Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Top-level
Océane ⏚

@unexpectedteapot Aren't you confusing morality (individual community intelligence) with ethics (collective community intelligence)? Yes, political statements should be grounded in ethics, but I'm no one to assert an individual choice on everyone.

In the FSF case, I'm sure people would use free software more if they felt it was flexible enough. I'm definitely using the Tor network more since I'm juggling between Librewolf (for SaaSS in which I'm authenticated) and the Tor browser (which I use to read documents, lookup Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, read a blog post, etc.). Anyway, forbidding free software users to use proprietary software is both the FSF's PRs and Microsoft's strategy. That's an example of the moral judgements I'm talking about, but IME it tends to be a poor org's publication, when it has nothing else to say than “capitalism is bad, join us now”.

2 comments
Océane ⏚

@unexpectedteapot By the way, I've been a students union member since 2016. It was messy but I'm still fairly sure of what I'm saying.

Océane ⏚

@unexpectedteapot Hi, sorry, it took me a few hours to process it, but yeah – maybe you're right, and maybe there are different communities involved. I wouldn't dare to make an assessment on how my readers should interact with their own communities, or which compromises they should (or shouldn't) make. But in the FSF case there might be a confusion between a few communities, free software developers and users to begin with, and of course both communities with the FSF members. But there's still a silly sort of gatekeeping where you wouldn't be a true FSF member if you dared to use the professional software you might need (or even Windows) to, you know, reach a higher position.

As I said, I believe you're more talking about ethics than about morality, i.e., I expect political organizations to make political statements on collective action rather than on individual practices. I don't think that would be their business, not just because it would be inappropriate or orwellian (I don't know, and this isn't the topic we're discussing, is it?), but also because they wouldn't know much about them. For example, domestic violence is a political problem especially because it's structural, it usually happens with the same “structure”, concepts are being developed and shared about this, to protect potential violence victims (e.g. the cycle of violence, red flags, etc.).

But then, there's the activism community, and there are the numerous beneficiary ones, aren't there?

@unexpectedteapot Hi, sorry, it took me a few hours to process it, but yeah – maybe you're right, and maybe there are different communities involved. I wouldn't dare to make an assessment on how my readers should interact with their own communities, or which compromises they should (or shouldn't) make. But in the FSF case there might be a confusion between a few communities, free software developers and users to begin with, and of course both communities with the FSF members. But there's still a...

Go Up