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miki123211today at 8:24 PM3 repliesview on HN

This is the problem with choosing platform for moral — instead of practical — reasons.

Platforms that are known for making moral judgments will likely keep making moral judgments in the future. Eventually, they'll make a judgment that you heavily disagree with.

This is why communities founded on ideology tend to shatter, while those founded on a shared goal tend to survive. Linus doesn't care whether you're a GPU expert at AMD, a 16-year-old in Nairobi, or a nazi with a swastika tattooed on your arm. He cares about the quality of your kernel patches.


Replies

strikingtoday at 9:17 PM

He does have some choice words for you if you're Russian, though:

> As to sending me a revert patch — please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be ‘supporting’ Russian aggression?

(from https://therecord.media/linus-torvalds-russian-linux-kernel-...)

I think this shows that there is a blurry line between moral and practical judgment, and that the type of judgment might not even matter in the way you think. Sure, this episode may have been started by OFAC sanctioning various Russian companies, but Linus is happy to invoke more personal moral terms; and ultimately whether it's practical or moral doesn't matter, a bunch of Russian folks found themselves without a commit bit seemingly at random and the same could happen to anyone regardless of a particular platform's or company's judgment.

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illiac786today at 8:43 PM

You are saying this like pursuing profit above anything else is not a moral judgment one can heavily disagree with.

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sajithdilshantoday at 8:42 PM

Perfectly summarised. Also recently saw so many people moving from GitHub to Codeberg because of anti-US and sovereign European tech movement and I wonder now which platform they are going to move again

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