Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized contributors as political, and why a united boycott of complicit tech companies is our only way forward.
Yeah but the problem with that argument is that when kind and empathetic people have to starve and beg for money with equal or higher level of quality output compared to those who peddle racism and bigotry, it feels like the world only rewards racism and bigotry.
You tell me: there are a lot of great projects that don’t spread hatred, bigotry and disparity but they don’t get even a fraction of the funding this project gets. And this project is just some dotfiles over ArchLinux. Even Archlinux didn’t get this much funding in one go.
The spirit of open-source is built on Kindness and Empathy. When a movement such as that is slowly hijacked by people who are ideologically opposed to kindness and empathy, then the kind and empathetic get deprived of a sense of place and belonging.
The main idea of open source is that code should be free (as in speech) so people can really own it, modify it, contribute and work on it together. So no, open source is not about Kindness and Empathy. I can accept your PR for my project and I don’t have to know anything about your values, opinions or gender. If you run into a bug in an app you’re using you can submit a fix without getting into the politics of the maintainer. Open source is a technical solution for a practical problem of locked down code.
What your talking about is another layer of ideology and politics built on top of the open source movement. It’s natural that people from communities and need some rules on interacting within them. In different groups different views become mainstream and different types of people join them. Then groups with different ideologies start fighting with each other. It’s all normal. And yes, right wing influencers always get more funding simply because rich people are mostly right wing and are willing to support them.
The problem here is that people now start to mix those two layers and try to govern the technical part using tools from the ideological part. If code is useful, if it does something we need (it’s a driver, it’s a protocol implementation, it’s offers some crucial functionality) it doesn’t really matter who wrote it. You can use it and it will not contaminate your computer with fascist/liberal ideology. If you want to engage will all this drama on political level you’re free to do it, just like you’re free to be a political activist in any other space. Just be careful not to mix politics with code. What is happening now is that people start rejecting code because they don’t like who wrote it. It makes no sense. It’s just code.
If you pay a nazi to bake you a pizza, you may have gotten a pizza you need to live, but you’ve also paid a nazi.
And when there are also 19 other pizzamakers, who aren’t nazis, then it’s not all that strange for people to think it’s a bad thing when you get your pizza from a nazi.
Do you pay for your open source code? I don’t.
Someone paid 12 million
And interestingly enough, the people with money all seem to go to the nazi pizzamaker