I do see your point and I’ll actually upvote you here. But I do think there’s a meaningful difference.

Software is just an idea written down rigorously. Various societies created various conventions and social contracts to control dissemination and usage of ideas, both in their pure and written down forms. Capitalist societies generally defer to the author of the idea for how they want it handled (at least for the first few decades), so that the author can earn some money from it (of course, even ideas are monetized under capitalism) - this is patent and copyright law.

The free software movement is just a novel application of the copyright law. By sharing ideas freely but with a license that forces everyone using the idea to share their derivative ideas freely as well, it is attempting to destroy the spirit of copyright law by using the letter of copyright law.

With all this in mind, let’s examine what it would mean to add the “don’t be evil” clause to an otherwise FOSS license.

1. In ideal circumstances, a society’s system of laws and social norms should incorporate “don’t be evil” in it already. Hate speech and nazism should be prohibited and punished, so the clause would be superfluous.
2. In “ordinary circumstances” of neoliberal capitalism, there are agencies that will be acting in bad faith but will stand above any laws, be it geneva conventions, hate speech laws or (boring) copyright law. You won’t be able to enforce a “don’t be evil” clause against the CIA or ICE or the Rockefeller. They can just take your software and use it, so the clause would be of little use typically. This is partially applicable to our current situation.
3. In extraordinary circumstances, such as capitalism in advanced decay a.k.a fascism, the law will be ignored by most evil actors anyways. Law is just a social contract and fascism is deliberately breaking all social contracts. Nobody will enforce copyright law in favor of an individual FOSS developer, especially against someone who’s on the side of the regime. So the clause is completely useless. This is also applicable to our situation.

There is some edge-cases in the middle where a “don’t be evil” clause might make a bit of sense. If the contract law (which includes copyright law) is still well-respected, but the social contract itself is falling apart around it, it might be used to prevent some nazis somewhere from using your software for a short while, but that situation is always unstable and does not last. In any case nazis are known for ignoring all social contracts, including court orders, so even this is questionable.

There are also downsides in any “don’t be evil” clause, because it requires you to rigorously define what you mean by “evil”. This is actually really hard to do well without relying on existing laws (which ruins the point), and will usually either leave nazis leeway to get away with using it, or harm legitimate users, or both - especially because legitimate users are less likely to try pushing the boundaries.

This is explicitly different from what Bluesky is doing. They are hosting known nazis. Nothing is stopping them from banning ICE and making it into a point of pride, it is really easy. There is no downside, no legitimate user hurt. It’s as easy of a decision as one can make.

To reiterate,

So the mastodon service supports Nazis.

Mastodon-the-service doesn’t really exist (unless you count mastodon.social). But the fediverse in general is not supporting nazis. Nazis are banned and defederated.

Mastodon-the-software may “support” nazis in the same way as the idea of a printing press (from your other comment) supported nazis.

They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post.

Bluesky is categorically worse because it doesn’t have the “don’t be evil” clause in the software licenses either, and it is hosting nazis directly on the platform they run.

I’m quite interested whether Russia will join. On one hand Russia and US are geopolitical rivals, and trump is still helping Ukraine to some degree. On the other hand putin has been trying to suck up to trump at multiple occasions - the last one being that rare earth proposal - and is trying hard to be seen as wanting “peace”.

A cool $1b bribe might warm the relationship significantly, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US starts selling weapons to Russia at that point.

I guess it also depends on how much EU countries are willing to bend over, if they go all in on it that can scare putin off for a bit.

I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.

When has he actually approached the Taiwan govt with any respectable offer of long-term cooperation?

Under more reasonable Taiwanese rule there was a lot of goodwill and cooperation going both ways (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Cooperation_Framework_Agreement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_Service_Trade_Agreement etc).

Under new, even more pro-imperialist government, there doesn’t seem to be much room for cooperation when Taiwan repeatedly rejects attempts at cooperation and beefs up their military with american weapons. I agree that Xi could be more accepting and cooperative, but it’s not primarily his fault.

It didn’t last because the will of bureaucracy was placed before the will of the people, it was a long decline of democratic rights of the working class started under Stalin and continued by all following leaders. It was not due to socialism per se, more due to the specifics of CPSU politics. China seems to have figured out a better way to do democratic dictatorship of proletariat and is successfully combining aspects of capitalism and socialism, to both make the country appealing to capitalist investors and also build up a socialist economy to bring the living standards up. It’s not perfect (and is definitely not “the end of history” by any means), but it is doing fine as an interim solution.