Given what’s been coming out of open source projects in the last few months, with waves of purges and “cleansings” to rid projects and repositories of anyone who is not left of Bernie Sanders, I’m starting to wonder if FOSS is about to have its own version of “Atheism+”.
I first write about Atheism+ not long after it got off the ground back in 2012. To summarize, Atheism+ was about politics and demands by atheism speakers and “leadership” expecting all atheists to move hard left and adopt a preordained set of tenets. And in my above-linked article, I said this:
For one there are more atheists than those who actually use the label “atheist”, and more using the label “atheist” than those active in the atheist movements, meaning Atheism+ is, by definition, another minority within the totality of all who fit the definition of “atheist” even if they don’t use the label.
Atheism+ would die the death it deserved in 2016, but its underlying tenets haven’t gone away. The lesson they failed to learn is, quite simply, that atheists were a LOT more politically diverse than first presumed. Those who formed Atheism+ expected they’d get the majority of atheists on their side. And when that didn’t happen – as shown by the dismal attendance numbers for the 2016 Reason Rally when compared to the 2012 Reason Rally – to say they turned hostile would be an understatement.
I’ll let Peach’s video do the talking:
I’m libertarian and atheist. Skeptical of governments and gods. So when Atheism+ first came around and tried to redefine atheism, despite their assertions they weren’t trying to do that, I wasn’t going along with it. Instead it showed that a lot of people who typically advocated for free thought and free expression were now adopting the idea that you only had freedom of thought and expression only if you used that freedom to think the same way as them.
And one of the counters to Atheism+ by other atheists, such as me, was simply… what does any of that have to do with atheism and being an atheist? Rather than focusing just on… atheism and offsetting or countering the influence religion has over society, along with countering the false ideas many propose such as creationism, Atheism+ I guess decided that wasn’t enough. That atheism meant more than just saying “gods don’t exist”.
And now with open source, we have something similar brewing. Requiring a person hold certain political ideas to contribute to repository rather than being inclusive of everyone who wishes to contribute. Where a lot of projects have people at the reins who are hard left. With “purges” and “cleansings” happening because of it. So are we now witnessing the formation of “Open Source++” or “FOSS++”? Borrowing on Jen McCreight’s tenets for Athesim+:
- Open source
+=“we care about social justice” - Open source
+=“we support women’s rights” - Open source
+=“we protest racism” - Open source
+=“we fight homophobia and transphobia”
And to finish with adapting Peach’s ending statement, since that’s the apparent trend: Open source += everyone we haven’t yet blacklisted.
What do all the += have to do with writing software?
Software development, especially open source software development, is the ultimate in egalitarianism. Projects live or die on the merits and with whatever effort their creators or forkers are willing to put into it. User bases are earned, not owed. Though every so often we get project creators and maintainers with a god complex. But the central idea of contributing to open source is… leaving your identities and politics at the door to the code repository. Focus instead on writing code, fixing bugs, and delivering value.
But right now we definitely have people on a power trip. And this has the potential to threaten wider adoption of FOSS projects.
So will we see “FOSS++” or “Open Source++” coming down the pike? I very much hope not. If anything, the push back by others within open source spaces should push these projects to reverse course.
