I for one am getting pretty sick of it. FOSS is by nature apolitical, pre-competitive and for me has always been an intellectual exercise. This is the only way it can power Chinese clouds, Azure, AWS and GCP, and the many EU sovereign systems we're going to see. To me it's a place to find kind people who are enthusiastic about tech, like me.
Now I find myself judged when using Nix, genAI, Blockchain, Omarchy (and by extension even Framework), Podcasting 2.0 related things, Centos Stream... It doesn't end. So many people that divide the world in good/bad, them/us. I'm tuning out tbh.
(as an aside, I wish I could have some indication of how polarized the voting here on HN is ;))
I think that’s a very idealistic view of FOSS that is detached from reality. In the late 90s and early 00s we were fighting the crypto wars, making DeCSS illegal, DMCA, EUCD. There was a lot of infighting between free software and open source proponents. Many FSF campaigns were very political. I got bashed by some other FOSS people I knew in ~2006 for using and contributing to CentOS because it was Red Hat-based (evil empire or whatever).
The difference is that social media is amplifying things a lot more and there is a culture of destroying people in public (made easier by social media amplification).
It’s really the same issue as outside FOSS, social media creates stronger bubbles, more extremes, more grifters, and more amplification of crap.
What is your definition of politics?
It's about governance of society, about how decisions concerning society are being made. About what processes we adhere to. About agreeing to follow those process together, instead of resorting to primitive things like violence.
then FOSS is political. It's about processes we adhere to and how decisions are made. Microsoft makes a decision to ban the ICC from Windows and has a process for this. Linux has a different process where they can't make that decision because it's impossible.
"Concerning society" is important here. We do not codify the use of FOSS in any laws. At most we have decided that people can make up licenses and that we agree to adhere to the terms of any creator stated in licenses. We don't say what those terms must be or how we come to those terms.
I just like some terms more than others, they work for me, I think they make the world a better, more interesting place. Where is the politics in that?
Some terms allow the ICC to be banned from computers and some don't. This can have far–reaching implications.
Indeed, but that was not FOSS but MS365.
It was precisely because MS365 wasn't FOSS.