cw polemic about the NetBSD situation
I personally think what is going on with the NetBSD situation is incredibly shortsighted and reactionary. So I looked into it a bit, and yes, there is a thin thread connecting the money sent to them to Louis Rossman, who apparently (and I just learned about this too) has a Kiwifarms account and says he is "willing to set aside differences for a common cause" regarding transgender people.
That's very suspect and disappointing, and I also just learned this about him. I am not a huge follower of every thread of drama on-line, I have a lot of responsibilities off-line. This post isn't meant to defend an individual's character.
However, here's my problem. To my knowledge, all of this information was fairly obscure, and I'd never even heard of the org that actually donated the money before all this started going down. I also haven't seen anyone email or message the folks at NetBSD asking them if they were aware and what their position on it is, whether or not they endorse that specific individual's statements, or even what they plan to do with it. All I have seen is that the second people started switching, there was an instant brigade.
Admittedly, I have less skin in NetBSD and wouldn't be the right fit to send that email because my friends and I have been migrating to OpenBSD, we saw it as a safer bet because it's less likely to get any corporate money, however it might have been laundered. My goal in the end is to develop or help others develop something better than UNIX in the end, and the short term and mid term game is a question of just maintaining a functional environment to work in.
But look, there's a deeper point. We can't claim we're serious about the principals we represent regarding justice and anti-reaction if we just launch into salvos after seeing a single connection on the cork board without even investigating further or interrogating people. This is ridiculous, and it's only serving to sabotage the pipeline pulling people off of slop and surveillance platforms generally. We should be at least asking NetBSD what they think. Save the firing squad for after they, potentially, say they know they're in bed with fascists and they don't care.
Stop with the mob behavior, it's not helping.