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Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

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Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#221

Post by FredPret »

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #140
meken wrote: post #33

This is crazy. The monetary system is fracturing, now the open source system could be fracturing. If I was Russia, I might start seeing the need to develop in-country versions of open source packages, as a matter of national security.

It’s open source: If the government’s are willing to pay people to fork the original and vet and merge all the future deltas then they just need to host their own package manager. But would developers trust a government managed set of packages? In the US that is doubtful (I’d assume at some point FBI, CIA, NSA, DOD do something dishonest with it at some point.)

At least they’d have an incentive to make it work reliably and not nuke your files. Sounds like an improvement already

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#222

Post by seneca »

zucker42 wrote: post #152
ksec wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretty much summarise what is wrong with the title. It is not "Protestware" that harms open source. It is politics and ideology harms open source. And the rate things are going may be Open Source will not only be split between permissive and copyleft, but progressive and libreRight. Edit: Now I remember Douglas Crockford's "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license. I wonder if there are still any o…

> It is politics and ideology harms open source. The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology. Open source would not exist to the same extent without the ideology espoused by the FSF. The problem is that abandoning a key tenant of the free software movement, neutrality towards different uses (part of freedom 0 of the free software definiti…

> The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology.

This is true, and an argument that keeps getting repeated, but isn't the same issue. The politics of open source software are about software. How it's made and how it's used.

The modern push is about injecting outside ideology into software (and everywhere else). Bringing geo, gender, and racial politics into software is a whole lot different than software politics in software.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#223

Post by mohanmcgeek »

zucker42 wrote: post #152
ksec wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretty much summarise what is wrong with the title. It is not "Protestware" that harms open source. It is politics and ideology harms open source. And the rate things are going may be Open Source will not only be split between permissive and copyleft, but progressive and libreRight. Edit: Now I remember Douglas Crockford's "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license. I wonder if there are still any o…

> It is politics and ideology harms open source. The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology. Open source would not exist to the same extent without the ideology espoused by the FSF. The problem is that abandoning a key tenant of the free software movement, neutrality towards different uses (part of freedom 0 of the free software definiti…

> The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology

They did have a strong ideology and they worked towards building the world they wished to see. Not by breaking existing things to virtue signal their support for "the current thing"

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#224

Post by sirius87 »

shkkmo wrote: post #109
sirius87 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly it. For some people, a world that they relate to is coming to an end, and anything they could do, however insignificant, no matter what the side-effects or personal reputation cost, is worth doing. This isn't some brainy impact-analysis based action. "Something must be done". The disruptions caused by these rogue packages will make it to newspapers and the media, and maybe, just maybe, parrying the ne…

Not everything people feel compelled to do is OK. It is not OK to go out and find Russian Americans and go vandalize their property to make a point. If you do so, you should face criminal charges. I similarly think that the node module maintainers who deliberately abused their trust to make an indiscriminant attack of people's digital property should face criminal charges and civil liability.

Yes, people affected should absolutely go to court. Let the courts decide if this activity of this nature in violation of the law. I absolutely support that.

Package authors who did this are also going to be ostracised by the community. So they will most likely pay a price.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#225

Post by ryanmarsh »

seanw444 wrote: post #4

I just don't understand what the node-ipc dev was expecting when he did that. "Hm, maybe if I put malware into a community-trusted module that destroys files of people in a certain geopolitical region, the countless innocent citizens that are affected will realize what they did wrong! Wait, who am I actually targeting again?"

I’m ok with it as long as the maintainer is consistent and does it for “the current thing” every time. That means Sudan, Darfur, Iraq war, ISIS, Assad’s regime, etc… Heck why not even Florida after the “say gay” thing?

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#226

Post by wrycoder »

baud147258 wrote: post #200
Larrikin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably hoped the effects would negatively effect people there so they could put pressure to stop the murder of other innocent civilians. Arguments like this are similar to the BLM protest that try to equate property with human lives.

> they could put pressure to stop In case you haven't checked, both targeted countries are authoritarian regimes where any kind of civil protest is ignored at best or actively suppressed at worst. And violent regime changes (aka revolutions) coming from the people don't work, at least not without the support of part of the governing elites (which aren't impacted by that kind of actions)

Revolutions have succeeded time and again. The problem is that in most cases, the kind of people who lead successful revolutions are not the kind who can form a non-autocratic government. It can take generations to correct the resulting chaos and totalitarian excesses.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#227

Post by _fat_santa »

Palomides wrote: post #11
cpitman wrote: post #6

100%. I've already seen articles in non-tech media that explain what happened to a non-technical audience, and the explanation sounded a lot like open source is the problem and that proprietary software would never have these problems. It wasn't that long ago that using open source software required a lot of politicking inside my clients, and we could easily go back there with enough spooked executives.

a disagreeable take: why should open source projects make any effort to be accessible to corporations that will never donate or support them?

The problem I see is that there is no way to discern a "corporate customer" versus a guy in his bedroom building an app. The whole fakerJS fiasco really pissed me off because the developer seemed to assume that the only folks using his software were greedy F500 companies.

And that's the problem I see with many of these political statements. There seems to be this politically driven assumption that the only users of OSS are greedy companies that won't pay to support it. So they make a political statement, take down their package or make it malicious. All this does is creates a minor headache for the big corps that have resources and fucks over the little guy.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#228

Post by aulin »

jraph wrote: 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?

in theory, but why is it always node.js/npm? I work on completely different things... is it a different community culture? is it the thousands of tiny low quality packages people include to do the most basic things?

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#229

Post by _fat_santa »

makecheck wrote: post #51

One of the things I think protestware doesn’t understand is that the “users” of something are not clear-cut, and that should be especially obvious for things like chains of dependencies in modules/libraries. In other words, some (if not many or even most ) people have no idea that something else they use (or even need) is depending on your stupid module. For example, how would I know if my mouse driver software happe…

> and how could that be worth it in the long run?

fake internet points.

Re: Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

#230

Post by [deleted] »

pkulak wrote: post #143
lioeters wrote: post #112

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.

[deleted]
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