The Real Fascists Wear RedHat

Fascism is sadly in vogue again and has infected many facets of society. In the realm of Free and Open Source Software, it takes the form of corporations, projects and developers who feel entitled to control the computing of people in the community. The fundamental ideas of Free Software are to help your neighbor AND put users in control over their computing. It's the user who should get the final say in their computing; not the developers or the whims of large corporations.

While Free Software is ubiquitous, we are far from the dreamed utopia that Free Software could facilitate. We now find ourselves in a dystopian landscape where corporations and projects assert that they are the ones who get the final say over YOUR computing or whether a Free Software project can be forked. The privilege to have software run on a user's machine is one that's earned; it can not be demanded or asserted to be the default. It's important now more than ever that we don't let anyone swindle their way into controlling devices that are OURS or walk into a future with no choices or alternatives.

It's no secret that RedHat has been a poor steward in the Free and Open Source Software community for quite a while. Sadly, RedHat and the GNOME Project's actions show that they don't have the community's best intentions at heart and, at worse, their actions go against the values of the community. Free Software is being weaponized against users to undermine their security and their fundamental right to privacy. Many mainstream [GNU/]Linux vendors have become embolden to bundle spyware and malware that compromise user privacy and security under the guise of making software functionally better. Instead of having choices, a few are now trying to assert that users should only be allowed one and they know what's best for everyone.

Labels Are For The Label Minded : No one cares what face you wear!

One of the great equalizers in "hacker", "counterculture" and the early Internet is that no one cared what you looked like or where you were from as long as you had something to contribute. Where we find ourselves now is that our communities have become infested with red and blue meanies who insist that we must label and judge everyone every waking moment. Humans are not perfect but we should be working towards the same goals instead of dividing and breaking everyone down. As a society, we've allowed the most abhorrent ideas to fester in the dark instead of debating them in the open and now we get to pay the price.

We have created a culture that rewards censorship of any ideas that we disagree with and that treats all disagreements on the same level as the most abhorrent ideas on the planet. People should not be banned if they don't like SystemD or Wayland for ANY reason. People should not be banned for criticizing Mozilla for the things they do, I personally don't like DRM, spyware (Studies), Pocket integration..etc. The world should not end if someone likes strawberry ice cream instead of vanilla or chocolate. Maybe Wayland does some things well and X11 is better for some other use cases. If we continue down this path of absolutes with no compromises then we will soon find ourselves with a more broken society, and fewer choices, than we do now.

The path forward should be forged with cooperation and building people up. If people feel the need to continue to use or maintain X11 in some form, they have the freedom to do so. RedHat, the GNOME Project and Canonical can't take these rights away, no matter how many angry skeets they make or unhinged blog posts they write. We should not create environments where arrogance, manipulation and gaslighting are rewarded. We need communities that are more resilient to this type of regressive behavior. The focus should be to make the best possible Free Software instead focusing on where people come from or what dumb ideas they hold that day.