I’ve seen many threads suggesting products but they often don’t mention FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software. With FOSS you are already boycotting capitalism, on either side. Free and Open Source ignores borders and shouldn’t be categorized in nationalist terms, no matter where some of the maintainers happen to live.
From a purely “vote with your wallet” standpoint it doesn’t make sense, because there’s no money paid. However, one might worry about data/information getting in the hands of a fascist/compromised government. So I think people should judge this themselves case by case.
I think the important part is about who is running the server, rather than who made the software
The fediverse is interesting in that context because each instance can decide where they set up the infrastructure or how they process data / requests. The same applies to self hosting
I saw an article that outlined which country each fediverse platform “originated” from, such as Canada for Pixelfed and Germany for Mastodon. That’s fun to know about, but otherwise not important to users compared to the instances themselves
At most it might speak to which laws will govern the project itself, but even then someone can fork a project that goes astray
I mean, any FOSS project from anywhere could be being used by a fascist government or corporation, to be fair. That’s literally one of the very serious and real downsides of FOSS. It’s able to be used for good or ill.
I mean, it can easily be argued that the US corporate technology class has benefited far more from FOSS than end-users worldwide.
Initially, EC2 used Xen virtualization exclusively. However, on November 6, 2017, Amazon announced the new C5 family of instances that were based on a custom architecture around the KVM hypervisor, called Nitro.
Amazon leveraged FOSS to create their own successful closed-source offshoot. AWS pretty much runs the web. Amazon… is not a good company.
That being said, the US has chosen to be isolationist, whether all of its citizens agree with it or not. Having less of a presence on the international stage, including in the FOSS world, is simply a consequence of isolationism. So boycotting US FOSS is likely to happen in some ways on purpose, and in some ways just from diminished international respect and involvement.
I’m the most anti-American user on here and I agree.
I’d rather use USA-linked free software than Spotify.
Wasn’t Spotify Swedish tho? But yeah
I think that’s the point, he’s saying he’d rather use USA-linked FOSS than non-USA proprietary software.
Didn’t microsoft buy them?
Counterpoint: Fedora is a testing bed for Red Hat. One of Red Hat’s notable customers is the US military. I’d prefer to stay off that path if I can help it. It’s a matter of trust, and it’s a matter of indirectly contributing. I’ve seen people say the same things about Deepin and everyone nods in agreement, but why the hell should I trust a US project, for the same reasons?
Honestly this should be a wake call to the FOSS community that we are way too reliant on the US.
Every default we have is US centric and if FOSS is really meant for everyone we should move away from that.
why the hell should I trust a US project
Bekuz Amerika fridom wurld polis, best kontri in da world!
But on a more serious note, did you know Linus banned those Russian contributors like a month after redhat and DoD signed a new deal. Can you guess who owns RH stocks?
Totally agree. The majority of Americans are great people. Not everyone is MAGA. We need to support the good ones. Sanctions and boycotts tend to unite.
One exception would be if the project imposse a security risk because key people and servers, within the US, may be blackmailed or pushed by the new administration. We’re not there yet though. And I hope these projects and people migrate if this becomes the case.
Also, FOSS projects run by big tech are probably also wise to avoid for strategic reasons.
The majority of Americans are great people
They’re not the majority if they can’t win an election — just sayin’.
a minority of the population voted for trump though, it’s not like 50+% of the total population voted for him, it’s 50+% of the voters, a lot of people just didn’t vote.
Fair enough. I’m still smarting from that election result, all the way across the pond.
On the other side, I don’t count people as “great” who can’t be bothered voting against bigoted authoritarianism. But different strokes, I’m sure.
a lot of people just didn’t vote.
So they decided that it was just fine if he won and saw no reason to oppose what he stands for…
Yeah, that’s some good people right there I can see that /s
Voter ID, gerrymandering, not allowing absentee voting, no day off.
Not everyone was able to vote, and that disproportionately affected Democratic voters.
All true. But the world also watched a huge amount of voters rejects dems over gaza. While trump had no better plans on gaxa.
Much like Ukraine his only argument is “i am better and every one else was stupid”
The argument often heard. “Voting the lesser of 2 evils is still voting evil”.
So yes these folks very much voted the greater of 2 evils by refusing to vote the lesser option. And much of the rest of the world is rightfully sorta pissed at the evil they allowed in.
Maybe a system that regularly gives us “evil vs lesser evil but still evil” as our only options isn’t worth saving
Sorta like the trolly problem.
You can flip the lever to kill 5 or 1. But if you choose not to and also don’t fucking bother to hit the breaks. Your still responsible for killing 5 instead of 1.
If you are not willing to actually stop the evil fai.ing to selects make you the bigger evil.
lol who is suggesting boycotting foss projects?
Almost all the lists shared in the communities exclude FOSS projects.
Which lists?
There are quite a few in [email protected]
I think OP means that one shouldn’t boycott FOSS projects just because they are from USA. That said, I don’t like to be told what I have to do and don’t agree to “FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software”. My pc, my LAN, my rules.
you seem to hold your individual freedoms high, there is a kind of software i think you’ll really like
You seem to wanting to school me about what my preference should be. I’ll happily block you. Bye.
They were just pointing out that saying “my PC my rules” is pretty funny when you advocate for closed source software on it. Your PC their rules.
Obviously it was tongue in cheek so chill.
That was a shitty reply with paternalistic attitude. The kind of fundamentalist attitude which alienates people from some communities. I use Linux and FOSS exclusively since decades, but if I happily fire up a VM to use some CS software that is only available for Windows, if that allows me to do my job better or faster. I don’t need some stranger in the internet telling me that my workflow is broken because of “principles”. These people better stay in my block list.
What a childish response.
Nobody asked your opinion. Bye to you too.
I don’t like to be told what I have to do and don’t agree to “FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software”. My pc, my LAN, my rules.
…he said, without a hint of irony.
Meanwhile, “my PC, my LAN, my rules” is precisely the reason I do agree with always preferring FOSS to corporate software.
FOSS is not American. Foss belongs to literally everyone.
I kept saying it all over the place regarding the fascistic rejection of Russian (as in race) code and got flamed as result. These people use FOSS, especially GNU/GPL software and yet they have no clue about the license themselves.
Weren’t Russian contributors (from very specific sanctioned companies) rejected from contributing because of US sanction laws and with Linux Foundation being HQ’d in the US?
I think that was mainly due to the concern of hostile actors committing code to the kernel.
I think it was US OFAC sanctions
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/navigating-global-regulations-and-open-source-us-ofac-sanctions
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/23/linus_torvalds_affirms_expulsion_of/ (links to the OFAC sanctions set up after Russia invade Ukraine)
The OFAC sanctions do have quite a few lists, with one of them being “Russian Harmful Foreign Activities Sanctions”, so it could be fear of harmful actions and not just retaliation for the invasion
I would think it depends on the project
Are there US open source projects?
I think the majority
I don’t know about that, to be honest.
I don’t have any hard data to back me up, but anecdotally I find that most FOSS software I use is headquartered in Europe. Quite often Germany. There are many maintainers from all over the world, but I feel like (again…in my experience) Europe has always been bigger into starting such projects.
I mean, open source projects can be started or based in the US. But that doesn’t mean it’s an American project; it’s just that the people who started it happened to be American.
I guess if we had to point to a specific American OSS, maybe Tor would qualify? It was initially developed by the CIA, so that may qualify it as US OSS. But it has since taken on a life of its own and the CIA doesn’t have any hand in active development anymore… So it’s still hard to say that even “being made by the literal US government” qualifies an OSS project as “American”.
It’s sort of a Ship of Theseus situation. At what point in the development process do we consider it a non-American project?
I think you’re missing the point a bit.
Both BuyCanadian and BuyEuropean are about supporting their respective economies as they are boycotting America’s.
For Canada, we’re looking at a recession (brought on by our “ally”) so people are trying to help fellow Canadians out as things get rough and people lose jobs.
While I support FOSS and recommend them in threads etc I fully understand why they don’t meet all the goals of those movements. (That being said, I think one of the most rocking counter punches would be EU investment in stabilizing Linux enough to make it a feasible alternative to Windows/Apple for casual and corporate users, solid shot to 2 of the magnificent 7.)
investment in stabilizing Linux enough to make it a feasible alternative
Do you care to elaborate? If I had to write a list of reasons why Linux might not be ready for your average cubicle… Stability wouldn’t be one of them.
Not the other commenter, but they likely meant stability with respect to device drivers. The kernel is great at not degrading with a high uptime, but there’s consumer stuff that’s just perpetually unimplemented, buggy, or minimally-functional:
- Sensor monitoring on Ryzen platforms
- Realtek NIC chipsets
- Nvidia cards and proprietary drivers for anything and everything other than compute workloads
- Nvidia cards older than the RTX 2000 series and FOSS drivers
- Peripherals targeted towards “gamers”
None of this is the kernel maintainers fault, of course. The underlying issue is the usual one of shitty corporations refusing to publish documentation and/or strategically abusing the legal system to stifle reverse engineering for interoperability.
Agree with the main point, though disagree that FOSS is “boycotting capitalism”, many for-profit companies contribute to FOSS and FOSS can be used by for-profit companies too, much of today’s capitalism runs on FOSS.
The point of free software is that it does not have owners, so what exactly are you “boycotting”?
Tell it to the Russian Linux devs that foss has no owners :-) Theory and practice are 2 different things
FOSS doesn’t mean that you are entitled to a place at the table or that your contributions have to be accepted. Nothing prevents these Russian devs from continuing to to work on the kernel.
I get it as an European that it means more to me to consume “locally” and to prioritize services that are European-based. But due to the nature of computers and FOSS, borders are redefined and it is more about ideas and politics rather than physical location. However, computers and servers are also physical and submitted to legislations of countries, we cannot ignore laws such as the Patriot act and the power that the American state can have even on FOSS projects.
For me the priority is to use software that match my needs; if I have the choice between an American and an European solution, I’ll tend to choose the latter one.
I canceled ongoing donations to several projects based in the US and stated that my reasons for doing so was US policy against my country. It doesn’t matter if the dev or project lead supports those policies or not, I refuse to contribute to the US economy if I can at all help it.
I understand, but I am also thinking about the dev of those projects, as an individual who (probably) really despises the current US Gov, and even though they have to engage in the US economy, as they need to eat, pay bills, etc. It is a very tricky problem for those individuals and how to emancipate from. It is like with Russia where such individuals do not endorse at all the ongoing war but still live in that system 🤔
Free software is the antithesis of capitalism. It doesn’t make sense to boycott them.
FOSS is definitely not boycotting capitalism, but its still an objectively good thing. I see FOSS work as a way for relatively rich imperial core citizens to give back to the world.
Definitely do not boycott FOSS projects.
I’ve tried to extol the virtues of FOSS for a long time. Not many people even care about it or their privacy, always parroting the adage “If i do nothing wrong what do I need to worry about” without a further thought.
Is someone doing that? If it’s FOSS it’s from the internet.
Seeing people look for corporate social media alternatives is painful.
> “Hey guys, I want to leave X, should I go to Bluesky or Threads? What? Mastodon? Never heard of that. Looks very complicated, I’ll pass”
> – CEO, founder, IT wizz on LinkedInEvery time!
Or the classic “guys I am leaving WhatsApp, moved my whole family to Signal, another centralized US-based silo that requires phone numbers and runs on AWS, CloudFlare, etc.”
Signal: over a decade of leaking nothing and providing a great service for free, with some weird hiccups along the way like cryptocurrency.
Privacy “advocates”: fuck signal
- if they leaked something you wouldn’t know because US government law doesn’t allow them to disclose if they requested data.
- uses AWS servers that also the gov could ask for access to Amazon directly without even talking to Signal, being centralized and depending on AWS infra is also a weakness.
- needing phone numbers to register, often tied to passport and it is super easy to get your whole network when compromising 1 device
- all centralized services start nice, attracting users, once they have you, and money starts being a problem… meet: enshitification
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If they were leaking there would be prosecutors using the evidence in court, on the public record.
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It doesn’t matter what infrastructure that they use because the service provides end to end encryption. This remains secure even if a third party is able to record all of the traffic between the two devices.
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Has there ever been a single instance where a Signal client had a RCE exploit? Of all of the software on your phone likely to be exploited, signal is low on the list (your browser is where they get you).
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Enshittification is a reason to leave, speculation about maybe possible enshittification in the future is not.
Finally, common sense. Thank you.
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