Free and Open Source
Democratic Software and Its Consequences
I have always loved computers and for as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a programmer. It is a uniquely Faustian endeavor. A world of data, mathematics, and problem-solving in its most pure form. Just like Faust, though, modern man is now entombed by its own creation. Media manipulation, the moderation panopticon, and the erosion of ownership all driven by free (as in beer) software, subscription-based software and advertiser money. The intrusion on every aspect of our daily lives is sickening. Indeed, our technocratic overlords use this as their center of power and have perverted what should have been a thousand-year golden age into the gay dystopia.
It is for this reason (among others) that I am a conscientious pirate. I refuse to abide by incentive structures that don’t benefit me. I won’t pay for 5 different streaming services when it used to be just one. I won’t pay for a subscription to Adobe who took away people’s lifetime licenses. I won’t use any platform that bases its monetization on advertisements and data-mining which I can’t get around with ad-block. Long story short, I won’t allow my ownership of things to be eroded, and I won’t allow my attention to be sold.
These models only serve to drive up stock valuation because fiduciary duties force public companies to act in the stockholder’s interest, not yours (yet another Faustian cage). These models are so successful because they show recurrent revenue not linked to just getting new customers and in the case of data and advertisements, have no upper bound for potential profit. Once Google and Facebook showed how profitable it could be to sell your data and attention, other companies were forced to follow suit.
That is why I am a big proponent of free (as in freedom) and open source software to remove yourself from the grid as best as you can. You can’t change this stuff, but there are plenty of ways to reduce your dependence on it. That said, I’m not a sperg who buys old thinkpads to libreboot into TailsOS so I can use the library’s internet to access my email. If you really don’t want any part of it, you have to cut the internet out entirely and use cash for everything, a tradeoff that most are not willing to make. I’m also not saying I refuse to pay for anything, because that’s the mentality that got us here in the first place.
Given my position, I’m sad to say that I’m disappointed in the state of FOSS. They have lost the plot catastrophically. Once again, the group of apolitical centrists that used to be in charge have failed to keep the subversives out because doing so would be illiberal.
The values of FOSS are similar to the values of Liberal Democracy, everyone gets a vote. Anyone can make a pull request and get their code added to the program for the benefit of all. This has worked well for years, as did our own Liberal Democracy (arguably) when it was restricted to the more “aristocratic” members. In FOSS, the community was so small that restrictions weren’t really necessary, so it still maintained that kind of demographic. People like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. The folks behind Python, GNOME, the Linux Foundation, I could go on. The kind of people who dutifully maintain software for no other reason than they use it themselves. For decades these “institutions” remained uncaptured until the Internet was brought to the masses and with it, the Democratic process of FOSS development was subverted. Below are a few (but not all) of the kinds of people I am talking about.
Looney Troons
These are public enemy #1 for any community that wants to maintain cohesion. Troons are, of course, produced by the Internet and live a 24/7 fetish lifestyle. They demand total ideological compliance and will go to extreme lengths to this end. They talk endlessly about how FOSS needs to be more inclusive and signal boost marginalized voices, distracting people from the actual work. They implement Codes of Conduct to arbitrate disagreements (take the pinkpill or die). They crybully developers to wear them down, hoping to get them to leave. If that doesn’t work, they’ll use the CoC to force you out. Just last month one of the core Python devs, Tim Peters, was ousted for ideological reasons. He contributed to Python for 25+ years and served as the gatekeeper that kept python in line with its mission statement. Bye bye, should have been a decent fucking human being!
They do this for the same reason that streamers always turn on each other when there is drama. They hope to swoop in and take these devs’ vacated positions. It is important to note that this is only a means to an end. For people like Tim, the development and management is that end. The looney troons only want to use it to show how much of a gross faggot they are, like always. They don’t have any higher ideals about what the software should be like, they just use it as a soapbox for their autogynephilic humiliation ritual.
This would be fine if they actually wrote competent software. Instead they countersignal and push retarded ideas like converting the Linux kernel to Rust for memory safety reasons. The problem is that Rust is a rather temperamental language and doesn’t have the greatest support at time of writing.
The rust drama was as you would have expected. The cult over-reached and got hard push-back and then they went home to cry.
It is one thing to do the faggot rust shit in some leaf module that no one has dependencies on and no one cares about
but now these faggots wanted to "lets fucking switch the core of VFS into troon-rust" and not just the core of VFS, they wanted to change the semantics of struct inode to be rust-ified, basically forcing every single filesystem to eventually become rust too,
and the actual vfs/fs developers did not take kindly to it.
I am just surprised that Christoff Hellwig did not step in and brutally cut these rust-faggots down by the knees.
Both Al Viro and Ted 'tso sounded quite reasonable and not too confrontational. I guess the dagger had already stabbed the faggot and there was no need to twist it.
This is the end of rust in the kernel.
You can look at low level C code and if you are experienced you will basically know exactly what this translates to in machine code and how it behaves. This is a feature.
You can not do that in sex-offender-languages.
On top of the technical problems, there is good reason to reject Rust in a large project like the Linux kernel for maintainability. When Rust gets added to important systems, there are fewer people who could come in after the fact and work with it compared to C. When the trannies throw a tantrum and leave the project (which mentally ill retards are liable to do), that Rust code they wrote essentially metastasizes and must be torn out and rewritten in C for changes to be made. It gives the trannies a tremendous amount of leverage because they become less replaceable. It would be one thing if they wrote new software to prove that Rust has legs, but instead they have to latch on to a well-established project and fuck it up from the inside, a classic tranny technique. Fuck trannies.
LinkedIn Pajeets
Contributing to FOSS can be a good way to jumpstart a career in tech. It gives you the opportunity to create a portfolio and show that you actually know a thing or two. This is a good thing in theory, but it gets taken advantage of by malicious actors who use this to fraudulently pad their credentials. The best (but far from only) example of this are the Pajeets. They network with each other, look out for each other, and circlejerk each other. This makes every one of them look like competent and upstanding members of the community when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Their playbook is this: spam a bunch of pull requests for menial things like “more verbose variable name” or “fix formatting error”. Most projects would tell these people to piss off and reject them, but not all of them.
On its face, this person looks like a great developer who gets tons of shit done! 10+ commits a day on average. Impressive stuff, but this doesn’t tell you what they’re contributing to, what the contents of those contributions are, and how impactful they are to the project as a whole. To do this many commits, each necessarily has to be small-time stuff. The idea that you can do 10+ things of serious value to established projects is absurd.
They employ this practice solely to look good on the surface and get an interview at FAGMAN, at which point they can use their H1B skills (ChatGPT) to nail their remote interview and score a sweet six-figure tech job. These types also go on LinkedIn and circlejerk themselves with recommendations to make this more likely. As a small tangent, once they get in they use their in-group preference and spread like wildfire until everyone on the team is a pajeet, displacing potential quality hires.
The best part about writing embedded C is knowing that pajeets don’t know how to. And it’s important to write embedded C so that you can remind the pajeet that they aren’t allowed to have anything good in life. They’re allowed to have electron-wrappers and StackOverflow copy+pastes, and that’s pretty much it.
On top of enshittifying proprietary software, this directly affects the FOSS community. The time a core developer spends sifting through bullshit pull requests is time they could be spending on useful things. This bogs down the greatest people in the field to nothing more than jannies.
Adversaries
Just a short word on this. If you think that enemy nations and blackhat hackers aren’t trying to backdoor any FOSS they can, you are sadly mistaken. The current system allows anybody to submit contributions to be checked and added to the codebase. Even with tons of people looking closely at this, things still slip through the cracks. The best example I can think of is the XZ-utils backdoor that was discovered back in April of 2024, which had been in the codebase for 3+ years (This is a big fucking deal).
The Users
The userbase has its own problems which I alluded to earlier. This is mostly about tech-illiterate normies who complain that there is no universal download button on GitHub. The reason big projects need support staff on their Discord 24/7 to tell people to reinstall the software or drivers or how to put a file in a directory or any number of other dumbass things that anyone with some brains would know to try. The people who are so used free (as in beer) software-as-a-service like Google that the idea of donating to the developers of software that you can freely download is appalling. “If you wanted me to pay, you should have made it proprietary and charged me for it” is what they would say if they were capable of sentient thought. These folx should be enslaved and forced to work in Chinese industry as far as I’m concerned.
What is to be done then? As always, more gatekeeping and for more strict reasons. Being a belligerent ideologue in technical spaces, muddying the waters? You’re out. Asking why the software crashed without providing logs? Banned. Am I getting a whiff of ulterior motives in these submissions? Get fucked. We should have been putting our own Codes of Conduct in our projects that give us explicit permission to do these things, and collaborating to prevent the retards from submitting code in the first place. If this sounds hypocritical to you, I suggest you inject peroxide because what I want is correct and will save FOSS, while what the looney troons are doing is actively destroying the scene as we speak. While you’re at it, get these retarded ideas about the marketplace of ideas and the democratic process out of your head. They have absolutely no basis in reality and will be the end of everything you love. ARISTOCRACY FOR THE WIN!
Addendum: While I stand by almost everything in this post, adding our own CoCs is not the way to go and can only hurt the gatekeeping cause. As
pointed out in the comments, you should instead rely on the mechanisms already in place to protect your projects. As the admin of your project, you already have absolute authority and any addition to that in writing gives bad actors a foot in the door.
I like programming too, it’s too bad it is full of trannies. I’m noticing though that a lot of troons in their eternal lust for power and status are switching to engineering
FOSS was dying of mission creep and bloat years before it got sick and weak enough to be opportunistically infected by ideology tards. If you want to trace it back to its roots, look for the transition from unix design principles (e.g. "do one thing and do it well") toward fat design principles (muh year of the linux desktop, muh beginner friendliness). Around the late 2000s we underwent a massive shift from building stable, secure, comprehensible tools and systems and toward opaque convoluted messes that attempted to anticipate and muddle through the most deranged demands that the dumbest, laziest conceivable user might theoretically want.
For example the monstrosity that is systemd was pitched largely as a way to shave 20 seconds off boot times, a thing that only the fattest-brained retard could possibly think was a win in light of the price of entry. Or the gnome project's heroic replacement of useful error reports with the windows style "oops something went wrong" screen because error reports are scary to muh average pc user (read: dumbest person anyone could possibly imagine).
I could rant indefinitely about this.
If you want a better open source, one that delivers at least partially on the initial promise of stability, security, user control, and comprehensibility, you must abandon "user friendliness" and steer clear of everything that pitches that as a feature. That and keep CoCs off your lips.