Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[SCV]

At the risk of basically double posting

why can't the "evil chud nazis" just make their own software without the trannies?

What a fortuitous coincidence! I just happened to see a long and purportedly well researched & cited paper about just that subject on one of my favorite internet forms! I've attached it to this post so you can peruse it at your leisure.

Spoiler: Spoiler

How ironic that this is the post immediately before yours.

Cynically, there's a breed of person who can't accept anything as truth, not even the input of their own senses and their own faculties of reason, until it is presented to them in the form of a scholarly paper.

You may be one of these people.

View attachment 8749652

I saw this the other day. Find the lie. You can't.

 

[Nice Stick]

Thread tourist but why can't the "evil chud nazis" just make their own software without the trannies?

TLDR; people don’t like working for free, especially while being harassed by troons.

The people forced out by the troons are often the creators or core contributors. Many decide that all of the drama is not worth it, especially since they are working for free. For example, after the creator of Rust was forced out of the project, he became a Swift developer and is no longer involved in Rust or open source projects. Sometimes there are successful forks though.

XLibre is a well known recent example. The troons at IBM/RedHat were sabotaging X11 for several years while promoting a poorly conceived (IMO) alterative called Wayland. After they publicly announced that they were killing X11 last year, a prolific contributor to the project forked it and has continued working on it. It's being adopted by some alt-distros, although the troon infested major distros are still trying to kill it.

 

[Kuroyuri]

even arguably the Linux kernel itself, are all still in a decent state thanks to their respective BDFLs.

Linus is actively sucking tranny dick, his corporate overlords just don't have a troon/faggot/nigger replacement for him, yet.

 

[Dreamland]

Thread tourist but why can't the "evil chud nazis" just make their own software without the trannies?

People are doing that, but they have to deal with harassments on the issues page, bogus PRs, and convicted pedophiles siccing their hounds on their project.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

XLibre is a well known recent example. The troons at IBM/RedHat were sabotaging X11 for several years while promoting a poorly conceived (IMO) alterative called Wayland. After they publicly announced that they were killing X11 last year, a prolific contributor to the project forked it and has continued working on it. It's being adopted by some alt-distros, although the troon infested major distros are still trying to kill it.

It's "funny", they're only trying to kill it because they have to force everyone to suck the girldick adopt Wayland.

 

[wlan0]

Rare high-quality schizopost from our friends at /g/

https://files.catbox.moe/uezu4x.pdf

It's a surprisingly well-sourced and exhaustive paper on the subversion of the OSS world by bad actors (the rise and fall of coraline, the nixos putsch, the LLVM purge) who try and run it into the ground with HR and compliance bullshit.

This paper refers to Ehmke as "she", which made me wonder if a large part (if not all) of the paper was majorly AI-generated without significant review. I'm aware that it's not conclusive, but I ran the sub-chapter through a publicly available, free AI authored text detection suite:

 

[Eternal Gopnik]

This paper refers to Ehmke as "she", which made me wonder if a large part (if not all) of the paper was majorly AI-generated without significant review. I'm aware that it's not conclusive, but I ran the sub-chapter through a publicly available, free AI authored text detection suite:

View attachment 8751048

These AI detection suites are completely useless.

 

[Sneed Chuckson]

Thread tourist but why can't the "evil chud nazis" just make their own software without the trannies?

To some extent it is part of the life cycle of open source projects. They start out small, get more impressive, eventually they're widely used. Control freaks take notice, be they corporate or tranny, and do whatever they can to take over. Eventually, someday, they get what they want either by budget, coercion, social forces, sheer unemployedness, etc. Good maintainers can't be around forever, eventually they will retire or die and it's a gamble as to whether the new maintainer will keep the project safe from the forces of darkness. Eventually the project is taken over, a new open source alternative is created, and the cycle repeats. It parallels the rise and fall of nations, imo. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

TLDR: we did, and we will again, and after enough time those projects will go to shit too, and new ones will be made. It is a cycle.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

I'm about to read this but... duh? Obviously? They did the same thing to occupy wall street. Is this really a controversial position?

Leftists tend to be midwits who pretend to not understand obvious things and demand professional credentials and other signals of authority before tolerating that anyone even thinks something that doesn't agree with leftism
In other words "do you have a hecking study that proves this????" can now be answered with "Yes."

 

[SCV]

In other words "do you have a hecking study that proves this????" can now be answered with "Yes."

I kinda don't think they'll accept this given the source but by god I admire your optimism.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

I kinda don't think they'll accept this given the source but by god I admire your optimism.

I just thought it would be too pessimistic to immediately describe the followup move of "yeah but that's not a hecking accredited left-wing government-approved source"


Really, the moment you expect a leftist to be intellectually honest is when you've lost the game already

 

[some guy with an opinion]

Thread tourist but why can't the "evil chud nazis" just make their own software without the trannies?

As someone who is the solo developer on a somewhat-obscure open source project that's in the limelight enough to be known by a niche public audience, I have had some personal experience with this.

The basic answer is that, as your project inevitably grows, more and more parasites are going to try and influence you to their own ends. What's worse, they can ask certain questions in certain ways that will essentially be a lose-lose if you answer them. It's the software equivalent of "Should you pay taxes to Caeser?"

Essentially people will shit-test you by asking questions that might seem innocent or innocuous to the untrained eye, like "Why don't you have a code of conduct for your project?". You know you're in trouble when this question is asked in a public forum like X/Twitter, because the purpose of the question is NOT to get an answer, the purpose of the question is to force you to out yourself as a conservative so that they can then use that to hang you. You can't call them out on this either because they can always say "I'm just asking innocent questions", even though they are not.

The unfortunate reality is that the ONLY way I have found to stay safe and not get attacked by everyone is to remain politically neutral. Do not answer political questions, or answer with some sort of cliche like "This is a software project for everyone, we don't like to get political" (although even this will eventually stop working, because these parasites believe if you aren't 100% on board with their censorship agenda then you must be a chud).

So to answer your question, there ARE "evil chud nazis" making their own software. You just don't hear about them. That's by design. You aren't going to find open source projects with an ANTI-CODE OF CONDUCT message on the front page most of the time. It'll just be the projects you download and use without really thinking about them, because they stay on track and don't leave themselves open to attack. It's dangerous out there, and when saying anything can cost you potentially years of work on a project, the best option is to keep your mouth shut. A lot of projects just plain don't accept pull requests that do pointless bullshit like addiing a COC, but they do it quietly and in ways which are plausibly deniable, like simply leaving the PR open for "further changes" with no intention of ever merging it, rather than actively campaigning against it.

You might think a lot of open source contributors are cucks as a result of this, but unfortunately it's the only way to stay safe out there. Especially if you're on Github or some other left-leaning service run by spineless weasels.

People expect to see "Heckin PROGRESSIVE software projects!" vs "anti-woke anti-liberal CHUD projects for real patriots!" but the reality is you basically have the ultra-infected projects that only care about politics and don't actually make anything of value, and then the normal projects (THESE are the right-wing ones). Don't go looking for chuds, they are simply everywhere where there aren't troons and other obnoxious people.

IBM/RedHat were sabotaging X11 for several years while promoting a poorly conceived (IMO) alterative called Wayland.

Oh GOD don't get me fucking started on the absolute dumpster fire that is Wayland.

How can a "lightweight X11 replacement without all the bloat" somehow end up being harder to work with than the "crusty old system from 50 years ago"???

I genuinely believe that Wayland, Flatpak and Systemd are all part of a grand conspiracy to kill Linux by making it unusable and unstable.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

The unfortunate reality is that the ONLY way I have found to stay safe and not get attacked by everyone is to remain politically neutral.

How cowardly or foolish. If literally "everyone" attacks then it just means you stepped foot into a zone full of ridiculous people (why would you do that?), and if "everyone" just means unhinged mentally ill people, then what's wrong with having a spine and let these people reveal themselves? If more devs had the spine to not get intimidated by mentally ill freaks, that would disincentivize their presence. Essentially to "remain politically neutral" is to weaken your immune system, and that's how you get AIDS

 

[A Deer In Headlights]

Rare high-quality schizopost from our friends at /g/

https://files.catbox.moe/uezu4x.pdf

It's a surprisingly well-sourced and exhaustive paper on the subversion of the OSS world by bad actors (the rise and fall of coraline, the nixos putsch, the LLVM purge) who try and run it into the ground with HR and compliance bullshit.

I had Gemini do an audio summary so I could listen to it in the car, but it seems to be an interesting theory. I liked the part where it argues the reason why people are trying to take control over repositories by setting up CoCs is because they want to receive the same elite status as a core contributor but lack the skills to gain that level of respect/power. Instead of trying to compete for attention they try to change the playing field completely by seeking other ways to gain a sense of respect in the community. It's a lot easier to post that "X project is bad because a dev is a heckin Nazi" or "X project isnt an inclusive project because only white men are contributing" than it is to spend time learning how a compiler-level code work and be able to make a commit that will significantly impact the project. If they can't become founder of a project or a notable contributor, they can at least become the founder of the Code of Conduct and a notable community manager.

It's also funny too that it mentions that even after most projects adopted a CoC, from 2017 to 2024 the number of cases of harassment, doxxing, and threats in open source projects  increased rather than decreased even though most of those projects should have been "safer" communities because of rhe CoC.

 

[some guy with an opinion]

How cowardly or foolish. If literally "everyone" attacks then it just means you stepped foot into a zone full of ridiculous people (why would you do that?), and if "everyone" just means unhinged mentally ill people, then what's wrong with having a spine and let these people reveal themselves? If more devs had the spine to not get intimidated by mentally ill freaks, that would disincentivize their presence. Essentially to "remain politically neutral" is to weaken your immune system, and that's how you get AIDS

Spoken like someone who has never actually risked everything to rebuke other people like this.

If you want a project to gain any sort of traction, you *have to* operate in public spaces. Which means you will eventually run into these kinds of people. It's inevitable.

You don't need to "reveal" them. They can't help revealing themselves constantly anyway because their entire political mindset is based around showing off how heckin' PROGRESSIVE they are. All you do by engaging them is give them ammunition to use against you.

It's not worth potentially throwing away a career (or in the case of open source, having your project boycotted/blacklisted after years of work) or losing some other aspect of your livelyhood to "educate" someone who doesn't want to be educated.

If you expect people to throw themselves on the fire "to not be cowards", well.....you first, I guess... Let me know how effective it ends up being (hint: it will do nothing but hurt you).

Sometimes it's not worth being "the better person" because nobody cares and you will only hurt yourself by doing so. Standing on principles only works in a functioning society where principles matter.

That's exactly how these crazy people operate. They have rigged the game. They aren't going to argue with you. They will simply shut you down and you will gain nothing by engaging with them.

No offense but you come across like the kind of person who would be intimidated into being a "real man" and getting yourself needlessly killed in WW1 because some heartless bitch handed you a white feather and called you a coward.

 

[SCV]

I genuinely believe that Wayland, Flatpak and Systemd are all part of a grand conspiracy to kill Linux by making it unusable and unstable.

This guy gets it. Rest of your post is illuminating too.

How cowardly or foolish. If literally "everyone" attacks then it just means you stepped foot into a zone full of ridiculous people (why would you do that?), and if "everyone" just means unhinged mentally ill people, then what's wrong with having a spine and let these people reveal themselves? If more devs had the spine to not get intimidated by mentally ill freaks, that would disincentivize their presence. Essentially to "remain politically neutral" is to weaken your immune system, and that's how you get AIDS

This is true at a high level but what you're asking here is "strap a suicide vest to your project you've worked on for years for the cause everyone's benefit". AND there's no guarantee they'll even end up helping. If no one follows them then they've sacrificed everything for nothing. I too want to live in utopia but the game theory of this sucks and it's understandable they don't want to suicide for nothing. There are no 72 virgins for software projects in the afterlife.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

but the game theory of this sucks

I arrived at the exact opposite conclusion using game theory reasoning
at least one of us is wrong, and if it's me, that's a prime learning opportunity
if you don't mind, I would like to see your reasoning (DM if this would otherwise derail the thread)

 

[some guy with an opinion]

I arrived at the exact opposite conclusion using game theory reasoning
at least one of us is wrong, and if it's me, that's a prime learning opportunity
if you don't mind, I would like to see your reasoning (DM if this would otherwise derail the thread)

I can't speak for SCV but the simple version is that the amount of potential loss in doing so massively outweighs the potential gain.

It fails a basic cost/benefit analysis. You're trading "outing some insane leftists as insane leftists", which is a very small benefit especially when they will happily out themselves as insane anyway, vs risking hundreds if not thousands of hours of work being taken from you or destroyed, targeted harassment campaigns, potential job loss or relationship breakdowns, and other major issues. It's just never worth it.

As a result, the only real argument that can be made in favour of acting this way is a moral one, ie an argument along the lines of "it's the right thing to do, we need to stand up to tyranny no matter the cost to ourselves!", but that falls apart when you realize that nobody actually cares. Everyone has already heard the arguments before, everyone has made up their mind politically, and this isn't some rebellion against an evil government that just needs to gain momentum, it's a group people who have too much power that we can't topple because the corporations WANT them to be there, but who have also convinced the general public that their positions are justified and that the people who disagree with them are bad people.

In any sort of cultural revolution, sacrifices are made under the assumption that they will eventually be worth it. People risk death or imprisonment to fight against tyrannical governments because there's a chance to overthrow them. People stand up against injustices because they want to see them resolved. That's not going to happen if the average person supports the injustice and thinks it's the right thing to do.

Think of it like trying to convince the average person in The Matrix that the real world is better because it's real. A decent number of people might decide to wake up, but the majority would prefer the happy fantasy anyway, and will resent you for presenting them with the truth. You would only be hurting your own cause by trying to convince everyone of the truth.

It's really not worth it. You're only hurting yourself for no real benefit.

 

[SCV]

I arrived at the exact opposite conclusion using game theory reasoning
at least one of us is wrong, and if it's me, that's a prime learning opportunity
if you don't mind, I would like to see your reasoning (DM if this would otherwise derail the thread)

I don't know if there's that much to tell... it's just a coordination problem.

I'm going to try and write this out as a decision tree from the perspective of our chudly @some guy with an opinion. It's one round (because most developers are not going to throw multiple year long projects on the pyre), there a chuds and troons playing, cooperation means telling the troons with their CoCs to fuck off, defecting means hiding your power level and remaining "politically neutral".

1. Cooperate
1a. Most/all chuds defect. Your project is dead and you lose years of work.
1b. Most/all chuds cooperate. The chuds ACK all the troons. You no longer need to be coy about your politics.
1c. Most/all chuds cooperate. It's still not enough. Your project is dead and you lose years of work.

2. Defect
1a. Most/all chuds defect. You are fine. You must continue to be coy about politics.
1b. Most/all chuds besides you cooperate. The chuds ACK all the troons. You no longer need to be coy about your politics.
1c. Most/all chuds besides you cooperate (aka be a free rider). It's still not enough. You are fine. You must continue to be coy about politics.

Spoiler: Cows

Of course we need the usual spherical cow disclaimers: There are more states than "nothing happened" or "project completely destroyed". People are not rational and may do things for ideallogical reasons. Some people don't care about the broader ecosystem only their project. A given project may be more resistant than others so there's a chance you could survive coorperating regardless. Conversely you might lose a lot more than your project ex. your career. And so on and so forth because the real world is messy.

For example Tim Peters, big wig python developer, narrowly avoided being removed but it probably damaged his prospects but is still in the project. Now has to be paranoid about what he says. Or the projects the troons tried to cancel, failed, but are now known as chudly which did not kill the project but will hinder adoption. How could you classify these scenarios cleanly?

Look at those possibilities and tell me that "Defect" isn't the rational choice when only "Cooperate" has you losing your project. IFF you could guarantee all the chuds cooperating at the same time your chances are much better but... you can't. That's why it's call a coordination problem. If you do try to organize beforehand (nearly impossible anyway with tens or hundreds of thousand of project but hypothetically) some cowards will defect then if you succeed reap the benefits anyway (the "free rider" problem).

 

[LarpBait]

Essentially people will shit-test you by asking questions that might seem innocent or innocuous to the untrained eye, like "Why don't you have a code of conduct for your project?". You know you're in trouble when this question is asked in a public forum like X/Twitter, because the purpose of the question is NOT to get an answer, the purpose of the question is to force you to out yourself as a conservative so that they can then use that to hang you.

I think that much of the issue of open source's infiltration problem comes down to the fact that the Bazaar, as opposed to the Cathedral, methodology of developing software necessitates a certain level of social capital management for projects to operate. This means that, to keep a project safe, higher levels of appeasement to outside forces are necessary as to not be excommunicated from the Church of Troondom that currently plagues much of the open source space.

To power level a bit: My team accepts code contributions from those who use it (including in some cases our customers), but these contributions overwhelmingly come to us over email rather than through a public github. This keeps talks between our team and our contributors largely private and denies trannies their ability to ask these uncomfortable questions (Although, I do not think they'd target the kind of work I do). This model is far more centralized than what most open source projects use (but isn't completely Cathedral-like), but works well to avoid the myriad of awful problems the FOSS space brings.

Really, avoiding playing into any kind of "social media" game is the most ideal move, as proven by by SQLite's titanic success in spite of having literal Christian theology in a code of ethics. Although some of that also may be due to their strict contribution requirements too. Their development team is tight knit and contributions are made through their email, not some public github page that can be easily blasted all over x.com for heresy against Estrogen.

If FOSS is to survive, the social capital aspect of development has to be entire excised at all costs. Developers are not going to win a socialization war against well-funded, terminally online, ideologically determined manipulators with the media on their side, instead the game has to be played differently, ideally wherein contributors are making direct contributions to a maintainer, without the involvement of any kind of public forum or board so that said maintainer has to consult the crowd on what happens. This wouldn't even be that detrimental since, if a developer dislikes changes, said developer can merely fork the project.

Public consent to a developer's changes are ultimately completely irrelevant in open source given that anyone can fork the tool and change it the way they like AND there are no warranties tied to anything. The sooner that developers realize that they're developing for their own benefit and not for social media upcummies again, this problem will largely stop.