Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political! - eviltoast
  • eighty@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I can relate to the “how the fuck is being a concerned human being extreme/poltical?” energy in the post hard.

      • HomoScotian@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It’s so exhausting, they treat it like a sport, it’s not about making anyone’s lives better it’s all just about their team winning

    • caribou@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Politics used to be something people engaged in. Now politics is the core to a lot of people’s identities, which means disagreement or debate is perceived as a personal attack and people will embrace a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance to avoid being wrong.

  • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Linus gives exactly zero fucks about saying exactly what’s on his mind. And it’s almost always massively based. He’s always been great about that, we don’t deserve such a great mind.

    • Adderbox76@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Was just coming here to say that. The entire Ethos of Open Source is basically the people owning the digital means of production. So some people really not grasp that?

      • OrangeSlice@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        So some people really not grasp that?

        Actually, yes, the original FOSS movement had more right-libertarian roots than anything to the left, although nowadays some might see it as “common ground”.

        • PorkrollPosadist@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.

          Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.

          Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.

  • roda@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Woman right to choose, fair enough. Regulated guns, absolutely. The less guns the better. Gay people stuff, I couldn’t care less. Check.

    The man said it as it should be said.

  • xenago@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Linus has always been political and principled, I mean he chose the GPL for a reason! Glad to see him state all of this outright though, it only makes me respect him more.

  • Trash Panda@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Hard fisagree. Linux isn’t political. Everyone has an opinion, it’s obvious Linus would too. But I am pretty happy that his opinion is one I personally agree with. Linux can be uaed by anyone though, and nothing stops far right activists (terrorists) from making a distro, which would still be Linux. There’s a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn’t make Linux as a whole religious.

    • raresbears@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Does that really make it totally apolitical though?. Like obviously it’s not inherently attached to a wide reaching political ideology, but it still is political in the same way that any free software is kind of political.

  • Puls3@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    One great thing about about software is you don’t have to agree with or care about what the creators thoughts and beliefs are, software is at the end of the day just software.

    Doesn’t get any less political than that.

    • Jonny@lemmy.rimkus.it
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      1 year ago

      I create software by myself and disagree. First it’s very political where and for whom I choose to develop software. Second, software is always made for a purpose and the purpose can be indeed (and is) very often linked to political or social cause. E.g. a software which only purpose is to harm people, say for controlling mass destruction weapons is in my point of view a very political software

      • Puls3@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        software is always made for a purpose and the purpose can be indeed (and is) very often linked to political or social cause

        Its not though, typically software exists to serve a basic function at its core, and it could be used or contributed to by anyone for any number of things.

        • Panos Alevropoulos@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          You are thinking of software as if it exists in a vacuum. Software that is libre is a political statement. Software that is proprietary is also a political statement. Lemmy choosing to be decentralized/federated/interoperable is also a conscious political decision just as Apple chose to create its own proprietary ecosystem instead of caring about interoperability.

          • Ferk@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.

            Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

            In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.

            • bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              historically speaking, when you consider its domestication by indigenous people in South America, its appropriation by Spanish colonizers, its resistance to looting by marauding armies compared to grain crops, and the freaking Irish potato famine, I think it becomes quite clear that the potato is a politically relevant crop and could reasonably be considered political.

    • JasBC@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      One great thing about about software is you don’t have to agree with or care about what the creators thoughts and beliefs are, software is at the end of the day just software.

      It really isn’t though - no-one dared touch ReiserFS after the creator became a wife-murderer even though it, supposedly at the time, it was quite the piece of advanced code.

      • Puls3@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Was referring more to people trying to politicize software and push them into political movements they’re unrelated to. Open software is at is core free and as such anyone with any political leaning could use it or contribute to it and no one would know, and no one should care.

        • paaviloinen@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Now, what one considers free is political. You cannot decouple reality from politics, and the free software movement is just one very specific example how political this really is. It’s also these communities that generate politival movements that you may see as unrelated to the pieces of software in question.

        • Jonah@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Free software is, at its core, about the users having control over their own use of the software - the software isn’t controlled by some owner and licensed by the users, but instead all users have equal ability to understand and use the software. If you consider communism to be political, then free software is political, because free software is communism in its purest form.

  • FuzzyDunlop@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.

    Protip: You can crash self-driving cars by purposefully misclicking during Captcha checks when they ask you to identify what is a bicycle, a car, a pedestrian, etc. Keep misclicking, your are poisoning the AI with each misclick. Just stay safe on the sidewalk.

    • juergen@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      don’t think you can make a big difference as an individual, given that captchas are used by probably billions of users per day

        • Andreas@feddit.dk
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          1 year ago

          Given the number of bots on the internet trying to crack captchas, this is already happening. I don’t think captchas are being used for AI training that much, since hCaptcha uses AI-generated images with prompts like “Select the images with a hamster eating a watermelon” for its tests. All of the reCaptcha road captchas I receive also have answer validation and won’t let me pass if I answer incorrectly because of a misclick.

    • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I love doing it. I have no interest in wanting Google/Cloudflare/Tesla to succeed in CIA world domination.

  • bobslaede@feddit.dk
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    1 year ago

    I don’t see how his, very reasonable, views makes Linux itself (more?) political. What is the point of this post?

    • ElectronSoup@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’ve seen people on other sites malding about how this proves linux and the GPL are communist. I suppose it’s important to know just what those people are melting down about this week.

      • Andreas@feddit.dk
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        1 year ago

        Surely that already happened in the Code of Conduct drama a few years back? Or the “Linus is rude and difficult to work with” callout even before that?

    • Andreas@feddit.dk
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      1 year ago

      Gloating? Complaining? I thought the FOSS community has matured past “creator’s views = views of everyone who uses their creation”, honestly. And isn’t Linus supporting the Democratic party already well known?

    • Lilium@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Well, there was drama here yesterday about Lemmy’s creator and maintainer being a tankie or whatever and one person trying to say “Lemmy bad” because of that.

      This post doesn’t seem to be here by coincidence.

      • clumsy_cat@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        This post doesn’t seem to be here by coincidence.

        As the person who posted the original post: i don’t like/trust tankies and them being tankies is one of the reason i deleted my lemmy.ml account.

        My impression is that Linus also doesn’t speak in his post about tankies, but instead i think the word “communist” is equal to some general leftist.

        But i kind of agree, that this post can be seen as “in support of tankies”. hmm.

        my impression is, furthermoore: because the more tankie politics is on lemmygrad.ml, an instance which is easily blocked, it is not that bad / could be worse. I kind of hope instances like beehaw.org have the most users someday, because they are really awesome i think

  • seahorse [Ohio]@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    I half agree with his gun regulation stance. While ideally there would be more caution given to who owns guns that is unfortunately not the world americans have been living in the last 80 years or so. The fascists have guns, lots of them, and I’m not giving mine up while they have them.

    Everything else he said is 100% based.

    • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Yeah the gun law regulators generally ignore the fact that everyone and their grandma already has guns. And those with guns are not willing to do trade in programs.

      I’d like to see better psych eval and requiring to re-license every so often. That should start steering the country in the right direction. Of course I don’t see this happening any time soon.