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Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

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Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#261
Unpopular opinion: telling people they need to keep their protests non-disruptive is akin to telling them they can’t protest. “Protest in a way where I can ignore you.”

Do I think “protestware” is a bad idea? Sure. Am I going to tell them to take their fight for human rights elsewhere? Not a chance.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#262
To be honest, I'm annoyed by the benign protestware messages when they start to get in the way of using the software, particularly on mobile. I was looking at the isomorphic git documentation the other day, and noticed that their "#BlackLivesMatter #DefundThePolice" banner scrolls under the rest of the content, leaving this annoying gap that takes up screen real estate, especially in landscape mode on a phone.[0] What's the point? Is a single person going to be persuaded to support either cause by seeing this banner on a relatively niche JS library that reduces readability of its documentation? Will anyone find the library any more useful because they support the cause? (I support neither cause, but find the library useful nevertheless.)

Recently, I saw a similar pattern with the Svelte REPL adding a pro-Ukraine message.[1] The banner along the bottom is so large that landscape mode becomes unusable, and non-trivial examples are hard to see even in portrait mode. Again, who does this help? (I support Ukraine, so feel like, "yeah, I get it; can I close the banner now?")

The worst part about these patterns is that they can't be disabled and seem to be deployed haphazardly without regard for the overall design.

While these aren't malware, they are still hostile for the majority of users who aren't so gung ho in their support for the current thing.

[0] https://isomorphic-git.org/docs/en/deleteBranch

[1] https://svelte.dev/repl/hello-world?version=3.46.4

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#263
post #146
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was anyone surprised people were pissed off?

Indeed, judging by the response it seems like a very successful protest (aside from the reports of lost NGO files.) Not something I’d have done, but I understand the idea.

No post body was provided.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#264
post #10

npm install is such a scary command these days (or yarn install, same thing). I never liked it because of the shitload of dependencies it usually pulls but now I would hesitate running it outside a well isolated container. This event added to the strong distrust I came to have on NPM these last months. The NPM ecosystem seems incredibly immature and unreliable and any Javascript project depending on NPM is now a pote…

> In theory the same things could happen for PIP, Maven, Gradle, their Rust and Go counterpart and any such package manager. Any data on this? Supply chain attacks, such as these, can definitely happen to any language. NPM seems to be a nice target simply because the volume of deps your avg 'simple' node project has (I mean, 'npm generate'ing a simple strapi-backed static site for us and there's ~300mb of node_module…

[deleted]

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#265
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they got caught up in the socially accepted "hate fest" against citizens of a certain country, particularly by private companies.

If a company does business in Russia right now, they are giving money to the Russian government which will be used to kill Ukrainians. Let's not conflate wartime trade policy with Twitter wokeness marketing.

There are US companies still selling health products to Russian citizens. What is the expectation, to let them die? I fully understand that cars, fast food, liqueur or perfumes are things to stop selling, but essential products not. The average Ivan and Natasha should not receive a collective punishment (to death in some cases) for what some guy they may not have even voted for is doing.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#266
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they got caught up in the socially accepted "hate fest" against citizens of a certain country, particularly by private companies.

If a company does business in Russia right now, they are giving money to the Russian government which will be used to kill Ukrainians. Let's not conflate wartime trade policy with Twitter wokeness marketing.

They’ll most likely use it to pay their employees, since employment costs are the biggest chunk of expenses for many companies. From the money that goes to the government, some will go to fund the war, but some will go towards social support, maintenance, etc just like any other country.

Where does this black and white caricature of an idea come from if not twitter? Acting like all the money in Russia is used to make bullets which are sent directly to the front.

Not to mention that there’s quite a few countries killing people today and nearly nobody’s boycotting them.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be a problem in any language or package manager but in my Golang project, I have a single dependency outside of the standard library, in my Javascript project I conservatively have 200+ (if I consider all the packages installed by my primary dependencies). The surface area is just that much bigger and the packages change so frequently.

So you recon a better (bigger?) node stdlib would solve a lot of this?

That Golang project also likely isn’t trying to be a highly interactive UI running on thousands of different runtime configurations.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> men are still statistically more likely to be violent criminals I think your meant criminals are more likely to be men.

No, I meant exactly what I said, more men are violent criminals per capita than women. What you said is also true, but it's not what I meant.

Moreover, unless we are talking about a very unusual subset of the population, the ratio of men:women is always almost 1:1, which renders the two statement functionally equivalent

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#269
post #177
post #34

Do people think the people protesting like this don't know that this is damaging? They presumably feel that the issue at hand is more important than that damage. Every protest every has been met with "but this protest is being done the wrong way, don't inconvenience me", but that's the point: protest has to disrupt things to make people take notice and make changes. Would I do this? No. I don't think it's effective o…

I don't know what the next step is after "I've deleted your files... now listen to what I have to say." That makes no sense. It sounds more like an excuse for acting out.

Once your hard drive is wiped, you're supposed to automatically realize it must be a legitimate open source developer protesting the war, rather than some other type of malware. Then, rather than the natural human instinct to blame the person who did it, you're supposed to realize that your government must be lying to you and must actually be evil, and you're supposed to start a revolution to overthrow Putin.

I guess that's the thinking?

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