Re:Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source
by baryphonic on Friday March 25, 2022 @10:05PM
(#30808683)
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.
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.