Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political!

I can relate to the "how the fuck is being a concerned human being extreme/poltical?" energy in the post hard.

Hate is mainstream politics now, sadly. So yes, not hating is political as well.
That's what "being political" means. Otherwise you'd be apathetic, cynical and not concerned about anything.

Political? For everyone outside of America that's just common sense.

In Canada it’s starting to become “political” since our morons are egged on by the morons down south.
- It's so exhausting, they treat it like a sport, it's not about making anyone's lives better it's all just about their team winning
Politics used to be something people engaged in. Now politics is the core to a lot of people's identities, which means disagreement or debate is perceived as a personal attack and people will embrace a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance to avoid being wrong.
Hello I'm a trans person from the UK here to tell you this is sadly not the case at all.
I despite this “trend” of considering just simple opinions and basic statements as “political”. It’s been watered down and turned into a meaningless tag.

Linus gives exactly zero fucks about saying exactly what's on his mind. And it's almost always massively based. He's always been great about that, we don't deserve such a great mind.

Remember the time with the anti vaxxer, man was firing with all cylinders
Seriously, we are super blessed to have him.

Hard fisagree. Linux isn't political. Everyone has an opinion, it's obvious Linus would too. But I am pretty happy that his opinion is one I personally agree with. Linux can be uaed by anyone though, and nothing stops far right activists (terrorists) from making a distro, which would still be Linux. There's a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn't make Linux as a whole religious.

Does that really make it totally apolitical though?. Like obviously it's not inherently attached to a wide reaching political ideology, but it still is political in the same way that any free software is kind of political.
- Personally I disagree but that's ok, we can't all see it the same way :)
I don't think we get to use cold reason to determine if something is political or not, just like a dictionary doesn't control the meaning of a word, nor does a small group of ants decide what the colony does next. If Linus came out as a right wing extremist, it wouldn't matter how apolitical the linux source code is, people would decide to distance themselves from him and everything he represents. Something is political the moment a society perceives it as relevant to their politics.

Woman right to choose, fair enough. Regulated guns, absolutely. The less guns the better. Gay people stuff, I couldn't care less. Check.

The man said it as it should be said.

Linus has always been political and principled, I mean he chose the GPL for a reason! Glad to see him state all of this outright though, it only makes me respect him more.

I half agree with his gun regulation stance. While ideally there would be more caution given to who owns guns that is unfortunately not the world americans have been living in the last 80 years or so. The fascists have guns, lots of them, and I'm not giving mine up while they have them.

Everything else he said is 100% based.

Well, yeah, fascists having guns is a "randomly giving guns to any moron with a pulse" problem.
Yeah the gun law regulators generally ignore the fact that everyone and their grandma already has guns. And those with guns are not willing to do trade in programs.

I’d like to see better psych eval and requiring to re-license every so often. That should start steering the country in the right direction. Of course I don’t see this happening any time soon.
I think fascists is going too far… they’re crazy and dumb, that’s it.
- They attempted a violent coup. They're crazy, dumb, and dangerous
- Nah, they're fascists. Maybe not every republican, but a solid 70% or so of them. And a decent chunk of democrats too.

FOSS is an active political statement!

Was just coming here to say that. The entire Ethos of Open Source is basically the people owning the digital means of production. So some people really not grasp that?
- So some people really not grasp that?
  
  Actually, yes, the original FOSS movement had more right-libertarian roots than anything to the left, although nowadays some might see it as "common ground".
This fact eludes some folks.
- "Wait, FOSS is political?"
  
  "Always has been."

One great thing about about software is you don't have to agree with or care about what the creators thoughts and beliefs are, software is at the end of the day just software.

Doesn't get any less political than that.

I create software by myself and disagree. First it's very political where and for whom I choose to develop software. Second, software is always made for a purpose and the purpose can be indeed (and is) very often linked to political or social cause. E.g. a software which only purpose is to harm people, say for controlling mass destruction weapons is in my point of view a very political software
- software is always made for a purpose and the purpose can be indeed (and is) very often linked to political or social cause
  
  Its not though, typically software exists to serve a basic function at its core, and it could be used or contributed to by anyone for any number of things.
One great thing about about software is you don't have to agree with or care about what the creators thoughts and beliefs are, software is at the end of the day just software.

It really isn't though - no-one dared touch ReiserFS after the creator became a wife-murderer even though it, supposedly at the time, it was quite the piece of advanced code.
- Was referring more to people trying to politicize software and push them into political movements they're unrelated to. Open software is at is core free and as such anyone with any political leaning could use it or contribute to it and no one would know, and no one should care.

Well said!

I've never been made happier by one of his rants.

social.kernel.org : one should migrate to lemmy :°

comrade linus 🫡🫡

but also he’s finnish, which is communist, so he’s obviously a communist smh 🤷‍♀️

@juergen @k_o_t A paranoic fascist here.
~~He's not Finnish, he's a Swede from Finland. Please attribute the nationality correctly.~~

He's not defending communists. He just points out that 'woke' is a word used in a spiritual context, which doesn't make sense with communism. The header of this thread is a clickbait. Read the article again.

EDIT: He's actually a Swedish-speaking Finnish guy, mea culpa.
- Finns are arch enemies of communists. Show a finnish guy a hammer and sickle, and he'll ... you.
I don't know if you joke or not, but thinking finnish = communist is too far away from any truth. I lived and still live in an ex-communist country and let me tell you: nothing Linus says or does is communist in any way. Socialist? Maybe! But that's a different discussion.
- it’s a joke 😉

Common Linus W.

Holy fuck, I love that guy even more now. I didn't know that was possible.

Hahahahahaha this is great

Hell yeah. I love watching this man take a stance.

I don't see how his, very reasonable, views makes Linux itself (more?) political. What is the point of this post?

I don’t think the title is good, but I do think it’s notable to some extent. With people having weird, shitty opinions, it’s nice to see someone who is relatively famous in the tech community for having somewhat sane opinions and being vocal about it.

In my experience, the Linux community has got its own bunch of free speech weirdos who would reject some of these political points (especially the trans position), so I do think in that context it is kind of important.
The man can say what he wants and it's nothing to do with Linux. And, his gun stance seems fair to me. I think he is an intelligent man, and I think he's allowed to say his thoughts without some lame arse trying to tie his ideals to the OS. Move on, nothing to see here.
- This is exactly what I was thinking as well. Why is it so hard for folks to separate what someone creates from the creator? If we found out the person who created, say, the bandaid, was a militant Nazi homophobe who advocated for marriage at the age of 6, should we feel guilty every time we need to cover a cut or scrape?
  
  Personally, I don't know much at all about Linus, what he prefers for breakfast, whether he wears slippers in the house or goes barefoot, and so on. He could staunchly advocate that my country do away with its present form of government and declare him dictator for life for all I care.
  
  I like Linux. I use Linux. It gets the job done. End of story.
Gloating? Complaining? I thought the FOSS community has matured past "creator's views = views of everyone who uses their creation", honestly. And isn't Linus supporting the Democratic party already well known?
I've seen people on other sites malding about how this proves linux and the GPL are communist. I suppose it's important to know just what those people are melting down about this week.
- Surely that already happened in the Code of Conduct drama a few years back? Or the "Linus is rude and difficult to work with" callout even before that?
Well, there was drama here yesterday about Lemmy's creator and maintainer being a tankie or whatever and one person trying to say "Lemmy bad" because of that.

This post doesn't seem to be here by coincidence.
- This post doesn’t seem to be here by coincidence.
  
  As the person who posted the original post: i don't like/trust tankies and them being tankies is one of the reason i deleted my lemmy.ml account.
  
  My impression is that Linus also doesn't speak in his post about tankies, but instead i think the word "communist" is equal to some general leftist.
  
  But i kind of agree, that this post can be seen as "in support of tankies". hmm.
  
  my impression is, furthermoore: because the more tankie politics is on lemmygrad.ml, an instance which is easily blocked, it is not that bad / could be worse. I kind of hope instances like beehaw.org have the most users someday, because they are really awesome i think

Holy shit a based Linus is not what I expected to see today. Makes me prefer Linux even more than I already did.

What would you use for a synonym for based? I keep seeing that used. I always thought it was just some alt-right meme bullshit, but I'm learning I was wrong. I still don't get the use. My mind always thinks "based on what?"
- "Based" is typically used to describe someone who says/does something without caring if they'll be judged for it. Most commonly, it's shorthand for "That's a controversial opinion and you are bold for saying it, but I agree with you." It turns the previous sentence into an adjective, which is a little weird but it makes sense eventually.
  
  So if I had to choose a single word as a synonym, I would say "Bold".

average based Linus take.

And he's right!

All sensible points, nothing extreme, except maybe the Linus trademark super blunt delivery

Incredibly sensible take on all accounts in my opinion! I share all of the same opinions, though I lack the platform to be listened too haha.

This is one of the reasons why I respect him so much.

Couldn't agree more.

When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.

Protip: You can crash self-driving cars by purposefully misclicking during Captcha checks when they ask you to identify what is a bicycle, a car, a pedestrian, etc. Keep misclicking, your are poisoning the AI with each misclick. Just stay safe on the sidewalk.

don't think you can make a big difference as an individual, given that captchas are used by probably billions of users per day
- Imagine if billions of users per day selected the wrong options. So much chaos

After being disappointed by Steve, Linus lifted my spirits.

Maybe because he's not "American" and comes from a country with regulations like the rest of the world, and people care when they vote to make things work.

And like most of the rest of the world, there are more than two political parties, and is not a drama show.

He has American citizenship and lives in America, he's talking about America here. And I promise you that other countries, yes even those in the magical fantasy land of Europe, also have lots of political drama despite having more than two parties in the government (They tend to form alliances based on left/right and split into two blocks anyway).
- I know, im from Europe.
  The drama is not compared to USA, we don't vote on celebrities.
  
  In my country we even have a party for the animals and climate, so when USA still trying to vote for basic rights, we already ahead and vote for animal rights and more climate change.

Personal is political.

Well yes, it has been discussed a lot. But also, copyleft and other open source licenses are political in that they prevent capitalist exploitation to a degree.

It makes me very happy to hear Linus say this

Linus delivering the well-deserved beatdown as always.

Linus apitting facts

Every human opinion is essentially "political" in some way, and is even interpreted differently be country? But open source software as a technology should not be taking any stance for or against gender, guns, rights, race, etc...

Well, it's not any official statement by the Linux Devs as a collective.

It's simply the personal opinion of Linus - who also happens to be the person who created Linux and still manages it.

Linus is just such a treat. Love the guy.

Linus is based as fuck as always. Level-headed and agreeable as always.

Linus is stellar example of "good is not nice."

He will rake you over the coals because he cares about quality and expects better from everyone.

Good can be nice. This is just him personally and shouldn't be seen as a guideline on how to be good.

Based but don't make Linux political

@juergen I don't think he implied that he actually is a communist though lol

based

In my experience, people who explicitly state to be apolitical or demant non politicality happen to have worldviews which only in the best of cases fall under the label controversial.

Based Linus!

based