pitninja

That’s probably true, but if the satire is annoying in its own right, I’m not going to indulge it either lol

I actually do know what political means. Care to explain why you think software licenses are political instead of laughing at what I consider to be a completely reasonable statement?

I didn’t repeat myself on the second point. Either one’s politics endorse intellectual property rights, which include the rights of an individual or organization to permit/limit any or all of those specific facets I mentioned previously according to their preference or one does not believe intellectual property rights exist. That’s the only meaningful way I can conceive of software licenses being a political concept, but I’m welcome to hear your take.

Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

I know this is all somewhat pedantic, but I pretty firmly believe no software is inherently political. At least maybe not until we have a computer system that achieves some form of sentience and its operating instructions are subject to its own will.

The motivations for creating open source software can be political, but the product itself is apolitical. Programming code is pure logic and has no opinions.

I don’t even really believe that software licenses are inherently political. All they do is permit/restrict specific rights to attribute, use, modify, reproduce, distribute, etc. the code. The only real political position I could see against software licenses is one that doesn’t believe in protecting intellectual property rights. So if we’re going that far, I will tacitly agree that software licenses could potentially be considered political, but not in a very meaningful sense IMHO.

The Linux Foundation is not the Linux kernel, though.

I’m actually perfectly in agreement with both of those statements 🤷

100% there is absolutely no reason Reddit needs to be making 3rd party apps be brokers in paying for these API calls. Aside from the ridiculous price for API calls, they’re implementing this in the dumbest possible way. And no NSFW is dumb as fuck too and honestly anticompetitive.

Yeah, I’m certainly not going to delete my Reddit account immediately. When Digg was fucking up, it took several rounds and I really made sure I was going to be comfortable on Reddit before I deleted my account there. But once critical mass was achieved, there were major threads on Digg that became literal ghost towns of deleted account comments pretty quickly. It was obvious what was happening. I don’t expect we’re going to see quite the same massive collapse at Reddit unless they follow up this API decision with killing old.reddit in a month and then dropping all NSFW communities in another month. If they do those things, Reddit is going to essentially die.