Ask Lemmy

I'm going to guess not everyone who runs a lemmy server agrees with the maintainer's politics

Depends on the context but generally I will. Like I don't love the lead of GrapheneOS but I still use there project. But I strongly disagree with Protons ethics and many other issues so I avoid them. Really it's a question of how much I want to care and how much I disagree with them.

Would you drive on a road made by nazis? Your life literally depends on the quality of the road, but where does political ideology come in to this equation?

With software though, different things are at stake, but how will ideology affect the quality? I think it does have a effect on features and how the project is run, but isn’t quality a mostly separate area?

jdupes: it's great software. The author left GitHub not because of Microsoft, but because he refused to implement 2fa on his account, which GitHub made mandatory.

I choose not to do business with anyone who's too vocal about their political disagreements. I'm paying you for your services not your opinion so shut up!

I can't really apply "you don't understand the code yourself" because I do.

So I do check the code if it's something critical, but otherwise don't bother. For example the Lemmy server I'm running I didn't really check much because it can't really do any harm to me.

But if I was running Lemmy somewhere on my home network, I'd either isolate it or thoroughly check it (but probably just isolate it from the rest of the network and put it in a VM, nobody's got the time to read other people's source code).

Since you're asking specifically for "on my machine" I usually put stuff I don't fully trust in a VM.

I moved off of lemmy because I didn't want to use software made by a tankie, so no.

I've installed thousands of programs on my systems over the past 30 years. Closed source, open source, you name it. Never had a single problem.

Trusting software is such an overblown hangup that people have. Even if it bites me in the ass someday, so what? I'll roll back, reformat, do whatever I have to do. It'll have been worth it.

No. Fuck that guy.

Yes.

Whether you'd boycott it is another thing.

for me, it generally boils down to "show me the work, then i decide".

some works are more influenced by politics like art pieces and written works. some, like architecture, plumbing and network stacks, much less so.

in this case, even if you don't know code but can be a good appraiser of political taint then you can decide on your own what to endorse or not.

If I know someone's political affiliation prior to using their software I'll likely find an alternative if their views are harmful.

Not when it comes to anything important like work or other sensitive data.

You are not supposed to trust anyone who doesn’t have a duty of providing trust. It is why companies like Red Hat, canonical and Novell were paid billions; they did the reviews and provided support. Yes, some distributions try to provide some of that (like Arch, Debian, etc) but only for core packages (everything else is just the Wild West and it could be malware again)

open source is safe.

even non-technical people can learn how to look at issues on Github (or wherever the code is kept).

it's like restaurant reviews: if there are dozens of people saying they got malicious food, then you have reason to be careful, even if you don't understand why the food is malicious.

caveat: if the code is open source but no one has had time to review it, it's potentially dangerous even if there are no issues yet. it takes time for people to review the code. and there should be multiple reviewers; there's always the chance that a single malicious developer has created multiple github users. Time is on your side here.

'Open source' is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, engineered to derail libre software.