May you do good and not evil. May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
A huge problem with software that relates to privacy and/or to money is that frequently strange and overcomplicated design decisions are made, (passive tense because it is strangely difficult to find who made those decisions), decisions whose only apparent utility is to provide paths for hostile organizations to exploit subtle, complex, and unobvious security holes.
These holes are often designed so that they can only be utilized efficiently by a huge organization with a huge datacentre that collects enormous numbers of hashes and enormous amounts of data, and checks enormous numbers of hashes against an even more enormous number of potential pre-images generated from that data.
Another huge problem is that if we get penetrated by enemy shills, entryists, and buggers, as the Patriot Front is and the Jan Sixth protestors were, we are likely to wind up like the January sixth protestors, who as I write this are imprisoned indefinitely being tortured by black guards recently imported from the northern part of black Africa, awaiting trial with no likelihood of any actual trial for years.
A participant who can be targeted is likely to introduce unobvious security flaws into the software architecture. All contributors should make some effort to protect themselves against a third party subsequently coercing them to use the reputation that they have obtained by contributing to make subsequent harmful contributions.
All contributors will use a unique name and avatar for the purpose of contributing to this project, and shall not link it to other names of theirs that are potentially subject to pressure. In the event of videoconferencing, the participants shall wear a mask over the lower part of their face that conceals the shape of their mouth and jaw and a rigid hat like a fedora that conceals the shape of the upper part their head.
Apart from your mouth, the parts of your face that communicate non verbal information turn out to be surprisingly useless for identifying individuals.
If you wear glasses, should not wear your usual glasses, because facial recognition software is very good at recognizing glasses, and easily distracted, confused, and thrown off by unusual glasses.
Even if there are gaping holes in our security, which there will be, and even if everyone knows another name of a participant, which they will, no need to make the hole even bigger by mentioning it in public. People who lack security are likely to result in code that lacks security. They come under pressure to introduce an odd architecture for inexplicable reasons. We see this happening all the time in cryptographic products.
Of necessity, we will rest our developer identities on GPG keys, until we can eat our own dogfood and use our own system’s cryptographic keys. Login identities shall have no password reset, because that is a security hole. If people forget their password, they should just create a new login that uses the same GPG key.
Everyone shall be white, male, heterosexual, and vaguely Christian, even if they quite obviously are not, but no one shall unnecessarily and irrelevantly reveal their actual race, sex, religion, or political orientation.
All faiths shall be referred to respectfully. Even if they happen to be making war on us, this software may not be very relevant to that kind of warfare, in which case that discussion can be held elsewhere.
All sovereigns shall be referred to respectfully, if they are referred to at all, which they should not be. If this software is likely to frustrate their objectives, or even contribute to their overthrow, no need to make it personal, no need to trigger our enemies. War will come to us soon enough, no need to go looking for it.
Status must be on the basis of code, good code, and clever code, not on cheap claims of superior virtue.
When someone plays the holier than thou card, he does not intend to share what we are sharing. Out of envy and covetousness, he intends to deny us what we are sharing, to deny us that which is ours.
If he is holier than we are, he not only wants what we have, which we will gladly share. He wants us to not have what we have.
Christians are required to turn the other cheek, and people attempting to maintain a politically neutral environment need to turn the other cheek. But you very quickly run out of cheeks, and then it is on. You cannot be politically neutral when the other guy is not being neutral. You have to bring a gun to a gunfight and a faith to a holy war. People who start politics in an environment intended to be politically neutral have to be purged, and a purge cannot be conducted in a politically neutral manner. You have to target the enemy faith and purge it as the demon worshiping heresy that it is, or else those attempting to maintain political neutrality will themselves be purged as heretics, as happened to the Open Source and Free Software movements. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
We want to maintain a politically, racially, religiously, and ethnically neutral environment, but it takes two to tango. You cannot maintain a politically neutral environment in a space where an enemy faction wants their politics to rule. Neutrality cannot actually be neutral. It merely means that the quietly ruling faction is quiet, tolerant of its opponents, and does not demand affirmations of faith. If an enemy faith wants to take over, the ruling faith can no longer be quiet and tolerant of that opponent.
We are doing this for ourselves, our friends, our kin, and our posterity, not for strangers a thousand miles away, and we only care about strangers a thousand miles away to the extent that they are likely to enable us to make money by making them secure.
If someone mentions the troubles of people a thousand miles away, it should only be in the frame that we will likely have similar troubles soon enough, or that those people a thousand miles away, of a different race, religion, and language, could use our product to their, and our, mutual advantage, not because he cares deeply for the welfare of far away strangers that he has never met in places he could not find on a map.
The Open Source and Free Software movements were destroyed by official victimhood. Status and leadership must be on the basis of code, good code, and clever code, not on cheap claims of superior oppression.
The experience of the Open Source and Free Software movement demonstrates that if victimhood is high status, code and code quality must be low status. If victimhood is high status then “you did not build that”. Rather, if victimhood is high status, then good code, silicon fabs, and rockets spontaneously emerged from the fertile soil of sub-Saharan Africa, and was stolen by white male rapists from the brave and stunning black warrior women of sub-Saharan Africa, and social justice demands that the courageous advocate for the brave and stunning black warrior women of sub-Saharan Africa takes what you have, what you gladly would share, away from you.
Unless, when a female contributor unnecessarily and irrelevantly informs everyone she is female, she is told that she is seeking special treatment on account of sex, and is not going to get it, no organization or group that attempts to develop software is going to survive. Linux is a dead man walking.
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