SJWs strike Linux community, Linux community strikes back
I’ve been talking a lot of politics lately, which is a bit of a turn from my past material. However, I think it’s important to raise awareness about how our hobby is being co-opted and demonized by the alt-left as part of this big dick (or pussy hat) waving contest for moral supremacy.
Their newest target is the Linux community. SJWs claim that the vast majority of kernel developers are white males, who are of course the go to boogie man these days. They are demanding that more women and people of colour be brought in. As a result, the community has now implemented a new Code of Conduct to try and prioritize contributions from ‘underrepresented’ groups.
This whole thing seems to have stemmed from a hit piece by garbage tier magazine The New Yorker on Linus Torvalds. He has been attacked for alleged “unprofessional” behaviour in the past. Something which sleazy media outlets have used to launch a salvo at the entire Linux project as a whole. Torvalds has since left the community he created.
Needless to say, there are many in the community that aren’t happy with political busybodies poking their nose in. A group of developers have banded together to protest the Code of Conduct, arguing that it goes against the community’s philosophy of meritocracy. The alt-left meanwhile has argued strongly against merit based systems claiming them to be a tool of the patriarchy, or some BS like that.
Well, it seems the SJWs have now made the mistake of sticking their ding dong in a hornet’s nest. The nerds have now effectively declared a policy of mutually assured destruction should the alt-left get its way.
A faction of developers are threatening to take their protest a step further by copyrighting their code. While Linux is, for all intents and purposes, public domain, the GNU 2.0 license it operates under does indeed legally allow for this.
This is not just an empty threat either. The community would then be forced to pay royalties they can’t afford, or remove all copyrighted code from the kernel. That would spell disaster. Basically the entire internet runs on Linux, along with countless other machines including corporate data centres, Android smartphones, IoT devices, etc.
It’s like a game of Jenga. Remove one piece and the whole thing is liable to come crashing down. All that code will have to be re-written from scratch, which could take months. In the meantime, the amount of lost revenue due to downtime would total well into the billions.
The whole irony here is that Linux is an open source project. Which means that anybody is free to edit the kernel or any other component of the operating system. That’s why it’s so popular with IT in the first place. There’s really no firm record of who actually is editing it, let alone one that contains all their superficial stats like race and what gender they feel like today. All that matters is whether your code is sound.
Once again the alt-left is manufacturing problems where none previously existed. If you can’t survive in a merit based system, it’s not the system’s problem. You just need to git gud son.
Image copyright Fox, used under fair use