THE concept of "free speech" is changing. Right now, for example, racism is "hip" and "woke" if it's directed towards or used to discriminate against every Russian. The whole concept of "hate speech" has become subjective and arbitrary, ripe for distortion by those equipped with laws and admin interfaces. If moderators are obedient, docile employees of corporations looking to control "dinobabies" "100% of the time" (to use the words censorious IBM uses), we end up with stagnant/dying projects like Fedora, or even CentOS whose management resigned almost entirely after what IBM had done in 2020. In Debian too we've been seeing similar patterns. Sometimes it feels like a covert objective is to put off volunteers, especially charismatic leaders who know how to say "no" to corporate power.
"Torvalds knows a thing or two about Microsoft crime, but he cannot speak about it anymore. It's considered risky."Linus Torvalds was not punished for writing poor-quality code or poorly planning a kernel release; instead, they nailed him to a cross for writing a bunch of E-mails which were seen as "rude" or "hurtful" (usually because he rejected bad quality of code or sinister agenda like putting Microsoft inside his kernel). Torvalds knows a thing or two about Microsoft crime, but he cannot speak about it anymore. It's considered risky. As associate recalls that "there was once a very well-written article which explained quite thoughfully wny it is important that Linus must write e-mails so clearly and express assessments of the code so unambigously. People are not code. Code is not people."
"The confusion which is intentionally cultivated by M$ and other opponents to Linux and, especially, the GPL is to mix up discussion of code with other things. Torvalds berates code, not people. Even then, it happens only in specific circumstances."
The above video concerns Paul Fernhout’s talk, but it goes further by covering the potential to be misunderstood, especially when it comes to non-verbal channels of communication. Some years ago we closed comments (except for old timers who have had an account for many years already) and instead we use IRC. Social control media became a hate trap, so Techrights never embraced it and I personally quit all of it a month ago. Being a participant in such sites isn't just unhealthy; it is also a growing risk. ⬆