Regarding “pro human rights”, what I mean is that software development can be (for some) a form of activism for human rights, just like it happens in the arts and in science.

Agreed, there’s a whole spectrum. On my part I’d more properly say against giving too much power to corporations.

Well said. In fact there’s more than an ecosystem problem. We must understand that saying or using “FOSS” or “Linux” does not automatically mean to stand up for human rights, for the community, and against corporations. I’ve personally been under this gross misunderstanding, and I think other users might be too.

If we read the comments in current debates about FOSS, Linux, and age verification, we can see that many developers and possibly also users make statements like “the developer has no obligation towards the community”, “the law is the law, no matter what the community wants”, “we must comply”, and similar. It’s important to realize that many developers work on FOSS not out of consideration for the community or for human rights. For them it’s just one kind of software development. We may have projects that are FOSS and pro-corporations or pro-surveillance. The “F” in FOSS stands for freedom to modify and distribute the software by/to anyone in the community. But it doesn’t stand for “software that promotes / stands up for general human freedom” or human rights.

So for anyone who, like me, wants to use and promote software as an assertion of and a stand for human rights and against corporations, beyond the simple “software” aspects, it’s necessary not to stop at “FOSS” or “Linux” but apply more scrutiny and a more careful choice.

I was very confused about this too. But now I realize that’s not what “FOSS” means to everyone. There are developers that work with FOSS in the same way they could (or do) work for a corporation – note the many comments like “users don’t have any rights to make demands of developers”, “developers don’t owe anything to the users or to the ‘community’”, and similar comments. Luckily there are also developers for which “FOSS” does mean what it means to you and me.

Maybe there are other FOSS users that are under the same misunderstanding as I was. It should be made clear that “FOSS”, per se, really means nothing else than “not requiring payments” and “with source open to the public”. Any extra meanings depend on whom you’re speaking to.

The jury found tech firms treated addictiveness as a feature, not a bug

No shit, Sherlock! 😮

I don’t think enough developers realize that the majority of users does not want this. They’re acting exactly like the legislators: “we don’t give a shit about what the people think”.

The legislators won’t take the Linux community seriously, because the developers aren’t taking the community seriously either.

I’m curious to see how it’ll develop.

Yes, that’s the good news. But probably some of the forks or privately-modified OSs will therefore be by definition “illegal”, just like in some countries the wine that you might make from the grapes in your garden is illegal.

The problem is where this is going, if you look down the road.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

You’re absolutely right. And it’s the same group of people pushing for this in all these places.

“Leveraging”

🤝 Maybe “government parent brainwash them”.

I don’t see any difference with a law saying that you must have a camera installed in your house to potentially check what you do (or what your child does). It’s my house, I decide whether I want a camera installed.

If someone tells me they’re going to put a camera but it’s innocuous because it’s off, or because I can decide whether to turn it on, or because I can point it in any direction I like (toward the wall), well they completely miss the point: it’s my house, if I don’t want a camera in there, then no camera goes in there. That’s my basic right as a human being, and any individual or entity or government that tries to force something like this, automatically loses its legitimacy. Its “laws” are immoral and therefore void. I don’t care being then branded as “anarchist” or as “criminal”. Welcome are all “criminals” from the past that fought and broke unjust laws in order to fight for human rights. I’m not a Russian, bowing my head and complying. Better dead. My grandchildren should not grow up in such conditions.

Likewise, my personal laptop is mine and I decide what does go and what doesn’t go in it.

Personally I do not want to comply with the law. It’s a law that violates my basic rights as a human being, and any tools that favours it or try to comply with it become tools that commit the same violations. My laptop is mine, I decide what goes in it, and nobody has any right to force any software in it, no more than they have any right to put a camera in my house to check what I do. When “laws” violate human rights, what counts is not what’s the “legal” thing to do, but what’s the moral thing to do.

Today we would be in a Russia-like state if people had not actively resisted, broken, and refused to comply with unjust laws.

Amen!

🤝 Well said. Not only normalizing the new boundaries, but in the case of software or hardware, even locking you into the new boundaries.

It doesn’t work quite that way. Typically you have a sequence of very small changes, all “innocuous”, that lock you more and more into the previous ones. When you suddenly realize that the cumulative change is bad, you also find it’s very difficult to “move away from it”. This is why it’s important not to give away a single inch, from the very start.

It’s seen as offensive, but I was surprised that they censor that and don’t censor “fuck”. Even the link was censored, managed to bypass the censoring by using percent-encoding.

In principle I agree with you, pacific discussion and democracy should be the way to go. But it seems that “discussion” doesn’t lead anywhere these times. Politicians do whatever they like (or what lobbies tell them to do), without checking if the majority of the population really agree with some decisions. A developer does whatever he likes, without bothering about the more or less pacific feedback he gets on github. Nobody really seems to want to have a discussion. Well guess then what the “mob” does at some point: they don’t care about discussions anymore either, and they do as they please too.

I fear that riots will start on a larger scale. Even if the context today is different, the situation reminds me somewhat of what happened with the 1981 riots in Toxteth, in Brixton, and other previous riots. Unjust and misused laws; deafness of authorities about discontent; innocent and not-so-innocent people getting hurt.