YHK - yet another hacker news clone

For the opposite take, here's a former emacs contributor recoiling in horror at discovering that FSF isn't there to fight climate change, whaling, civil war or whatever moral struggle you hold dear this week.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-11/msg00...

This extends beyond software to technology in general. The "tool use" theory, by which technologies are neutral instruments with no moral or political implications until put to use, is an incredibly naive, weak theory that was basically killed and buried by Langdon Winner back in the 70s. If you don't have time to read his books, at least read ["Do Artifacts have Politics?"](https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf) which states the case very clearly.

Of course, most technologists have never read a letter of a single work in the philosophy of technology, so they don't know this, let alone who Winner is, let alone that people actually think about and theorize the impacts of technology on a broad scale seriously (even though Winner worked at MIT, the ever vaunted institution of the technical priesthood). Of course, the people building things are the very people who should be thinking about the potential effects of the things they are building deeply and seriously, but apparently that's too much to ask.

This sounds like a /lot/ of opinions on a /lot/ of open source work - that the author has contributed nothing to. Snipe at RMS, trivialize GNU, and add all types of emotional nonsense that didn't exist at the time all this free software was being written. The author would should that - except they were likely not born yet, and are speaking on concepts they are utterly ignorant of.