RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/117579594140229264
If free software is not about ethics, then what the fuck is its point.
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@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.
It must be more.
Without debating philosophy and solely focusing on practicality and ease of use — the two things that actually will make the majority of people choose most things — explain to everyone why they should choose a project?
Just because something is free or open source, does not mean the people will choose it.
@Gargron Well, assuming it's logically correct, what can you do? Reject it and wait for the next guy to come up with the same solution?
Maybe blacklist the user from future contributions but you can't blacklist ideas/ solutions?
@Gargron @Mabande @ariadne is anyone actually surprised? Tech people, especially in the FOSS arena, have been relentlessly ethics-free forever.
Look at the pressure it took to make Torvalds realize “HOLY SHIT, those non-white males are *people*!!”
Their attitude towards even basic accessibility shows how much they still fuck ayn rand’s corpse.
@Gargron ethics and humanity do not go together
@Gargron There are a Range of solves - not just single-solve mindset "points". Equally, it's extremely rare for a solve to be too large of a Range, to be justly applied.
Therefore, it's more productive to scale ethics as part of a 'higher/better' solve, than its predecessor.
Call it 'evolution', but teach it as Behavioral Science, which should be Core Education instead of too many deRanged.
@Gargron This is bad, but the shitheads here legitimately trying to excuse this make it even worse.
The people who call themselves Libertarian these days don’t have ethics.
It’s a left-wing word and it’s origin expropriated like so many other words and concepts by power hungry evil people.
Libertarianism requires the discipline that one abstain from harming other people. This aspect is completely ignored by the right wing.
Freedom for me to hell with thee
@badrihippo looks like somoene discovered the same metaphor I like to use....., and then answered wrong!
@Gargron
That's a hell of an example! What a horrible take!
@Gargron The history oft the world is the history oft exploitation - be it resources, be it labour.
@Gargron I'm not all that surprised to see this come out of FSF-space unfortunately. Their dominant belief in that place at this point, whether they realise it or not, is that FOSS exists to service corporate interests. As a gift! As a treat!
They've spent the last few years proving that one.
"Software should be free. The people... not so much"
@Gargron Isn’t mastodon slop-coded as well?
@iscarlosmolero No? What makes you say that.
@Gargron it’s not a no, so I guess it’s the classic “yes you can use AI but pretty pretty please eyeball the code a bit”
Which leads to slop.
@Gargron Apropos of nothing, the only email I ever got from a "free software" figurehead over my career was a whiny complaint about documentation being in a PDF file. Ok.
@Gargron FOSS was actually never about people/environment/ethics. It was just another business or destribution model.
Maybe beeing open source is not enough. Like "fair trade", how it is developed should be reflected in the name.
@Gargron I mean, slavery as a lense is a very interesting way of examining LLM companies, particularly those that claim they are creating conscious entities.
I think that's an absurd claim, but if was true, it sounds to me that what they're trying to create is the perfect slave.
https://mark.gabby.li/Web%20Log/Servus%20et%20Machina.html
this is classic #libertarian shit
libertarians sound cool on the surface
but when you talk to them closer you find out that to them "freedom" means "i can do whatever i want, even if i harm others"
i think "freedom" means "i can do whatever i want, as long as it doesn't impinge upon the freedom of others"
#libertarianism and its pathetic immoral attitude is "freedumb"
unfortunately there is a lot of such turds in the world
you have to be on guard against them
they're out there
@Gargron I mean, slavery as a lense is a very interesting way of examining LLM companies, particularly those that claim they are creating conscious entities.
I think that's an absurd claim, but if was true, it sounds to me that what they're trying to create is the perfect slave.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF
@Gargron clearly unethical, but isn't his point that GNU's ethical mission has a limited scope (namely, software freedom, copyright, user privacy, etc)?
If you filtered source code contributions along every single moral dimension, you would end up with pretty much nothing at the intersection.
Think of all the scientific discoveries and tech invented by horrible people or horrible regimes. What matters to scientists is that the science is good. Historians and tribunals can judge the rest.
@isacdaavid @Gargron less horrible people will have scienced the discovery, and will have written the patches, instead. We do not need to accept the contributions of horrible people.
@Gargron When people grow up a bit - and it doesn't take most people very long! - they learn not to answer contorted convoluted hypothetical questions like that. You're always going to get less grief by refusing to answer than by trying to contort yourself to fit the question.
HMRC is a classic example of this. If you ask them "what would happen if I do X" the answer will always be "we're not telling you; you'll have to actually do it and then see how we decide to respond".
@Gargron Liberty? I mean this quite seriously, it is about the "It is better for ten guilty people to go free than for an innocent person to be convicted"-type of classically liberal and institution sceptical mode of thinking, where you intentionally do not assume to be able to know/express what is right or wrong with certainty that would legitimise extending power in ways that could be abused.
@Gargron Lately it seems to be about free patches for corporate infrastructure.
What @Gargron says ☝️
One can use free software because of the ethics, or because it's free. But never forget: it is only free BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING ETHICS!
@Gargron @sstephenson The reply is illuminating.
"i went back and read the gnu manifesto and the sections on philosophy at the fsf website, something i haven't done for quite some time. i was convinced I would find something to support the idea that the fsf's mission, while focused on software, is in support of the greater mission of human liberty. but you are right. i was gravely mistaken."
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-11/msg00197.html
@acf @Gargron @sstephenson The FSF/GNU has generally always been more in favour of having an alliance of people that set aside their differences to fight for something they have a common interest in. Others decide to have a more concrete, holistic worldview that relates their specific concerns to broader values. I think both the diverse and uniform approaches are valid and respectable, they just have different strategic advantages and costs.
@pkal @Gargron @sstephenson I agree, sort of. It's a noble goal to say we can put aside politics, or religion and focus on software, but I think that somewhere down at the bottom there has to be a line we can all agree on, where its not politics, its basic humanity. The hard part, of course, is collectively deciding where that line is. Are LLMs "politics" like your feelings on low tax, or high tax, or maybe gun control? Or are they ethics like your position on slavery or child abuse.
@acf @pkal @Gargron @sstephenson I agree. No slavery. I'm on board.
Do we make a global purity test questionnaire that everyone has to fill out before they can contribute? And the list of prohibited activities and unsavory political positions will be maintained by who, exactly?
Or no list, but each maintainer decides if they find out something repulsive about someone? So each project says what they accept and has a form where you can rat out contributors?
Not sure how to implement this.
@ericphelps @acf @pkal @sstephenson What a terrible take! Yes, if you find out that one of your contributors has a history of misconduct, you can and should reject their future contributions. If their patch disclaims it was made with slave labour, you are fully capable of rejecting it on those grounds! Just because you can't know everything about everyone in advance doesn't mean that nothing should be done! It's perfectly reasonable and possible to just react according to a set of principles!
@Gargron @acf @pkal @sstephenson A very libertarian position, to make individual choices😉. I can't disagree with that even though I didn't list it as one of my alternatives. It doesn't have the large social impact most other people are advocating for, but you're absolutely right: Regardless of what everyone else is doing or considers acceptable, we must make our own decisions.
@Gargron It's recognition that this shit is all deeply personal and subjective.
Sometimes people in power don't think Jews get to do science.
Some people in power don't think that Palestians can argue against genocide on campus.
No-one allowed Denmark to publish a political cartoon. When Yale wrote up the investigation, they weren't allowed to publish the cartoon.
They're all doing it for their own moral reasons.
@Gargron Ethics are central, but I like using it more than I like using commercial software. It tends to be better, and you don't have to worry about a company taking it away or breaking it.
@Gargron Depends on who defines the ethics. I like free software and, personally, I would like to see everything released under more permissive licenses which also includes usage in commercial software without attribution.
@Gargron How is that a ‘yes’..
“We could shoot ourself in the foot but we could also choose not too. We chose yes.”
@stux @Gargron Because for some forms of libertarian “freedom” mainly refers to property and what _they_ can do it with, not what people in general can do. He further goes on to state “it would split the community” if they refused to accept slave created software, as if a ruling that accepting such software isn’t devisive in the first place.
@Gargron Eugen Rochko being on the right side of history counter: ∞
@Gargron for me free software has been, can we make a world where everyone has free, same access to software? and an ecosystem where if you don’t like what you see, you can change it.
but if the software you use is built off of trash morals why use it?
@Gargron That’s the whole difference between free software and open source, we can thank Eric Raymond…
@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.