Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political!

juergen@feddit.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 93 points –

Linus' thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can't seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)

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Hard fisagree. Linux isn't political. Everyone has an opinion, it's obvious Linus would too. But I am pretty happy that his opinion is one I personally agree with. Linux can be uaed by anyone though, and nothing stops far right activists (terrorists) from making a distro, which would still be Linux. There's a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn't make Linux as a whole religious.

Does that really make it totally apolitical though?. Like obviously it's not inherently attached to a wide reaching political ideology, but it still is political in the same way that any free software is kind of political.

Personally I disagree but that's ok, we can't all see it the same way :)

I don't think we get to use cold reason to determine if something is political or not, just like a dictionary doesn't control the meaning of a word, nor does a small group of ants decide what the colony does next. If Linus came out as a right wing extremist, it wouldn't matter how apolitical the linux source code is, people would decide to distance themselves from him and everything he represents. Something is political the moment a society perceives it as relevant to their politics.