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Comment by edwintorok | Hacker News Reader

People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not?

Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it? What if those views (or your own) change over time and you disagree with them?

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(ESR aside) Why not? If I believe that someone's exposed views are harmful, doesn't it make sense to avoid increasing his/her overall influence?

I mean, the fact that we're discussing ESR's views on pedophilia shows that his influence in an unrelated area (software) increases the exposure of those views. If he was just a nobody like me, would we be discussing his blog post on Catholic priests? Not likely.

Do you check the political views of all authors of each software before you decide to use it?

I sure don't, but why does that mean one should actively ignore gained knowledge?

Maybe we respond more to the milieu of a comment more than its actual content. Personally I like conspiracy theories about topical things. I never believe them but they make me chuckle to see the world from a weird point of view. But some people are going to find such theories to be horribly offensive (like Buzz Aldrin about moon fakery). We all have the capacity to wrongly analyse something we don't understand and have no stake in. A lot of people don't know what it is like to be attracted to their own gender and come out with things that are not just offensive but blatantly silly. The rest of us no better.

First of all it would take too much time to find out all the authors of all the software that I routinely use, and then keep up with what their current views are on various topics.

But I think the main reason is that most software has more than one author, and it would be unfair to judge the usefulness of that software based on the (non-technical) views of just one of its authors.

Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software, and TBH I would consider those pet-projects anyway, and I don't think the original author would care much whether you use it or not.

Edit: about gained knowledge: I think you could apply this if you compare multiple competing solutions, one deciding factor could be the author's thoughts on various topics. Just like how a company's attitude towards various topics might be influencing your purchasing decision: for example Nvidia doesn't support open-source drivers, hence I don't buy Nvidia when choosing a graphics card.

But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible.

Your reasoning would apply only for single-author software

But doesn't that fit SRC itself?

But again for me those are all technical reasons, I wouldn't factor an author's/company's political views into that decision, unless it was something really horrible.

Ah! But then you're not arguing whether it makes sense to factor the political views in the decision - what you're actually arguing is that ESR's views are not really horrible.

But since pothibo supposedly considers them really horrible, it makes sense that (s)he would factor in those views, no?

Maybe, although I don't think I made technical decisions based on unrelated events. The closest that comes to mind is as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602582 I did use ReiserFS in the past, and I did switch to something else but the reason was purely technical: XFS became quite good on a HDD, an ext4 very nice on an SSD, and also there didn't seem to be much development done upstream once the original author was gone.

Why not respond to bigotry with love, instead of hating back? This is not some zero-sum game. If anyone needs a little bit of success in life, it's a bigot.

Tolerating intolerance is not an act of love, but of apathy--both towards the bigot, and the bigot's targets.

> People can have different political, religious, etc. views than you, but why should that influence whether you use his software or not?

It would be difficult to use software written by a person who openly had a political view that supports owning slaves.

This is not some mundane left wing vs right wing discussion. It's a guy who believes that homosexuals should be taken on the same level as pedophiles. The line between saying this and saying homosexuals should go to prison is thin at best.

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