their ability to code?

Don't we have explicit reputation scores baked in already? Sure looks like it. Even the BFDL have lower thresholds of acceptance based on past behaviour and "reputation"

But I would agree with a sense this looks very like parody. Nobody is setting out to design free software to "other" the user, or exclude contributions because you are not a white cis male. Are there reactionaries in charge of some software suites? Sure. There's all kinds.

A reminder that William Shockley was an overt Eugenicist racist. Every gate on your computer owes a debt to the transistor, designed by a white supremacist. We'd have got there eventually of course, but we don't have time machines and we can't erase the past, or the path which got us here.

yeah, the beginning makes "some" sense - i saw all those nix people red-angry when dhh mentioed that next omarchy could be based on their work, but the end about llms and monitoring and whatever sounds like a complete parody

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