@Gargron
Absolutely 100%, thank you for pointing out what shouldn't need to be pointed but JFHC

@Gargron great question. i got involved in FOSS through activism on *other* topics, and i suspect i am not alone in that

@Gargron I don't know, but FSF says freedom means freedom to do anything. Literally anything. Regardless of anything.

@Gargron Freedom without ethics and humanitarian values is chaos. The one that erupts in war torn countries etc Everybody is “free” to kill each other. In the same analogy free software without ethics leads to the same dog eat dog world we tried to evade in the first place.

@Gargron

so no contributions from the genocidal apartheid war-criminal fascist state of israel ?

@Gargron This whole thread needs a dose of "I don't argue with people John Brown would have shot" stapled to it, JFC.

@Gargron What's software for? I'm pretty sure Babbage was just bored. Or he was trying to get rich.

I don't think he was thinking about ethics.

@Gargron GNU GPL doesn't ban contributions from slaves forced to work on software, so it is… fine?

@Gargron @onepict given it comes from free as in freedom, and slavery was rife in "the land of the free", at least they're consistent.

Absolutely morally wrong, but consistent.

@Gargron this is the point, i think, at which i finally admit that the free software movement is dead to me.

anyone got anything else? i mean, i'm still going to want to write code based on tools that are zero cost, and give them away to anyone crazy enough to want them. but … not in association with these bozos…

@Gargron
AI- abuse make easy to recognise the addicted. Just like fentanyl.

@Gargron Yes, FOSS should include ethics.

But. For individuals, there's a problem. We are all embedded in societies. We don't live without them. If the societies have unethical structural components, individuals can do what they can but on a day-to-day level it's never much. It's like telling people to boycott the transit system because it uses fossil fuels and make their own. You can't. So do you never go anywhere? That doesn't change the system either.

The question about slavery is not hypothetical. It's embedded all over the place. There was a web site maybe 15 years ago that would estimate for you how many enslaved people globally were supporting your life.

So we've all answered the GNU maintainer's question and answered it the same way. Yes, we go on making contributions and accepting them. Mainly by being unaware of the slavery.

But the fact remains that we can either do nothing because our societies have grossly criminal components, or we can do what's possible for us in the moment and maybe all the invisible molecules of change eventually make a less criminal system.

Obviously, it would be better if we did that without lying to ourselves.

@Gargron Click bait coming to FOSS. The same tactics as in politics. I am seeing too much of this lately. For sure, it is the same ol' crowd benefitting. Beware!

@Gargron Is it money? Somehow it has to be amount money.

Many free softwares are collecting a lot of donations that I assume "reimburse" the managers of the project.