Honestly, who gives a shit? The whole free market deal everyone is preaching about should just fix the problem. Git is decentralized. If you have a political/ethical problem with Github, move your stuff to Gitlab or host it yourself. It's not a big deal. Although I share some of the feelings in that letter, Github is free to do whatever it wants and we are (still) free to take our business wherever we want.
If most people choose to take their business to one firm, instead of the alternatives available to them, that may be bad but there's not a monopoly under the textbook definition.
> GitHub is a near monopolist. Several large projects like Python have been moved to GitHub
No. No no no no. Stop using Git like SVN. Fork the projects if you don't agree with the maintainers choosing to stay with Github. Don't ask nicely, write manifests, sign petitions, etc.. fucking act!
The free market deal some people apparently still preach about relies on the people being informed, and on the people giving a shit; what you're seeing is part of the former, and evidence of the latter.
These open source projects certainly love the very high quality, free services Github offers them, until they start learning how the sausage is made.
ICE has done, and continues to do some terrible things. Horrible, horrible things; all legal things, but nonetheless horrible. But, frankly, if its legal, I am much less comfortable with Github's users subverting the US legal system by backdooring their moral code into products these legal entities rely on. Go to your senators. Go out and vote. Go protest. It's not that hard, but it is much harder than signing your name on a petition.
Increasingly people (esp. Millennials) consider ethics and values toward the top when deciding whether to purchase or use a product.
Why wouldn't they get together and shame a company when that company acts against their own moral values? Is the best possible solution to wait until the first Tuesday in November and hope for the best? I am sure many will also vote, call their elected officials, go to a protest. They'll also sign online petitions.
How about funding GitHub so it has the ability to be picky and choosey about its contracts? It’s really easy to voice concern. But github can’t fund itself on concern.
How would that even work? I imagine GitHub has a pretty typical sales department right now, with salesfolks who try to make deals selling licenses to anyone willing to buy (with perhaps a handful of well-understood exceptions, like no sales to Iran or North Korea).
If they add an ethical vetting layer in there, ok, sure this one is an easy call. But people will continue to complain about other government agencies, foreign and domestic. People will complain about corporations who violate privacy or violate open source licenses or violate web standards. People will complain about non-profits who align with religious or political interests. People will complain about polluters and arms manufacturers or companies with ties to polluters or arms manufacturers.
Next thing you know, GitHub can't sell to the State Department or DOJ or Ford or GM or Maersk or Boeing or Shell or Aramco or Google or Facebook or McKinsey or so many others. And, I dunno, cutting those organizations out might be a great ethical move, but I'm not sure spending significant amounts of time investigating organizations and adjudicating the results and deciding NOT to make sales and dealing with the inevitable lawsuits is going to help GitHub make money.
If I know that the angry mob can cut off my usage of $company at any time, and that I'm in an industry that could plausibly be the target of an angry mob... I'm probably going to avoid using $company in the first place if there are any alternatives.
I would strongly suggest people take their political concerns to the appropriate channels - write your representatives, be active in local town council meetings, stay informed on things that civic duty requires in the US (which is expensive, btw!), and vote. It might seem pointless, but all of those things do actually matter and have measurable impacts. Your representatives do actually listen to you if you vote for or against them - and they’re not gerrymandered into a lifetime appointment or some other political failure.
Drafting an online petition like this is not too far off from storming someone’s place of work and asking them to forego their main means of survival. I understand the outrage over human rights abuses, but this isn’t the forum.
These aren’t the people doing something wrong. GitHub staff are probably treated like second class Microsoft employees all the way up to the top management at github. Any one of them voicing concern or outrage over Microsoft’s or GitHubs customer contract(s) could very well lead to their termination - even at the C-level of github or whatever is the top of their management chain.
The letter is addressed to GitHub leadership. If Microsoft does not allow them to terminate a contract for widespread ethical and legal violations, they should quit.
The CEO of GitHub is not going to starve if he gets fired.
If the CEO of GitHub gets fired it should be because he mismanaged communicating that GitHub shouldn't be the moral arbiter its customers. I think GitHub leadership's morals align with Microsoft's here. I also share this moral framework, I don't want private companies creating an extra-judicial layer of subjective morals. You shouldn't pick and choose who your customers are for many reasons.
Go for it! I didn't say it was an inappropriate channel (that was a GP post). I do think it's misguided and against the spirit of open source software though.
Does it make it anymore acceptable when a cashier is robbed or shot and killed on duty that the store is located in a high crime area? Jobs will be filled by someone. That never excuses abuses towards them.
If you see someone doing something which you believe to be wrong, but the law suggests is right, asking them to stop absolutely is an inappropriate channel.
But Companies are not People. So this is a dumb metaphor.
It would be interesting to see a dollar value next to each signature to indicate how much money GitHub stands to lose if the signatory were to take their business elsewhere.
To where? GitLab? [1] Microsoft is almost a trillion dollar company, GitLab is valued over a billion dollars, none of those signatories have enough revenue pull to matter.
Vote, protest [2], run for office [2]. No other actions provide for material change.
iPhone is made my child labour in a Country that has uighurs Muslims in super-hitler scale camps. Do you promise to not make an iPhone app? Or buy one?
As you know, people are capable of voting and protesting in addition to signing a petition. Also, the stance of "you shouldn't tell an organization you don't like what they're doing unless it's literally illegal" is pretty wild. Nevertheless, since it seems to matter to you, ICE constantly breaks the law:
I found many decided cases, but you're right, it takes an incredibly long time for these cases to be resolved, so many of them are still technically in question.
Note that many of my examples, which I found in about 10 minutes of searching, are single cases of violations that happen constantly. For example, I listed a couple US citizens that were wrongfully arrested by ICE, which happened thousands of times: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180...
> But, frankly, if its legal, I am much less comfortable with Github's users subverting the US legal system by backdooring their moral code into products these legal entities rely on
I don't follow this logic. If it's legal, we should not take moral stances in our actions outside of political actions? Doesn't the concept of "voting with your wallet" expressly involve taking moral stances in ALL actions? Sure, the open source projects may not be paying Github directly, but I'm VERY uncomfortable with saying that money is the only way to take a moral stance.
The idea that there's some set of actions that should be categorically immune to moral reactions is...weird at best and feels pretty darn dangerous. Almost no one wants to make every decision an intense moral debate, but the OPTION should exist. Otherwise you just create places to foster corruption.
> It's not that hard, but it is much harder than signing your name on a petition.
This feels like a false choice. Doing one doesn't mean the other is unavailable, and doing one doesn't mean you SHOULDN'T do the other. Indeed, if you think the stakes are high, doing both seems to be the best option.
They're threatening a boycott. They're not actually boycotting.
I'll start paying attention when they actually start deleting repositories. That's also when Github will start paying attention; they've gotten enough warning.
But no one will actually do that, because everyone who signed this but still has a community and a repository on Github is a coward. They love all the free stuff, and they'd love for Github to just do whatever they tell them to do, but without any of that icky hard work like migrating a community to someone with more aligned morals.
Prove me wrong. Delete your account, NOW. Please. Prove me wrong. No one will. Because all anyone ever does is whine; no one acts. Its so easy to sign your name and complain; its hard to actually Act.
Im ok with it, just like im okbwith github serving ice. The fact is these guys dont pay and ice does. If github turns down this contract it will make other vendors scared. Whose next? Not good business. Get woke go broke.
> These open source projects certainly love the very high quality, free services Github offers them
Hopefully this argument will die soon. You don't hear anyone talking about how Google should be treated as a charity because the price of their search engine and YouTube is $0. Nor do you hear it about Facebook. Nor do you hear it about any other marketing campaigns by anyone else. That's their business model. What really bugs me when someone says this about Github is that Github added closed infrastructure on top of an open source project. Without open source projects giving them the product and then the free marketing, they sure as hell wouldn't have sold for $7.5 billion. Open source projects don't also have to be forever in the debt of Github as well, do they?
I'm not going to comment on the rest of your argument, but your opening sentence is really weak.
So many of these folks were forced by their communities of users to move to Github from their old, bespoke infrastructures. I can understand the bitterness.
As a side note to the letter, it's interesting to watch how pull requests are used to add signatures in alphabetical order. That's actually a really interesting exercise to watch.
To act like nothing has changed under Trump is ignorant. To pretend that it would matter is disingenuous.
No administration is called out in this repository. Saying "Well, it's too late, because you didn't complain about it under the last administration" is meaningless.
No, it is meaningful. It shows that the signatories are virtue signaling based on political animus, and dont care one bit for any supposed victims, severely hurting their credibility.
a) It's not even true. I pointed to a literal policy for this administration, which has been absolutely central to the controversy.
b) Even if it were the case, your issue is with the media, not the protestors. If I find out tomorrow that there's a problem, it is not really important to me that the problem began under X or Y administration, but that it persists under the current one.
c) You claim simultaneously that the media is biased and only covering the topic now, but then somehow blame people for only learning about the issue and caring about it now. Your issue is with the media, and that's fine, but it's not relevant to this at all. If you want to put the media on blast go nuts, this topic has nothing to do with the media or this administration.
Sounds like a great time to start your own woke git service. So you have maybe 10-15 open source packages in your product, at a minimum. I guess we're at such an intolerant point now that all 10-15 of those companies political policies and viewpoints must align with your own - to use their software/service.
I guess we've politicized code now. Has anyone looked at the political system of discourse lately? Keep that shit out of code, or we're doomed as a profession.
This is a crucial point. Status quo sycophants tell us to "take politics outside," but what they mean is "take YOUR politics outside, and make more room for MINE."
Politics is money and power. Tech is money and power. Tech is politics. And anyone who says otherwise is trying to undermine your power by obscuring this reality.
This comment is deeply ironic and lacking in self awareness.
>take YOUR politics outside, and make more room for MINE.
The only ones trying to enforce political opinions on software development are those who claim the status quo is broken. Those who push for vague COCs as political tools to oust anyone with inappropriate opinions. People who put developer feelings over merit and productivity. The rest, and majority, of us are just trying to write code.
The only way to legitimately act as though "everything is political" is by playing a bastardized version of six degrees of separation, and in doing so insufferably forcing the polarization of any environment in which one participates. If you can't separate politics from work and entertainment, you have a serious problem.
> The rest, and majority, of us are just trying to write code.
This comment is a really embarrassing commentary on how the US education system's emphasis on tech and STEM has crippled our critical thinking.
If you're working at github, you're literally constructing the tools used to terrorize communities. You can't do that in an "apolitical" way. Your actions are political. We feel the same way about the companies that manufacture their kidnapping trucks, their bulletproof vests, the bullets in their guns.
Yeah, it's always embarrassing to read topics like this and remember that, for the most part, the people in your field are basically braindead codemonkeys.
What's embarrassing is the pervasive desire to insist on the moral superiority of being unaware of second-order effects.
We're more than happy to debug nearly endless stack traces, but tracing the stack of our customers' and suppliers is, somehow, a threat to the foundations of our identity as good people, purely vocational talent.
I sometimes wonder if these people who have fully embraced intersectional politics are actually ever going to be satisfied (they won't). It's a complete dead end imo.
I agree with you completely, if you are to the point of worrying about the contracts a company that provides an excellent free service to the world holds, how can you survive without being upset that your phone has components made in east asian sweatshops, your clothing as well, you probably eat food farmed/slaughtered in unsustainable/unethical manners, the list goes on and on.
Even if GH cancels their contract to placate this incredibly small vocal minority, they'll just move onto something else to impose their own personal moral outrage upon. It is a dead end. It is impossible to please everyone, and you shouldn't try to either.
Internet activism only works due to the overamplification of voice, because the vast majority of people really do not care, they use Github because it is a stellar product.
I probably share political stance with most of the people signing this and it's a very interesting type of dilemma that I haven't thought quite through just yet but I think I disagree with this.
It's common for especially B2C corporations to have highly documented CSR policies. They will not work with suppliers that perform testing on animals. Or employ child workers. And they will not work with suppliers who have suppliers that do those things. The entire chain is potentially audited. I approve of this concept and I vote with my wallet.
This situation, however, is different. Whereas companies choose suppliers, they don't really choose customers. At least by some definition, the customers choose them. I know that this gets muddy because sales, but still. And I don't like the idea that companies should start auditing their customers. What if some company that deals with ICE uses Github? Or say someone who used to work at ICE formed a company -- is that company in the clear? Doesn't seem like a viable direction to me.
Wonder if these social justice keyboard warriors know that most of the stuff at ICE that they are upset about happened under Obama. Where was the outrage then?
> At the core of the open source ethos is the idea of liberty. Open source is about inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone.
I think the core idea of open source is that code should be shared for free. Not shared for free (with people I politically agree with). By policing who can use software, the author's of this letter are very much going against the spirit of open source.
It should not be the position of the tool maker to dictate who can use the tool they create. Once you put it out in the world, people you don't agree with will use your software (if you're lucky enough to have users that is).
I see no difference in slamming Github for having a customer certain activists don't like vs the MPAA cracking down on DeCSS.
> By policing who can use software, the author's of this letter are very much going against the spirit of open source.
I'd be inclined to agree, but it's a little weird in this case because GitHub itself is proprietary software, so they've always been in the business of policing who can use it.
Contrast: if ICE were using GitLab and GitLab decided to pull the contract, ICE could just (well, "just") self-host and be on their way. Open source in practice was always more about the freedom to walk away than about collaboration, and this is reflected in the licenses. Exit rather than voice, if you will.
Yes, the idea of liberty (for everyone to use free software regardless of intent) and the liberty of immigrants in the US to live without harassment and terrorism of their communities are indeed in conflict. So you have to choose one. By not choosing one, you're choosing the existing system -- ICE uses this software to accomplish these goals.
We're not trying to infringe on ICE/CBP's ability to use popular open-source software. We're simply asking some companies not to help them with support contracts.
As stated I choose the liberty of everyone to use free software regardless of intent.
> By not choosing one, you're choosing the existing system
It's become quite popular to say that being ok with the status quo is a political position. And while I couldn't disagree more, I've always believed in free software and I'll proudly stand by that status quo as my political position if that's how others want to view it.
This was discussed extensively a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703631. Unfortunately it also turned into a flamewar with many users disregarding the site guidelines. Please read and follow those when commenting here, no matter how strongly you feel about political questions. Indeed, when strong feelings are present, that's when we need to follow them the most. That's the point of this rule:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
83 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadOpen source is no longer free, so we do not have a choice.
No. No no no no. Stop using Git like SVN. Fork the projects if you don't agree with the maintainers choosing to stay with Github. Don't ask nicely, write manifests, sign petitions, etc.. fucking act!
ICE has done, and continues to do some terrible things. Horrible, horrible things; all legal things, but nonetheless horrible. But, frankly, if its legal, I am much less comfortable with Github's users subverting the US legal system by backdooring their moral code into products these legal entities rely on. Go to your senators. Go out and vote. Go protest. It's not that hard, but it is much harder than signing your name on a petition.
This is the protest. This is one form of how protest looks like.
Why wouldn't they get together and shame a company when that company acts against their own moral values? Is the best possible solution to wait until the first Tuesday in November and hope for the best? I am sure many will also vote, call their elected officials, go to a protest. They'll also sign online petitions.
If they add an ethical vetting layer in there, ok, sure this one is an easy call. But people will continue to complain about other government agencies, foreign and domestic. People will complain about corporations who violate privacy or violate open source licenses or violate web standards. People will complain about non-profits who align with religious or political interests. People will complain about polluters and arms manufacturers or companies with ties to polluters or arms manufacturers.
Next thing you know, GitHub can't sell to the State Department or DOJ or Ford or GM or Maersk or Boeing or Shell or Aramco or Google or Facebook or McKinsey or so many others. And, I dunno, cutting those organizations out might be a great ethical move, but I'm not sure spending significant amounts of time investigating organizations and adjudicating the results and deciding NOT to make sales and dealing with the inevitable lawsuits is going to help GitHub make money.
You don't need to do any of that, just wait and let the angry mob tell you who to not do business with.
Drafting an online petition like this is not too far off from storming someone’s place of work and asking them to forego their main means of survival. I understand the outrage over human rights abuses, but this isn’t the forum.
Yes it is the forum. No it's absolutely nothing like telling someone to "forego their means of survival".
The CEO of GitHub is not going to starve if he gets fired.
But Companies are not People. So this is a dumb metaphor.
Vote, protest [2], run for office [2]. No other actions provide for material change.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21274511 (Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work )
[2] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_pdf_file/kyr_...
[3] https://runforsomething.net/
Not sure where the conditional is coming from, its right in the second paragraph with sources:
> This government agency is actively committing numerous crimes and human rights violations, in contravention of both US and international law.
https://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=15649
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/02/how-badly-did-cb...
https://www.opb.org/news/article/ice-courthouse-arrest-ban-o...
https://www.aclu.org/cases/escobar-v-gaines
https://www.aclu.org/cases/colotl-v-kelly
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/ice-agents-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/ice-detains-woman-cali...
https://www.aclumich.org/en/press-releases/aclu-sues-ice-us-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/francisco-galicia-ice-releases-...
https://www.aclu.org/cases/immigrants-rights/morales-v-chadb...
https://www.propublica.org/article/pennsylvania-ice-who-poli...
etc. etc. etc.
Note that many of my examples, which I found in about 10 minutes of searching, are single cases of violations that happen constantly. For example, I listed a couple US citizens that were wrongfully arrested by ICE, which happened thousands of times: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180...
I don't follow this logic. If it's legal, we should not take moral stances in our actions outside of political actions? Doesn't the concept of "voting with your wallet" expressly involve taking moral stances in ALL actions? Sure, the open source projects may not be paying Github directly, but I'm VERY uncomfortable with saying that money is the only way to take a moral stance.
The idea that there's some set of actions that should be categorically immune to moral reactions is...weird at best and feels pretty darn dangerous. Almost no one wants to make every decision an intense moral debate, but the OPTION should exist. Otherwise you just create places to foster corruption.
> It's not that hard, but it is much harder than signing your name on a petition.
This feels like a false choice. Doing one doesn't mean the other is unavailable, and doing one doesn't mean you SHOULDN'T do the other. Indeed, if you think the stakes are high, doing both seems to be the best option.
I'll start paying attention when they actually start deleting repositories. That's also when Github will start paying attention; they've gotten enough warning.
But no one will actually do that, because everyone who signed this but still has a community and a repository on Github is a coward. They love all the free stuff, and they'd love for Github to just do whatever they tell them to do, but without any of that icky hard work like migrating a community to someone with more aligned morals.
Prove me wrong. Delete your account, NOW. Please. Prove me wrong. No one will. Because all anyone ever does is whine; no one acts. Its so easy to sign your name and complain; its hard to actually Act.
Hopefully this argument will die soon. You don't hear anyone talking about how Google should be treated as a charity because the price of their search engine and YouTube is $0. Nor do you hear it about Facebook. Nor do you hear it about any other marketing campaigns by anyone else. That's their business model. What really bugs me when someone says this about Github is that Github added closed infrastructure on top of an open source project. Without open source projects giving them the product and then the free marketing, they sure as hell wouldn't have sold for $7.5 billion. Open source projects don't also have to be forever in the debt of Github as well, do they?
I'm not going to comment on the rest of your argument, but your opening sentence is really weak.
MSM/These folks are not accurately describing what is happening at the border. There was a mass exodus (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/10/25/organizer-admi...) that is coming to our border and Mexico was allowing it, but now have stopped (https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/13/mexico-migrant-caravan-us...) the caravan.
Obama separated kids too, and said DONT BRING your kids to the border, but now Trump is to blame. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-01/fact-check-did-oba...
Not a fan of WaPo, but another example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/...
Why are kids separated? Because pedo's: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/illegal-immigration-e...
To act like nothing has changed under Trump is ignorant. To pretend that it would matter is disingenuous.
No administration is called out in this repository. Saying "Well, it's too late, because you didn't complain about it under the last administration" is meaningless.
a) It's not even true. I pointed to a literal policy for this administration, which has been absolutely central to the controversy.
b) Even if it were the case, your issue is with the media, not the protestors. If I find out tomorrow that there's a problem, it is not really important to me that the problem began under X or Y administration, but that it persists under the current one.
c) You claim simultaneously that the media is biased and only covering the topic now, but then somehow blame people for only learning about the issue and caring about it now. Your issue is with the media, and that's fine, but it's not relevant to this at all. If you want to put the media on blast go nuts, this topic has nothing to do with the media or this administration.
Someone should develop a distributed version control system...
I guess we've politicized code now. Has anyone looked at the political system of discourse lately? Keep that shit out of code, or we're doomed as a profession.
Like ???????????
Politics is money and power. Tech is money and power. Tech is politics. And anyone who says otherwise is trying to undermine your power by obscuring this reality.
>take YOUR politics outside, and make more room for MINE.
The only ones trying to enforce political opinions on software development are those who claim the status quo is broken. Those who push for vague COCs as political tools to oust anyone with inappropriate opinions. People who put developer feelings over merit and productivity. The rest, and majority, of us are just trying to write code.
The only way to legitimately act as though "everything is political" is by playing a bastardized version of six degrees of separation, and in doing so insufferably forcing the polarization of any environment in which one participates. If you can't separate politics from work and entertainment, you have a serious problem.
This comment is a really embarrassing commentary on how the US education system's emphasis on tech and STEM has crippled our critical thinking.
If you're working at github, you're literally constructing the tools used to terrorize communities. You can't do that in an "apolitical" way. Your actions are political. We feel the same way about the companies that manufacture their kidnapping trucks, their bulletproof vests, the bullets in their guns.
We do have a serious problem.
We're more than happy to debug nearly endless stack traces, but tracing the stack of our customers' and suppliers is, somehow, a threat to the foundations of our identity as good people, purely vocational talent.
We're too steeped in the California Ideology [1].
1. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...
Well... them, and those who claim the status quo is working.
The room does not disappear when you close your eyes, and a randomly wired neural network still has bias.[1]
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937
I agree with you completely, if you are to the point of worrying about the contracts a company that provides an excellent free service to the world holds, how can you survive without being upset that your phone has components made in east asian sweatshops, your clothing as well, you probably eat food farmed/slaughtered in unsustainable/unethical manners, the list goes on and on.
Even if GH cancels their contract to placate this incredibly small vocal minority, they'll just move onto something else to impose their own personal moral outrage upon. It is a dead end. It is impossible to please everyone, and you shouldn't try to either.
Internet activism only works due to the overamplification of voice, because the vast majority of people really do not care, they use Github because it is a stellar product.
Intersectional politics are awful.
It's common for especially B2C corporations to have highly documented CSR policies. They will not work with suppliers that perform testing on animals. Or employ child workers. And they will not work with suppliers who have suppliers that do those things. The entire chain is potentially audited. I approve of this concept and I vote with my wallet.
This situation, however, is different. Whereas companies choose suppliers, they don't really choose customers. At least by some definition, the customers choose them. I know that this gets muddy because sales, but still. And I don't like the idea that companies should start auditing their customers. What if some company that deals with ICE uses Github? Or say someone who used to work at ICE formed a company -- is that company in the clear? Doesn't seem like a viable direction to me.
I think the core idea of open source is that code should be shared for free. Not shared for free (with people I politically agree with). By policing who can use software, the author's of this letter are very much going against the spirit of open source.
It should not be the position of the tool maker to dictate who can use the tool they create. Once you put it out in the world, people you don't agree with will use your software (if you're lucky enough to have users that is).
I see no difference in slamming Github for having a customer certain activists don't like vs the MPAA cracking down on DeCSS.
I'd be inclined to agree, but it's a little weird in this case because GitHub itself is proprietary software, so they've always been in the business of policing who can use it.
Contrast: if ICE were using GitLab and GitLab decided to pull the contract, ICE could just (well, "just") self-host and be on their way. Open source in practice was always more about the freedom to walk away than about collaboration, and this is reflected in the licenses. Exit rather than voice, if you will.
We're not trying to infringe on ICE/CBP's ability to use popular open-source software. We're simply asking some companies not to help them with support contracts.
Hope this helps!
> By not choosing one, you're choosing the existing system
It's become quite popular to say that being ok with the status quo is a political position. And while I couldn't disagree more, I've always believed in free software and I'll proudly stand by that status quo as my political position if that's how others want to view it.
This issue makes a very good point!
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html