Why the fuck do people get off on accusing something they don't like of only being liked by men to prove it's bad and the people who like it are bad
Also, people have been publishing "not ready for primetime" experiments and ideas for people to try on their own machines as open source for decades. Every open source project is not required to be "professional" or "secure", and those who publish them shouldn't be required to do some kind of fucking "impact research" to make sure its "responsible" to release, and never were; those are requirements for major, already mature open source infrastructure projects, and it doesn't make sense to project them onto everything that has its code available for download or modification. That's not how most OSS projects that are now mature started (Linux started as a transparently hobby project! It was insecure, and is still in many ways!) and it's not true of the overwhelming majority even of useful and interesting OSS projects, and if we started requiring it, it would both utterly stifle all freedom, creativity, and diversity to the ecosystem and turn OSS into an EU-like regulatory museum, it would also raise the barrier to just releasing code into the open for people to use and contribute to.
Wasn't this the exact sort of thought process that went into that EU security regulation for OSS projects that we were all worried would kill OSS before they added an exemption??
And no, an interesting and fun experimental open source program shouldn't need to be plastered with explicit warnings like the California cancer labels just to be put out in the open. Stop infantilizing people. The post literally infantilizes those on the receiving end of OSS, saying handing unprofessional OSS to people is like "handing chainsaws to kids", and I think, alongside the outright sexism, that's the biggest indicator of the mindset of the kind of person who'd write this.
logicprog•1h ago
Also, people have been publishing "not ready for primetime" experiments and ideas for people to try on their own machines as open source for decades. Every open source project is not required to be "professional" or "secure", and those who publish them shouldn't be required to do some kind of fucking "impact research" to make sure its "responsible" to release, and never were; those are requirements for major, already mature open source infrastructure projects, and it doesn't make sense to project them onto everything that has its code available for download or modification. That's not how most OSS projects that are now mature started (Linux started as a transparently hobby project! It was insecure, and is still in many ways!) and it's not true of the overwhelming majority even of useful and interesting OSS projects, and if we started requiring it, it would both utterly stifle all freedom, creativity, and diversity to the ecosystem and turn OSS into an EU-like regulatory museum, it would also raise the barrier to just releasing code into the open for people to use and contribute to.
Wasn't this the exact sort of thought process that went into that EU security regulation for OSS projects that we were all worried would kill OSS before they added an exemption??
And no, an interesting and fun experimental open source program shouldn't need to be plastered with explicit warnings like the California cancer labels just to be put out in the open. Stop infantilizing people. The post literally infantilizes those on the receiving end of OSS, saying handing unprofessional OSS to people is like "handing chainsaws to kids", and I think, alongside the outright sexism, that's the biggest indicator of the mindset of the kind of person who'd write this.