this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Free and Open Source Software
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"What about the good things Hitler did?" Is not the flex you think it is. Also, using the Autobahn does not send support to Nazis
Using Lemmy without donating to the developers does not send support to them. Same goes for Ladybird, does it not?
Adding to popularity does support them.
you're kidding, right?
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
That would depend on the feature set
Read it again...
I refuse to believe there exist two pieces of software that are truly for all intents and purposes identical, unless one is a very recent fork of the other.
Both Lemmy and Ladybird are very pointedly not forks of anything.
Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.
You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:
If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.
Of course not. I would do my research, like any responsible consumer.
I'm a programmer. Which libraries I pick to add to my project have effects on everyone who will use the software I publish. I owe it to them to do my homework to compare them and figure out what the differences are and which one is better for my use case. If I just picked whichever one was most popular, I could have a polyfill.io incident on my hands every week.
I do the same thing with software I personally use, because I'm a responsible consumer. Firefox and Chrome aren't identical. Chrome has way more downloads but I'm betting more than half the people in this thread use Firefox or one of its derivatives, like Mull or Librewolf.
I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare that people assume no one does, and accuse those who do of lying.
But when it comes to most people out there, we're not in that world right now, and popularity does matter, so boosting shitty devs' products is harmful to the FOSS ecosystem. HTH
I mean, you can deny the premise all day long, but it will never win you an argument.
I guess that's true when you're a company trying to sell a product. For an open source project more popularity might just mean more hassle. Sure, it may increase your employment opportunities somewhat, but seeing how entitled and demanding users of os-software can be, I'm sure some devs wish their projects were less popular.
Yeah, it EMOTIONALLY supports them. Dude. It's okay. It also supports the users who get value out of it in actual material ways.
A. Not a "dude"
B. I'll pose the same rhetorical as I did to the other person that didn't think popularity was support:
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
I'm sure a few bad people make a living maintaining it, and all the roads you depend on everyday.
Bad people are everywhere, doing all sorts of jobs you appreciate.
Sure, there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism. But I can do harm reduction. When someone says or does something shitty, I can avoid or stop using their product. In your example, if a road worker came out publically with some transphobic nonsense, I could raise that to my local road authority and they would likely lose their job. Are there more people that have shitty views in this theoretical? Maybe, but they will be less likely to spew them if they know there are consequences.
Is it harm reduction if all the bad people couldn't make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were living on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?
Wow, what a slippery slope you've made.
It's your idea.
All I did is assume all good people agree with you.
What? It was your hypothetical
Given that what these people are being criticized for are not intrinsic traits, those people have the option to change their behavior in order to not be ostracized. I am certainty not under any obligation to give anyone my business.
"What if all the bad people lost their jobs?"
Well, that certainly might encourage them to rethink whether being bad is working out for them.
And yes, I'd say that route sounds to me like it will reduce harm in several ways.
What is the source for this quote? I most often hear it used to argue in a fatalistic way in favour of continuing to do whatever harmful thing it is a person wants to continue doing. I don't think it is true, certainly not for those who are struggling for survival. Ethical doesn't necessarily mean that there is no harm. It means that the harms have been considered and a meaningful attempt at balancing those harms according to some ethical framework has been made.
I'm not sure of the origin, but that is a fair point. I typically us it in the context of there is no way to find a harm free source of anything in a capitalist society, so you have to find the path with the least amount of harm in it. That is basically what you are saying, but just tweaking the stated definition of ethical.
"Ethical" does not mean "good", "moral", or "right", it means something more like, "consistent with an explicit set of ethical axioms." It's meaningless to say something is unethical without stating or at least implying a specific ethical philosophy.
Carnism says that it is sometimes acceptable or even good to be cruel and violent to animals. Veganism says that it only is in cases of absolute necessity. A researcher or scientist for a cosmetics company might follow all the ethical requirements of their profession, and yet by any other standard, do unforgivable harm both to animals they experiment on and to the humans they mean to exploit with their research.
Which is why I followed it up by saying the best we can do is harm reduction by choosing the less harmful paths when we find them. Nothing you are saying is different to what I said, just a different wording
I think you meant that using the Autobahn does not send support to Nazis. Slight typo there :P
Ope, yes indeed