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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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To be fair, Lenny's been on this matter for a while, and while the "he'll install malware" paranoia is... paranoia, he's not acting impressively here and hasn't been for a while. I don't expect social cons to be willing or able to do a serious debate at length, but kicking people out from maintainership is very much of "take my your ball and go home" school of social action.

Because a launcher is effectively auto-downloading and unsandboxed JAR code, there's a lot of bad things an untrusted actor could do, and fucking around with git access is not an unreasonable thing to consider untrustworthy. The 'OVE' thing is stupid, but PolyMC was used heavily enough and by enough of a userbase that isn't checking exacts of changelogs that there's been a long history of treating overly dramatic behaviors as undermining trust. See the various snafus over DragonAPI's nag screen or the first and second Wars of the Brass for non-political variants. Tinker's Construct also had a thing where the programmer was actually compromised and everyone went full Madagascar until they could figure it out.

((Unfortunately, this sorta behavior is really common. One of the points of Quilt was specifically to avoid this sorta thing because it's happened at length before, and age doesn't filter well for maturity... and I don't think they've so much solved the governance problem as made their problems hard to criticize.))

That said, yes, there's little reason for conservatives (or even libertarians) to see even the most mildly-phrased 'pro-social' CoC as an evenhanded emphasis on treating people honestly and kindly, and the popular ones are pretty overtly and explicitly not that, and the ability to ambivalent between the two ends is part of the point. And using the flatpak and other package manager/signing systems like this is... not good in a lot of not-good ways: at minimum blurring the lines between ownership disputes a la leftpad, at worst an exporting of the Build Your Own App Store call. I'm not absolutely sure the logo is aggressively meant as a filtering thing -- for historical (bees) reasons, in Minecraft dev world the anti-socon red flag is a blue-and-pink-and-white one -- but even if it wasn't, I don't think any of the people who did it will complain if it's perceived as such.

I'm also skeptical that Lenny could or was interested in trying to make those debates seriously.