The banner wavers have moved on to the next trendy thing and people are still getting killed. What was achieved by annoying HNers?

You’re at war. Maybe you don’t realize it because you can still go on with your life as if nothing was happening.

It’s not a trendy thing, it won’t go away because of some random trendy thing.

HNers annoyance couldn’t be more irrelevant. And people are still getting killed because the world has decided that this war , as bad as it is, shouldn’t interfere with business too much.

People are still getting killed because we don’t want our precious little irrelevant easy lives to be disturbed too much.

The world still hasn’t waked up. We should be alarmed and fully supporting freedom. But the world is just annoyed. I thought moral values were important to open source.

Are we still talking about BLM? Because I regret to inform you it has already gone away. The city where I lived published their provisional crimes stats for 2021 and it looks like murder rates have gone up. Most of that is gang related and black on black. Not only has the city not “defunded” the police department they’re looking to purchase what can only be described as a tank from a Homeland Security grant. There are good people working at the grassroots in the African-American community but they were there before the “awareness” and they will keep toiling after it.

It’s legitimate to ask what did all the Internet angst add to the solution? The answer it would seem is very little. I do hope it is different for Ukraine but I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe it didn't help much, and so what? Are you saying we shouldn't even try?

Precisely. We should not try things which, blatantly obviously, do not work, because it distracts and takes precious resources from things that actually do work. That applies to BLM in the same way as it applied to covid, as well as climate change and million other things. Virtue-signalling theater is distracting at best and harmful at worst.

I think virtue signalling should actually be happening more, not in the sense "I pretend to care", but in the sense "Those are the values I stand for".

I see a lot of ambiguous statements these days, from too many people. People not wanting to "take sides", but in reality not yet willing to say they only stand for their personal interests, if not for a return to the law of the fittest.

What do you stand for?

Well, it burned down a few cities, that's got to count for something.

So will plastering banners all over the internet end the war? How is it raising awareness exactly? And why aren't we raising awareness about thousands of other political, social and economic issues around the world that actually need awareness, rather than pretending to do so about the most popular issue of the day?

Politics doesn't belong in software. Some software can be political, sure, but the only purpose of these banners is good PR and virtue signalling.

> why aren't we raising awareness about thousands of other political, social and economic issues around the world that actually need awareness

Our lives are going to change. Depending on how concerned and committed western people will be, we'll have to face a major energy crisis, or give up our democracies for cheap oil & gas. If trump is re elected, I see nothing good coming for the west. We are living crucial times, fascism is back in full force, our medias and politicians are being bought one by one with dirty russian money. And fascists don't feel the need to hide anymore.

But people fail to see why this war isn't yet another political, social or economical "issue". I looks like we're in for a very dark age...

The OSI article even encourages banners and other such thing in ones work. If code is speech, then speech shouldn't be frowned upon when the coder uses it in their project.

The OSI is specially calling out an incident where someone actually put malware in their code which targeted Belarus and Russia. Totally unacceptable and not a form of protected protest at all, and arguably not speech.

I honestly don't care that much if people want to put political messages in and amongst their code. The maintainer of SQLite is a devout Christian and had "the Rule of St Benedict" from the 4th century.[0] Or the person known as "Ciro Santilli," who has a bunch of anti-CCP content in various repos.[1] (I've actually considered putting some of his content into my repos as a sort of "kill switch" targeting CCP theft and misappropriation of copyright.) I fully endorse both, even though they earn me no brownie points, nor are they likely to convert the world to the one true faith nor overthrow a murderous, totalitarian regime. The only differences are that my opinions are a minority among the community, and that I simply wouldn't let the hashtag activism detract from the product. I'd certainly let people opt out of the banner, and would probably set a cookie to remember the preference for a while.

[0]https://www.sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

[1]https://github.com/cirosantilli