You don't know that. I don't know about you (and whatever you wrote possibly tells more about yourself than anyone else), but I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
And the environment is far from being the only concern.
You are attacking a straw man. For you, being against GenAI, simply because it happens to be against your beliefs, is necessarily irrational. Please don't do this.
> I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
Then you would be the exception, not the rule.
And if you find yourself attached to any ideology, then you are also wrong about yourself. Subscribing to any ideology is by definition lying to yourself.
Being able to place yourself into the shoes of others is something evolution spent 1000s of generations hardwiring into us, I'm very confident in my reading of the situation.
> Having beliefs, principles or values is not lying to oneself.
The lie is that you adopted "beliefs, principles or values" which cannot ever serve your interests, you have subsumed yourself into something that cannot ever reciprocate. Ideology by definition even alters your perceived interests, a more potent subversion cannot be had (up to now, with potential involuntary neural interfaces on the horizon).
> Citation needed
I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling. There is no further point to this discussion.
> But then comes somebody and decides to just flush your well curated history down the toilet (=delete it and start somewhere else from scratch) and then all the valuable metadata stored in the history is lost.
How does this happen? I haven't run into this.
> Maybe consider putting your energy into a good documentation inside the repository
I'd say both are valuable.
I use git log and git blame to try to understand how a piece of code came to be. This has saved me a few times.
Recently, I was about to replace something strange to something way more obvious to fix a rendering issue (like, in some HTML, an SVG file was displayed by pasting its content into the HTML directly, and I was about to use an img tag to display it instead), but the git log told me that previously, the SVG was indeed displayed using an img tag and the change was made to fix the issue that the links in the SVG were not working. I would have inadvertently reverted a fix and caused a regression.
I would have missed the reason a code was like this with a big "work" end of the day commit.
It would have been better if the person had commented their change with something like "I know, looks weird, but we need this for the SVG to be interactive" (and I told them btw), but it's easy to not notice a situation where a comment is warranted. When you've spent a couple of hours in some code, your change can end up feeling obvious to you.
The code history is one of the strategies to understand the code, and meaningful commits help with this.
> Haven't open source projects done the rug pull too? Can't they relicense new code going forward?
They can, if the original license is permissive, or if there was a CLA. They can't for significant contributions under a copyleft license that was not done under a CLA. Something to consider when contributing to a project that uses a CLA or a permissive license.
> I get that there is an important distinction but from an adoption and evangelism standpoint it seems like an unnecessary crusade to push them away.
Depends on your goals. If source available misses the point anyway, adoption doesn't help, the message risks being blurred, and therefore you should push back.
> Open source isn't really about the license, and it's also not even really about the source; open source is a philosophy centering open development and collaboration.
Not really. A project under an open source license which doesn't accept contributions is still open source.
It is totally about the license and the source code availability.
There are interesting things to say about the various development models, and those common in the open source world, but the open source aspect and the development model aspect should not be mixed.
I'm not actually claiming that an open source license that doesn't accept contributions is not open source. See my post where I say it's not a bright line.
But claiming open source is totally about the source and the license completely erases the diverse and vibrant community that has formed around open source over the past 40 years. The license is simply putting the community ethos into a legal document. The source being open represents a meeting place which focuses and collects the community. But the real power of open source is the human element that drives it, and the development philosophy they hold, not the source code.
Linux for instance wouldn't nearly be the powerhouse it is if it were merely "source available". You're really misunderstanding the power of open source if you think it's all about the code, and not the development model.
The human aspects, the diverse and vibrant community that has formed around open source over the past 40 years are key, I just think that we should cleanly separate the concepts.
A piece of software is open source if and only if it's released under an open source license. It's necessary and sufficient. Also "source available" is necessary but not sufficient.
Then we can and should talk about how and why open source and free software appeared, and the other social aspects around open source and free software and how they are crucial.
I'm not stating that the whole thing is not important (clearly, it is),
it's just that keeping the concepts separate and clean helps communicating clearly.
My stance is already mostly not technical actually. I would push for free software and the human rights it embodies way more than open source despite open source and free software concerning mostly the same actual software. The tools (licenses) are mostly the same, but the intent and the approach can be very different.
Even the open source definition and the free software definitions are tools. They must remain clear and simple to be useful and powerful.
If you mix everything, we can talk about nothing.
There are many ways to develop open source software, including alone from a garage by throwing the source code out of the window without never looking outside. If you make the community aspect part of the open source definition, you break this.
A lot of said Big Tech is based on industrial-scale fraud and exploitation of the consumer so that a rich few can benefit. Not exactly something to be proud of.
(though we too have that in Europe in the form of high taxes, so that a rich few politicians benefit)
Yeah, sure, why not repeat the multi-decade old mistakes and decide to go from being dependent and locked in on one piece of proprietary software to being dependent and locked in on another piece of proprietary software.
2026 is definitely a great time for still not considering free software since lessons have not been learned yet.
You are trashing a competitor despite having the exact same fundamental flaws.
Please be actually better, please don't lock your users in. It's still time to make the right decision.
Yes, yes, everything should be free. Nobody should leave gainful employment to attempt to compete. Everyone should work using hamster and solar powered devices from their apple orchard communes. Understood.
> Please be actually better, we have too much trash proprietary software in this world.
> Nobody should leave gainful employment to attempt to compete.
That's not what I'm saying. You can thrive with an open source business model. I'm working for such a company.
Falsewoods software founders still believe about free and open source software in 2026
1. That's it's 100% made unpaid, outside business despite the numerous clues that it's not
(note to whom might read this thread: I edited my previous comment to tame it and make it a bit more constructive, piker cited something that doesn't appear anymore in my comment but that I indeed wrote)
That business model exists and appears here periodically complaining about how unfair Microsoft is. We don't care, we'll meet Microsoft where they are and just offer their customers a more specific solution.
Then make this specific solution open source, and make the laywers pay for support and roadmap decisions / features they require! Make them pay for integrations with Azure AD and struff like this! Make them pay for the binary! The possibilities are endless, it can work!
You can aim for better than "where MS is".
This could constitute a killer argument to make your solution appealing.
You don't know that. I don't know about you (and whatever you wrote possibly tells more about yourself than anyone else), but I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
And the environment is far from being the only concern.
You are attacking a straw man. For you, being against GenAI, simply because it happens to be against your beliefs, is necessarily irrational. Please don't do this.
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