[dannersy]

I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc.

It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith.

My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.

[breezykoi]

You're conflating freedom of use with moral endorsement. FOSS grants freedom, not ethical approval of every use.

[dannersy]

No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.