Human beings have this strange desire to be fed, have shelter and other such mundane stuff, all of those clearly less important than software in the big scheme of things, of course.
Many open source are not core business but supporting layers of overall organisations getting free PRs. Others are pet projects that tried to do too many things and overextended themselves for little additional value failing any sort of sustainability logic. Others had a larger range of features required than the original dev was aware of.
The beauty of open source is that there are all kinds of reasons for contributing to it, and all are valid. For some, it's just a hobby. For others, like Valve, it's a means of building their own platform. Hardware manufacturers like AMD (and increasingly Nvidia) contribute drivers to the kernel because they want to sell hardware.
God forbid a passion project stay just a passion project. You don't see this monetization perspective in the hobbyist 3D printing community or airbrushing communities. This is directly a result of how much OSS is framed as a "time sink" instead of enjoyable hobby. I don't like this narrative, and don't think its healthy.
No it is not. The DEA has been doing that since at least the 2nd Bush admin and probably would've been under Clinton or Bush 1 had the tech existed at the time.
At this point I am struggling to maintain the assumption of good faith. As I’ve said throughout, slavery is bad. That doesn’t change the fact that cheap solar panels are good and will save millions of lives. I have never said that the latter justifies the former, that’s something you invented.
I would suggest a more nuanced understanding that not everything fits into a binary good/bad mentality, especially when talking about decisions made by many people. Even individuals often have decidedly varied track records - Watson is in the news this week, and while his later racism and sexism don’t cancel out his scientific career, you have to know about both to understand how flawed people can still make large accomplishments (repeat for Shockley or Millikan, etc.). Recognizing the conflict helps you understand the whole situation, without detracting from your ability to say certain parts of the story are unambiguously bad.
> At this point I am struggling to maintain the assumption of good faith.
You began your comments by calling me a creationist. You never had good faith to begin with.
> I would suggest a more nuanced understanding
There is nothing nuanced or subtle here. This is not complex.
We're talking specifically about solar panels. Slave labour is being used to produce those solar panels. You're trying to make the case that's somehow a net good. That's ugly.
Your position is not defensible. I doubt you read anything I linked to.
Note the word “like”: I was using a simile not to say you are a creationist but to convey the idea that any time you have to chop a single sentence that aggressively you might want to consider whether that strengthens your argument or undercuts it. If the full sentence doesn't support your thesis, maybe you want to reconsider your approach.
This is highly relevant to your penultimate and last sentence, which demonstrate how you're arguing against a strawman: I never said it was a net good, and nor does it appear that OP did, and nothing you linked to could change the opinion of anyone in this thread on how the Uyghurs have been treated since everyone already agreed that it's very bad.
That still doesn't remove the benefits of cheap solar, especially because it's not like 100% of their solar production depends on forced labor. Both the current and previous administration have been willing to enforce the existing laws banning those imports (as have other countries such as Australia) so it's not like the only two options are “no Chinese solar panels” or “look the other way”:
Why?