3.8 KiB
Warning: If you are not willing to listen to me talk about people who are obsessed over identity politics, stop reading this blog post now!
Today I'm going to say something I may come to regret in the future. Fuck it. This needs to be said. I may also lose more readers for this, or receive angry emails from people I dislike. That's not something that bothers me.
I'm sure if you follow my blog you're well aware of the petition against Richard Stallman that big technology companies signed. Big names like Mozilla, GNOME Foundation, LineageOS, OBS, Tor, X.org Foundation and even Creative Commons all signed this petition. Even some GNU/Linux channels like The Linux Experiment. This petition calls for the removal of the entire board of the FSF, and that of course includes Richard Stallman. Even the GNU project, which is Stallman's project.
Whether or not you believe Richard Stallman is a good person is not something I care about in any way. I don't care about that, and I don't care about him as a person to be honest. But I value Richard Stallman's work more than I will ever value this petition or frankly anyone who signed this petition, because despite Stallman's possible ethical flaws, he is responsible for a lot of good free software, including the free software movement itself. This petition wants to shame Stallman over things that don't really matter all that much in the software space. When you develop or use software, the political views of the developer doesn't matter, the end product does. And for the most part, the software he has worked on is pretty good.
This is just one example of the awful political activism which has slowly but surely taken over many free software projects, such as the Linux kernel and many other projects that people depend on. It's no longer about writing a good program but rather political activism and identity politics, which doesn't at all matter to the end user. The end user, the average normie just wants a program that doesn't suck and gets the job done. While saying politics should stay out of software entirely is a bit far fetched, considering free software (or even open source) is a movement, when you're actually writing a program it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if a contributor believes in X, Y or Z or is a part of group X, Y or Z. If the code is good, it's good. If it isn't, then it isn't.
These people who are absolutely obsessed over politics are called SJWs, or "woke". In my experience, they may not admit it themselves, but usually they fall into this category. These people don't care about the software, they only care about making sure everyone involved in the project has (usually) liberal political views. If someone has different views, they will group together to shame that individual for their ideas, calling them a bunch of different names that I'm sure all of you have heard in the past even if the contribution the individual made is excellent and improves the project in a meaningful way. It's kind of difficult to avoid these people nowadays, and I am sure everyone who is reading this blog post has either come across one of these people, or are part of this group of people.
Either way, if you are one of these people, you are free to contribute to my software repositories. Same for the complete opposite part of the spectrum. I value these contributions equally, because they both result in a better product. The activism should stay out of software, that's the important part. Whatever you do outside of my repositories is not my concern in any way. Do however know that I will say what I want, whether you like it or not. And regardless of Stallman's views on politics or any other individual, I value and support the software and the software development, no matter who contributes to it.