Unfunkyufo

I don't often give GitHub credit, because I work with it every day and I encounter something frustrating or broken nearly every day ending in "day", but kudos to them for working on addressing the some of the big problems.

I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.

Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.

As an advocate (and practitioner) of European digital sovereignty, let me tell you, at least from my perspective, it has absolutely nothing to do with fear of US intelligence agencies spying on us, and everything to do with the catastrophic consequences of an unreliable and unstable American government pulling the plug on our vital infrastructure, or at least the very least weaponizing our dependency on American companies.

I live in Denmark, a country whose primary threat at the moment is the USA, and the thought of Donald Trump effectively having a kill-switch to our highly digitalized society is absolutely frightening. Reducing our dependence on American tech means that we are less vulnerable to a hostile power using it to extort us out of our territory. We cannot remove the threat entirely, but we can make the pain less extreme.

Other EU countries are also seeing things this way, that the US no longer has a stable government and is no longer a friendly country. Who cares about American spying when the real threat is your country being turned off?

I think it's worth keeping in mind that while this may be an automated agent, it's operated by a human, and that human is personally responsible for this "attack" on an open source project.

And they should be ashamed of what happened here.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software.

I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged.

After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.

> This is a capability that makes sense to have to use when absolutely necessary.

I definitely disagree with this. Currently there is no reason to believe we'll ever have sentient AI, or AGI or whatever term you prefer, much less a runaway one. There is definitely reasons to worry about governments using this power in an era of increasing authoritarianism, I mean we're talking about this because it is literally happening right now to cover up a massacre.

I don't want the power to turn off all communications to exist, because I don't want my political enemies to have it if they win an election.

This is also my problem. I am currently using my docked Macbook instead of my much more powerful desktop running Linux, even though I also want to use Linux more.

Why? Because as much as I want to get rid of my dependence on tech giants, Apple's products are just so damn good, and they Just Work^TM, especially with each other.

Having used Linux on/off for many years, I can say that it's definitely gotten better, but I am still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. It doesn't have to be as polished as my Mac, but I'd like to at least not have to fight with Bluetooth especially, and things like the dongle for my headset not working and other issues like that.