How did the ideology of libre/free software get so politicized?

I’ve noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy. How network software is configured in systems that other people don’t control, it doesn’t matter if it’s open source when people have no knowledge of other networks configuration.

On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.

It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way. Unless someone is both a network engineer and does infosec or something similiar, they’re not in a position to understand fully appreciate how network protocols matter more than a license and code availability.

  • frosty@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    The position that others should have the freedom to read, use, and adapt source code is inherently a political one. It was never not political.

    It shouldn’t be surprising that people within the FOSS movement have political disagreements about precisely what that freedom should entail.

  • fiasco@possumpat.io
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    1 year ago

    Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?

    • dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      This is an deeply uninformed rant about how their exact politics are what is “apolitical.” I’ve seen this exact nonsense on literally every FOSS related forum I’ve been on in the last 20 years.

      • fiasco@possumpat.io
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        1 year ago

        But isn’t it such a weird coincidence that “apolitical” always happens to be the same as “whatever is best for moneyed interests?” Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?

  • jadedctrl@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned

    I personally haven’t run into this, though I have seen people immediately hop into a conversation to say, “You shouldn’t use X! It’s proprietary!” Worst-case scenario, I’ve seen social shaming for using proprietary software. Which I think is to some degree OK? Encouraging and advertising proprietary software is unethical, and I think it’s fine to annoy people into not advertising things like Discord. That’s not censorship, it’s just how relationships work, it’s how people associate.

    don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

    Again, I haven’t run into this. I have seen people defend even garbage libre software on the basis that half-broken free code is better (ethically) than wonderful non-free code — which is true!

    My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

    It only hurts the people that use the proprietary software that was made; now they don’t have control over their PC, and are at the mercy of the developer. Really, all they can do is cross their fingers and hope the dev is friendly and not up to anything unscrupulous. Speaking of which…

    I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy

    Not inherently, obviously! No one actually thinks that free software is a magical silver bullet that vanquishes any possibility of malware, spyware, or anything of the sort. The argument is that these sorts of things are, compared to proprietary software, significantly easier to identify and remedy.

    For instance, let’s say you find through some network analysis that a program phones home with suspiciously large payloads. You can’t actually see the contents of the packets as they’re encrypted in some weird format you can’t make heads or tails of. With a proprietary program, you’ve hit a brick wall that’s very hard to climb — you can’t find out what the program is sending, not easily. Your only hope is some back-breaking reverse-engineering work, which probably isn’t feasible unless you’re a professional security researcher. With a libre program, though, you could snoop through the code for anything net-related, and discover much more easily that it’s sending your private keys to the project’s server. Heck, with the libre program you could even remove the malware code and use the program again!

    One is leaps and bounds more amicable to privacy and security.

  • xyguy@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    I will gladly admit that I don’t use BSD nearly as much as Linux and know far less about it but I think Apple forking and close-sourcing a version of BSD is a pretty good example of what you said doesn’t happen in BSD.

    With all that being said, that’s what the BSD license allows for and so there’s no issue with anyone doing so.

    Interestingly, Apple as well as the 2 others I mentioned that ship BSD based operating systems sell hardware meant to cooperate nicely with the software that they “give away”. Red Hat and other commercial Linucies? Linuxes? Linnii? often have a support or software license agreement that makes them money.

    • Lengsel@latte.isnot.coffeeOP
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      1 year ago

      If you want to talk about anything to do with BSD, you can’t do it with a Linux mindset using Linux terminology if you don’t want to lead with your prejudices and ignorance as soon as you start talking.

      As a first step starting point, there is no such think as a BSD distribution or “distro”. TrueNAS and pfSense are not and have never been a distribution.

      I’m not going to give you all of the info or explain what they are, I’ll leave it at that for you to choose to dismiss it and stay ignorant or read and learn, expand your thinking, and stop crossing one operating system with a different operating system.