 About a year ago, I wrote my own code of conduct, which I called the FOSS code of conduct, the free and open source software code of conduct. And I wrote it rather quickly in about 10 or 15 minutes. I wrote it mainly as an example of how easy it is to write a good code of conduct, a code of conduct that doesn't try to inject politics into everything. And, you know, I haven't looked at that code of conduct for over a year until this morning. I looked at it and I realized it had some spelling errors in it and some grammatical errors and it needed an update. So I took a few minutes to update the FOSS code of conduct, get rid of some of the spelling mistakes and things like that. But I also added one important addition. This heading here labeled political activism. This was not in the original FOSS code of conduct, which I published and I added it because I thought it was necessary. To talk about this a little bit because I've said a million times on camera that I don't think politics has any place within the free and open source software community. Political agendas, they don't belong here and people often get this confused and they come back at me. Well, what are you talking about? Politics doesn't belong in free and open source software. The free software movement is a political movement. I get that. I know that. Of course, I know that I'm a member of the free software movement and the open source software movement. I get there's a political element to open source software. Yes, there's politics involved with free and open source software. But what I'm talking about when I say politics has no place here, I'm talking about political agendas that are outside the scope of free and open source software. Those have no business being here. So just very briefly, I do want to read this new section to my FOSS code of conduct. Number two, political activism. While there is certainly a political element to the free software movement and the open source software movement, political activism outside of the scope of those movements have no place in this community. The number one political agenda for any free and open source project should be the promotion of free and open source software. Any other political message could distract or divert people from our primary mission. This is unacceptable. When you are here, you're fighting for free and open source software. If you want to also fight for other causes like social justice or human rights, which are certainly noble causes, then you should join an organization whose primary goal is to fight for those causes. I think that is just very succinctly put. I think that's easy to understand and I don't understand why so many people within the FOSS community have trouble understanding this. The free software foundation actually kind of gets this because one of the things about the free software movement, even though there's a lot of people with a lot of varying political ideas, ultimately they don't get involved in a lot of the really messy social justice kinds of fights because the free software foundation, its primary mission is to fight for free software. The free software movement, digital rights, digital privacy and things like that, and they never want to get distracted from that message. They may have other things that they would like to get done, but if trying to fight these other fights in any way takes away from the primary mission of fighting for free software, they just don't do it. Now, if you want to talk about an organization that kind of got distracted from their primary goal, let's talk about the open source initiative, the OSI. So the OSI, they define what open source software is. They actually have the open source definition on their website. You can go read it. There's 10 criteria. A piece of software has to meet for it to be open source. And one of them is that anybody can use open source software in any way they want. You cannot discriminate against people from using your software for whatever purpose if it's open source software. Well, recently the OSI has been infiltrated by people like Coraline, Aida, Mkey and the ethical source movement. And these people want to be able to push other political agendas. They're not there to promote open source software. They're there to promote their own political agendas, these activist agendas, social justice and things like that. So they joined the OSI. And what they want to do is they want all the seats on the OSI board and then they want to redefine what open source software is. They want to change the definition of open source software so that it's no longer anybody can use a piece of open source software in any way they want. They want to redefine it to where we can discriminate against people from using a piece of open source software if we don't like the political views of that person. That's literally what they're trying to do. And this is how getting away from your primary mission can actually destroy an organization. If your primary mission is to promote free and open source software, then you can't get distracted by fighting all of these other fights. I love that people are out there fighting for women's rights, minority rights and trans rights and animal rights and all this stuff. Hey, that's great, but you're doing it wrong. If you want to fight these fights, you don't do that by joining the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative or the Ganon Foundation or Mozilla or whatever it is you're trying to do. You go join organizations where the primary goal of those organizations is to fight for women's rights or trans rights or whatever it is that you're passionate about. I think right now too many people are trying to shoehorn so many things into free and open source software. Like if you're for free and open source software, you also have to be for this cause and that cause and this cause and this cause and this cause and this. You can't do that because if you're, say I'm speaking to somebody about the importance of the free software movement and I'm talking to them about the four freedoms and how proprietary software is evil and things like that. And then all of a sudden I start talking about women's rights in their particular country. Maybe they have some issues with women's equality and things like that. This person is all of a sudden going to become confused. It's like how did we get from free software to now talking about this? And then maybe I throw in some other things I'm passionate about. Maybe I'm passionate about, I don't know, animal rights. Maybe I'm passionate about people's diets. Maybe I think, hey, I noticed you eat meat. Did you know a vegetarian diet couldn't be healthier for like I just throw in everything that I think, you know, this guy really needs to know about. I'm just going to lump it all in into this free software message. And you know what? I'm not going to get anywhere with anything by doing that, right? No, have one primary goal stick to that goal and accomplish that goal. That should be what, what every organization should be doing. And right now we've got too many of these free and open source communities out there that they have too many irons in the fire right now. They're trying to fight so many different fights that really have nothing to do with each other. And they're trying to conflate them all and to being all part of this thing. And it's, it's counterproductive, you know, and I'm not against what some of these people are fighting for. I'm actually trying to help these people. These people would be better served fighting these fights in more appropriate places. And really I'm trying to help out the political activists out there because, you know, it's like the UNIX philosophy do one thing and do one thing well. That's always the best practice, right? But too many people are trying to do too many different things and they're not achieving anything. It's like I go to the Linux Foundation. I go to the Linux Foundation and I click on their donate button or whatever. And the Linux Foundation donate page actually says that quote 100% of our donations that we receive through our website goes to a diversity program. Okay, then why am I donating to you? Why would I go to the Linux Foundation to donate to a diversity program? Why wouldn't I go to some other foundation's website? A foundation whose primary mission is actually to get diversity in tech, right? Well, I'm sure there's organizations like that out there. I wouldn't go to the Linux Foundation to do that because that's somebody else's fight. That's not the fight that the Linux Foundation should be out there fighting for. What I really want is a more suckless kind of activism, right? A more minimal activism where everybody has a fight but it's in, you know, their own individual groups. Instead of everybody trying to lump us all into one and if you're against this one thing, you can't even be a part of this thing and it just gets crazy. Anyway, that's why eventually these organizations, these foundations end up tearing themselves apart. And it's why at least in version 1.0, which I went ahead and called it a 1.0, version 1.0 of DT's FOSS code of conduct, we will not have political activism. So any politics outside the scope of the free and open source software movements has no business here. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Apsi Dallas K. Blue, Mitchell Allen, Akami Archvicar 30, Chuck David Theodore, David Dillon, Grant Reynolds, Paul Polytech, Scott Steven, Sven West and Willie. These guys, they're the producers of this episode. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because this is a community-sponsored channel. If you guys would like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.