glitchsoc - Link to source
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incredible take from one of the GNU maintainers, seriously
in reply to Glyph

gotosocial - Link to source

:: fire_emblem_sickos.jpg ::

I'm still disgusted and mad about this hours later

(but seriously, fucking text editors nowadays
vim: "we are now allowing slop"
neovim: "we are allowing slop and are also fascists"
emacs, months later: "we would totally accept slop, and also, we're super cool with slave labor (software freedom is more important than human freedom (except mine, obviously))")

This entry was edited (today, 7:33 AM)
in reply to :: fire_emblem_sickos.jpg ::

mastodon - Link to source

Fubar

@aud @glyph@mastodon.social @ariadne Wait, I missed the neovim discourse, have a link at all?

(The sheer amount of things I am having to change or give up on because of fascism at this stage is astounding. In all honesty, we should have an 'anarchistsforkeverything' thing but no one I know who is politically conscious and has abilities in the tech realm has the time or energy. Too busy doing on the ground things)

@Ariadne, bunyote friend @:: fire_emblem_sickos.jpg ::
in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

bbuk

I recall a friend that submitted a bug patch to a project. They wanted him to agree to the "code of conduct" before accepting it. He refused. Why should he agree to be bound by anything? He found the bug, made the patch and gave it to the community under public domain. The "community" would not accept the fix.

This sounds like a more extreme version of this. While obviously I don't agree with slavery, code is code and does not and should not care about the life of the contributor.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

HellPie

That is par for the course, just like the paragraph after:

> Any other answer is a first step towards splitting our community along the many lines of political and ideological divides

The implication that answering yes to slave labor for the benefit of GNU would expectedly be unquestionable and unanimously agreeable is baffling, but also very much expected from GNU.

Still, people better not start calling them a death cult, what next? Acknowledge the fact that they put the project above everything and everyone else? Worship a single man as their prophet? Claiming that they would be willing to sacrifice humanity to save some crumbling software? Crazy talk. Conspiracy theory. It is heretic to have such thoughts about pillars of FOSS. To question GNU is akin to question the entire temple.

And yet, in a hypothetical example: if they found out one of 8 billion people has magic blood that can be used in a ritual to elevate any GNU project to never before achieved potential, and they knew that person is not RMS, would they kill 8 billion people to find the right one? Their answer must be YES.

This entry was edited (today, 8:12 AM)
in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

bit

lists.gnu.org/archive/html/ema…

The response came from Eli Zaretskii, one GNU maintainer, who is an asshole. A zealot with a narrow minded view of the ethics that should be employed for emacs development, prizing above all else the avoidance of community fracture, even at the cost of basic morals. He doesn't speak for all.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

Todd Knarr

Color me unsurprised. There's a number of people there who IMO have excellent ideas about software specifically but who're otherwise anywhere from unpleasant to downright vile people who should be shunned.

Myself, I'd have to consider it unethical to accept it regardless of whether it was legal or allowed by the rules, since it's creation was unethical.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

saxnot

"Our answer must be YES" has such maniac energy it''s such a whacky take.

here in germany just recently many companies used labour camps to build all products in all factories
it's a dark chapter and i can't imagine someone saying "our answer must be YES because the forced labour jews and political opponents who are slaved to death build the same toaster just fine"

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

paelnever

Be coherent and stop using your computer that is built thanks to slavery. Otherwise things shouldn't be like that necessarily, computers could be built in a sustainable way and without slave work, LLMs could be trained without spending humongous amounts of energy and without using stolen data. The campaign to blame technology itself diverting attention from technofeudal lords and the way they are making and using that technology is disgusting. Specially disgusting when you also use your slavery based computer to blame free and copyleft software, the worst enemy of those technofeudal lords.
This entry was edited (today, 11:31 AM)
in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

What I don't like about this answer is, if the project wants to absolve itself of responsibility for deciding whether contributions are ethical or not, then giving a definite yes/no answer is still not the way to do it.

In that circumstance, the correct answer is,
> As a U.S. based foundation, we track the law of the U.S. for issues outside of our focus.

Problem solved.

If the U.S. permits products of slave labour, that's a U.S. problem at that point.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

Northern Scrub

it would seem to me that if one is to use the products of slavery as a means, or part of a means, to disrupt and cause the cessation of that same slavery, then it is a viable solution if the alternative is to permit that same slavery to last any length of time greater.

When the slaves make guns, is it not appropriate to take those same guns, that would otherwise have been used in the oppression of slaves, to instead destroy the masters?

In that same vein, instructing an LLM to create the means of its own destruction would seem appropriate.

What is not is permitting personal gain from those same products.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

Space Hobo

When I was really getting into the whole FOSS upswell in the 90s, the details of the licences became a bit of a fixation for a lot of us. In particular, we kind of had to come to terms with DFSG#6 (No discrimination against fields of endeavour), as we all felt like we were the Good Hackers doing battle against the Bad Companies, and wanted to limit their ability to take advantage of us.

And so we wanted to do things like have a no-war-crimes licence, or a no-slavery licence or no-arms-deals licence. And we argued a lot about how violation might be adjudicated and where we might define the boundaries of these terms. In the end we kind of sighed and agreed that it was a reasonable thing not to try and tackle these topics specifically in *copyright law*. We're not going to look at the docket at the ICC and say "ah-HA! You violated my no-war-crimes licence when you used libextremelytinything!!!"

But this left a void, and it was filled by the ESR fash and the RMS sex-pest-apologists. Organisations felt the gap, but the best we came up with was Codes Of Conduct that just specified the Extreme Decorum that set the stage for normalisation of all sorts of horrible people. I liked the essay that analysed the FOSS movement as a labour movement that didn't realise its true nature until it was too late.

Anyway, yeah, having a licence that doesn't prohibit slavery does not mean your project should look the other way. It just means the means for acting on this lie outside of copyright law. We should have been so much clearer about that.

We still can.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

mbrdev

honestly I think the “community” should split, people who feel ethics are important on one side and people who don’t care on the other. Starting from scratch is not easy, maybe not even practical in the slightest, but is it ethical to use past work of people who have now become unethical or perhaps have always been unethical. Ethics is complicated but “is slavery bad??” Is one of the simplest things ever and when someone can’t answer that correctly it’s time to split.
in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

glitchsoc - Link to source

chmod 777 Kayfox

Arguments like this invoking moral relativism ("it is moral to follow and respect local laws and customs and therefore what is moral changes based on location") are fine in high school debate club.

Somewhat insane to see seriously discussed in the context of free software.

This kinda behaviour ("we are choosing to ignore all other moral questions that are not related to our core mission") is exactly what fractioned the New Atheists movement a decade ago.

"We're not passing any judgement on people as long as they support our core mission" is how you end up with a community of misogynists and alt-right losers, who face no judgement for their actions, and drive away anyone who doesn't want to be associated or around those people, like woman, queer people, and anyone with a functional sense of human empathy.

In other words, it's nazi bar behaviour. I really hope this person grows out of these views.

This entry was edited (today, 4:33 PM)
in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

Dan Hatton

Awful. Particularly since it looks like a clear majority of subsequent participants in the thread agree with him.

A tricksy thought, though: in some jurisdictions, businesses are required by law to show due diligence in avoiding the use of slavery or forced labour by their suppliers and/or "value chain partners". I wonder how the existence of a public statement like this affects the ability of those businesses either to use GNU software or to collaborate in the development of GNU software.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

snac - Link to source

Alexandre Oliva

what a confused question! is it meant to be a trap or somesuch?

the ethical position of free software is primarily focused on opposing the control of users through control over the software they use. the question has nothing whatsoever to do with this.

free software takes on various other issues of human rights, but that hasn't historically ruled out contributions made by wage slaves or, more recently, by mechanical slaves. there are reasons to reject the latter, but what affects free software projects in this regard is primarily legal reasons.

if the ethical issues that the question attempts to raise applied to accepting contributions to free software projects, they should probably apply to wage slaves as well. yet nobody seems willing to embarrass themselves by calling out the ethical issue of free software projects receiving contributions made by wage slaves.

it would be an embarrassment because the ethical issue is not in the free software project's acceptance, but in the contributors' stance towards workers. no benefit to society or to workers would arise out of declining such contributions. the only loss would be to the projects themselves. it wouldn't aid the workers, and it wouldn't harm the contributors. this is no more than misdirected virtue signaling, hurting those who're doing good even out of evil.

please call out those who're doing actual wrong, not those who repurpose the wrong to make right.

in reply to Ariadne, bunyote friend

mastodon - Link to source

Schykle

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Genuinely what was even the point of them making this statement. Ignoring the fact that it's just an abhorrent stance... what if they just... didn't say that? Damn 😬

If they supported images as replies, this would be mine.

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