When Privacy Meets Pride: The FOSS Dilemma

Ah, the Free and Open Source Software community. A place where people dedicate their free time, knowledge, and often their sanity to creating things the rest of the world gets for free. A place where privacy advocates finally feel at home, because unlike the rest of the internet, no one is selling your soul to the highest bidder. And yet — paradoxically — this very haven of freedom and idealism sometimes feels more like a medieval battlefield, with small castles fighting over whose flag looks better on the wind.

Spend five minutes in a Linux forum, and you’ll witness the friendly, generous side: someone patiently explains to a newcomer why their Wi-Fi isn’t working, even though they’ve been answering the same question since 2007. Another user uploads a patched script at 2 a.m., not for fame, not for money, but just because they can’t stand broken code. It’s beautiful. It’s the best of humanity.

And then, like an unexpected pop-up ad, it flips. Suddenly the conversation turns into a holy war: your distro is garbage, my distro is the chosen one, and anyone using that browser is clearly an idiot. A VPN? Wrong brand, wrong country, wrong encryption. You’re not a “real” privacy advocate unless you run your own DNS resolver in a nuclear bunker under the Alps.

The irony is staggering. People who claim to fight for the same values — freedom, transparency, and protecting users from exploitation — end up slicing each other apart over details so minor they would make an NSA analyst laugh out loud. The goal is the same: make people less dependent on corporations, give them control over their data, and defend the very idea of digital autonomy. But instead of celebrating that shared cause, too many prefer to play the role of purity police.

This isn’t unique to the FOSS world, of course. Every movement with high ideals eventually breeds factions that care more about defending their personal corner than advancing the actual mission. Privacy and FOSS circles are just particularly good at it, maybe because the people inside care so deeply. When you’ve dedicated years of your life to running everything on open protocols, every little choice feels existential. Still, the tragedy remains: while the giants of Silicon Valley sell yet another billion user profiles to advertisers, we’re busy mocking each other’s choice of email client.

Imagine for a moment what would happen if all that energy were redirected. If instead of fighting about whether Signal is better than Session or if Debian is “bloated” compared to Arch, people actually worked together to make these tools more accessible, more user-friendly, more mainstream. The biggest barrier for new users isn’t whether AES-256 is configured just so — it’s whether they feel welcomed or judged the second they ask a question.

FOSS and privacy don’t need purity tests. They need solidarity. Because whether you encrypt your life with Proton, Tails, or a tin can with a very long piece of string, the principle is the same: you’re trying to build a world where users aren’t cattle in a data farm. That should be enough common ground to unite us.

So here’s a radical thought: stop mocking each other. Stop treating different tools or approaches as betrayals of the holy cause. Celebrate every step, no matter how small, because every person who switches from corporate spyware to even the most modest open alternative is a win.

After all, the corporations we fight don’t waste time ridiculing each other. They just cash in. Maybe it’s time we learned a bit from that efficiency — minus the selling-out part.