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.
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”?
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.”
i mean… it is massively better, but yes it still sucks. but what do you move friends and family to? last i looked into element it was not an option for several reasons, and i don’t think anyone would switch to basically noname apps like simplex or similar, even if they might be decent solutions. i really want the last few contacts i have on whatsapp to move, but i’m not gonna push hard to get them to use signal just to get it enshittified in the near future. also a few switched to telegram, which while not facebook, is not really better mainly because it doesn’t even e2ee by default.
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.
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 ideas on gala.
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.
“Great people on both sides,” as a very stable genius put it 🙄
Either way, this is probably OT for an open source thread…
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.
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
People should pay for foss. Donations are oftentimes welcome
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.
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?
lol who is suggesting boycotting foss projects?
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.
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.
Almost all the lists shared in the communities exclude FOSS projects.
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.
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