Bad Actors Abusing the Free Software Community, Vandalising It Using Rogue Politics and Old Tactics
Yesterday I wrote about how Microsoft Lunduke was abusing projects. Under the guise of being "opinionated" or "Conservative" he is lying about people and moreover does harm by hijacking legitimate criticism of organisations and then politicising it (for instance, framing the issues in terms like "woke" rather than corrupt).
Even half a decade ago I already warned that he had been doing this. He could take some legitimate problems inside Mozilla or the Linux Foundation, then twist everything in political terms, which served to distract or discredit the criticism - any of it at all - as "partisanship".
To be clear, this problem isn't limited to Microsoft Lunduke (see these comments on "NixOS moderation team resigns"); it is not unique or compartmentalised, either. It's part of a much broader range of phenomena, which is why people think climate change or mitigation thereof is "political" rather than scientific in nature. The same is true for many other things, such as women's rights and abortion.
Right now the administration in the US is openly dismissing - in very strong terms - global warming, an observable phenomenon which is also measurable and can be attributed to human activities.
Oil giants have long attempted to do this; now, the digital equivalent of Big Oil does this in technology. █