Vibe-coding alternatives to fascist software projects
I missed this when Dorian Taylor published it a year ago, but it's relevant not only to TechFreedom, but to my current situation this weekend.
After discussing some standard business risks when dealing with SaaS vendors, he says:
Now, it seems that there’s another risk to consider, and that is your association with the vendor becomes a liability. The basis could be as calculated as a matter of brand safety, or it could be that you genuinely just don’t trust them anymore. What’s it going to take, then, to get out of that relationship?
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For a long time, the norm seemed to be that (putative) geniuses should be accommodated in their …idiosyncrasies. It seems like this may be changing? For one, the truly awful people seem to be leaning into it, which makes them easier to spot. For another, the #MeToo era appears to have spurred the development of a modicum of antibodies. People are now proactively weighing the governance of these assets so that one degenerate individual can’t sour the entire endeavour. It’s now another dimension along which these projects compete.
For people who like to live their lives according to their values and ethical principles, this has always been a high-wire act. I can remember at MoodleNet switching git repos and software we depended on due to changes in world events. It can be tiring, but then not supporting fascism is important.
Speaking of which, there has been a lot of digital ink spilled since Dorian's post about Omarchy, ostensibly a Linux distribution, but in reality little more than a nice theme and some shortcuts build on top of Hyprland and Arch Linux. Both Omarchy and Hyprland are seen as problematic by the Open Source community and, well, anyone who has a moral framework.
That's not to say the idea of a minimalistic Linux distribution with a lightning-fast tiling window manager doesn't sound like exactly the kind of thing I want in my life. In my case, because I can use my Little Robot Friend to indulge me, I've created Quire to sit on top of PaperWM on my Fedora Silverblue-powered Linux laptop.
Is everyone going to do this? No, of course not. But it's important that we can – just as we can choose to listen to different music, watch different films, associate with different people.
We all need to decide where to draw the line. Some people would point to what I've done as being even more problematic as I'm using AI. Which takes us back to my question in a previous post: which moral question are we answering?
Source: Original article · Are.na block · TechFreedom channel
Image: Are.na