Sex and Gor and open source | Hacker News Reader

Sex and Gor and open source

techcrunch.com

62 pointshealsdata38 comments

I spent a good portion of my early career working with Drupal on large-scale media sites and got to know some folks central to the movement. I liked almost everyone I met, including Dries, but after starting my own agency, left the platform and the community. Not because of individual conflicts, but because I concluded that I did not want my agency to orbit Acquia. This is what happens in commercially mature open source communities, and a huge source of mundane conflict. The founder and BDFL of the movement becomes the founder and BDFL of a venture funded, IPO-bound startup, and incentives start to become crossed. Or in the case this case, incentives become entirely perverted.

So I have a darker take on this: Dries banned Crell as a face-value reason to strip a competitor of a seat at the core contributor table. Crell works for Platform.sh, a challenger to Acquia's main hosting platform product. Drupal has lots of very senior architectural voices already, so losing Crell isn't going to jeopardize the platform, and it's more convenient for Acquia for them to work in the same place.

According to Crell's post about this [https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing], the Drupal Association apparently attempted to apply their code of conduct and found repeatedly that Crell had done nothing wrong. But then Dries decided to ban Crell with little fanfare. Hard to believe that Dries cares that much about Crell's sex life. Easy to believe that he's become a cutthroat opportunist who would use the Code of Conduct to optimize Acquia's outcomes. What would have happened if Crell had worked for Acquia?

That's the thing about a BDFL. Give him enough VC money and ultimately all that's left is a giant D.

Thumbs up. Acquia has too influence on Drupal. This is exactly why I stuck with Drupal 7 for my side projects, without any plans to migrate to Drupal 8.

There's an appearance of conflict of interest, and you are not the only one to make this accusation. But this is a red herring.

It was also brought up on the related Reddit thread. Someone surmised this might be "motivated by the direct competition."

To which rszrama (Ryan Szarma) said "As a co-founder of Platform.sh, I know with absolute certainty this is not the case."

Assuming Ryan knows more than both of us, and he would be in a position to gain from making such a claim -- it's important to note he emphatically said NO.

https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/60y9mq/larry_garfie...

I'm with you 100% here, yeah, and I agree entirely with the points made here [https://subfictional.com/thoughts-on-recent-drupal-governanc...]. But I don't think Dries has the credibility to act in the community's best interest and also in the best interest of Acquia. As an officer of Acquia he has a fiduciary responsibility; his responsibility to Drupal is purely ethical.

I'd argue that Ryan can't really gain from making a claim that Dries is trying to damage his business, because then he's admitting that his business has been damaged without any real recourse. But I do agree that he knows plenty that we don't!

My thesis is not that Crell's behavior was acceptable. I know I don't have the standing to opine on that. My thesis is that Dries isn't accountable for this conflict of interest and the demands of running a venture-backed startup are largely at odds with the demands of running a community worthy of its code of conduct.

Of course, Dries is not the only BDFL with this kind of a conflict of interest. Many of us who have a career on the Internet live in the shade of one tree or another...

I noticed that your company does develop on WordPress. Don't you think it has the same issue just as much if not more since Automattic seems to have even more control over the platform than Acquia?

I'm not at all surprised by this. I'm not a BDSM enthusiast, but in my personal life I wear clothes and have body mods that while legal and socially acceptable in my country, many Westerners find outrageous and deeply offensive. I have always complied with the standards and dress code of any business event I attend. It's simply what I wear in my personal time.

It's been a huge obstacle to getting recognition when dealing with Western tech media. Even when I don't appear at all with the project, simply the off-camera creator's appearance being offensive has been sufficient excuse for exclusion. I have no doubt that BDSM enthusiasts, or Furries, or many others face similar issues even when they check all aspects of their lifestyle at the door and it has no bearing on their projects.

As part of a knee-jerk reaction to community problems with sexism, parts of tech are now deeply, deeply conservative and judgmental about anything even vaguely sexual.

You can very easily have permanent damage done to your career prospects by appearing or acting in some way different from what they feel is the norm. Once that's done, there's no appeasement or washing away the stain- you might as well embrace your eccentricity and resign yourself to whatever fringe niche will have you.

This article is written from one side of a complicated conflict.

It's the perspective of the ousted Drupal member that his beliefs are entirely packaged up in the BDSM subculture that he takes part in, and that to have a problem with his beliefs is to persecute his BDSM subculture.

It's the perspective of the other Drupal members who ousted him that his beliefs are not in fact cabined in that subculture, but in fact bleed out of it into his interactions with the broader world. They cite evidence.

Since the beliefs that we're talking about could be broadly and probably inaccurately but by how much I don't know described as "females are subhuman", it's the perspective of the Drupal members who did the ousting that those beliefs matter very much to the project.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know that this TechCrunch article basically defined away the controversy. That doesn't help anyone make sense of it. I'm happy letting the Drupal community work this stuff out for themselves though, and also flagged this story, which is, after all, really just drama.

Community governance in a world where open source is increasing and privacy decreasing will necessarily require drama as long as emotions are involved.

The article raises questions in the controversy worth exploring in countless open source projects.

I didn't encounter evidence cited by the ousting members in the article. Can you link to your sources?

You didn't encounter pretty much any of the other side in that article, which is not an accurate summary of the controversy. I'm not sure this article makes a good starting point for discussing this issue, and I'm not sure the issue itself is really worth mining to find a good starting point.

In a way it looks very much like just the same issue that has come up before with people getting banned from tech conferences for example: Should the beliefs a person holds that are unrelated to the community in question be grounds for ostracizing him from said community. I don't really understand why you think that isn't an issue worth discussing.

I didn't say it wasn't an issue worth discussing. I said that the article we're commenting on is highly misleading. It would lead one to believe that the community is penalizing consensual sexual behavior, when in fact the concern has virtually nothing to do with his BDSM subculture.

I don't think the article is that one-sided. It also raises another issue which is that the total lack of transparency even to the person being prosecuted is problematic.

The comments from the DA side about this have been few and self-contradictory so that partially the reason the article is the way it is.

> It's the perspective of the other Drupal members who ousted him that his beliefs are not in fact cabined in that subculture, but in fact bleed out of it into his interactions with the broader world. They cite evidence.

I didn't see any evidence cited in Dries Buytaert's blog [1] that the ousted member's BDSM stuff affected how he interacted or behaved within the Drupal community. In particular, I didn't see anything cited that indicated they had any problem at all with him until they found out that he was a member of that BDSM community. Did I overlook some evidence?

[1] http://buytaert.net/living-our-values

My concern is that Drupal community leaders like Dries Buytaert have implied that there's more to this, but haven't actually presented any evidence (possibly for liability reasons). So there isn't really any way for the uninitiated to be sure.

Sad. I definitely agree with the article's "yes (no), hell no, hell no" answers. But I wonder how many people would answer the same here as with Brendan Eich being forced to resign or Curtis Yarvin being dis-invited from LambdaConf.

Edit to be more clear: I can understand either position as long as it applies consistently. I also think I may have pattern matched this incorrectly as "person unfairly ostracized for his personal sexual preferences", when perhaps the part that will get play in the tech community is "woman hating white male", in which case this will fit right in with Eich and Yarvin.

Yarvin was not disinvited from LambdaConf. LambdaConf was boycotted because Yarvin presented there.

(To your edit: so far as I know, the issue with Yarvin has more to do with outspoken racism than with gender equity).

Disinvited from strangeloop I think? It's hard to keep track of it all.

Right, disinvited from strangeloop. When he was invited to speak at LambdaConf, pressure was brought to bear to get him disinvited. When that didn't work, people instead brought pressure against LambdaConf's sponsors, speakers, and attendees, in an effort to get LambdaConf cancelled.

That's a lurid way to describe people boycotting (pretty successfully) a conference.

Which claim are you objecting to? That people attempted to get him disinvited? That people pushed LambdaConf's sponsors to pull out? That people pushed LambdaConf's speakers to pull out? That people encouraged LambdaConf's attendees to switch to MoonConf? Calling that "attempting to get LambdaConf cancelled" doesn't seem particularly lurid, especially not compared to things like "You chose to die on this hill."

Again, all you're doing is rattling off a description of a boycott.

Right, which is why I'm confused that you objected to it.

I have exactly the same feeling about the resignation of Brendan Eich. Mozilla has been a mindless for-profit business as long as I remember, and I likely older than the median here.

The difference is that many of us in the Drupal community have known Crell for years and not only has he done a stellar job of keeping these things separate, but also that he is very much a model for an ideal member of the community. He is always welcoming to others and of all the drama I have seen in the community, he is never part of it. He just seems like an honestly good person that I've known for over 6 years and seen regularly. Acquia should be giving him a medal for making "their" product with probably none of their venture capital money.

At first I thought this article would be linkbaity-gossip about a tech individual's private matters. However I think it raises a good point:

Generally our attitude toward different sexual preferences (previously labeled 'deviant') is that it is illegal and wrong to use them to hold back somebody's career. However fetishism thus far hasn't been approached the same way as homosexuality, nor has the debate even begun in any public fashion.

I think this debate will have to happen and it's very nuanced.

It's not illegal to use homosexuality to "hold back somebody's career" in most jurisdictions, though. Only just enough jurisdictions for multinational corporations to set policies about it.

Disclaimer : i am a dom/top/whatever you want to call it in my private life.

Even more interestingly, the majority of the fetish/BDSM community is heavily feminist and open minded. (There are always grey nuance and complex case but still) It is a community that is deeply rooted into consent and people that submit making a conscious and informed decision.

You tend to meet people that accept someone else opinion or lifestyle, that are team player and adapt to others, more than proselyts or zealots.

Interestingly, the legal implications are complex, and most of the time, in the US, would not support the lifestyle that much. Consensual non-consent or violence is a strange place legally.

But from the public information so far, it seems hard to believe that this was about proselytising or promoting anything.

Just a witch hunt. Which, to be honest, do not surprise me.

I am semi public about my personal involvement since 50 Shades, because i accept the problem i could get in exchange of informing people that need it (50 shades is hated in a lot of the community for good reasons) It is not easy and you get a lot of anxious/uneasy look.

To be clear: the claim here --- not that you'd know it from the article --- is that proselytizing was in fact an issue.

Well proselytising what ? Because once again, the fact he plays as a Gorean master does not mean he believes women to be subhuman.

This tends to be the problem with most of these things. But in any case we really lack information here.

Regardless what he believes, whether it is in line with the mainstream western values or not, it hurts the inclusion and tolerance to expel members based on that. One's taste, political views (regardless how extreme it is) should not be a subject of investigation in a professional community.

It wasn't an issue in Dries' article, either.

> More generally, is it OK for an open-source community to ban/ostracize a member purely because their “belief system” — perhaps better described as a complicated fantasy milieu in which they happen to spend their personal time — was doxxed? [hell no]

It's interesting to compare this with the TechCrunch article written after Brendan Eich was ousted for his “belief system”: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mo...

http://www2.rdrop.com/users/wyvern//data/

The Techcrunch article has a broken link to Dries' blog post: http://buytaert.net/living-our-values

The Techcrunch article focuses too much on BDSM in general. If I understand correctly, the problem here is on the specific aspect of viewing women as inferior and the fact that this contributor wields significant influence in a community where (like many free software communities) gender is a problem.

This isn't very different than being anti-gay and being the lead of a big free software project. Some people can pretend that their personal opinions have no impact on their work, but that's very rarely the case. If there was more diversity, this would probably be less of an issue.

It is both notable and unsurprising that the Drupal code of conduct [1] makes zero mention of any of the topics in this debate. Nothing about sexuality, nothing about feminism, or equality, ... Yet every discussion about this immediately turns to gender politics. I think this shows the duplicitous nature of COCs: no matter what the letter says, the intent, as understood by nearly everyone, is to apply it to filter by reigning morality, under the threat of public punishment.

When it comes to Drupal, the only gender problem it has is the people who keep manufacturing major incidents out of minor slights, even when the people involved don't mind. Case in point, the Drupal Association member who resigned because he called his friend a pussy, who in turn didn't mind it.

It is disingenuous to uphold a code of respect, diversity and inclusion while simultaneously expecting everyone to conform to the wishes of the most easily offended. More so to act like the only way to be respectful to women is to treat them like fragile flowers. Some people prefer traditional gender roles, in or outside the bedroom, and some are women.

The last thing these inclusion activists want is diversity, it would expose them as the sheltered and privileged upper class they are.

[1] https://www.drupal.org/dcoc

> Nothing about sexuality, nothing about feminism, or equality, [...]

From the DCOC: "The Drupal community and its members treat one another with respect."

> When it comes to Drupal, the only gender problem it has is the people who keep manufacturing major incidents out of minor slights [...]

I don't know for Drupal, but gender is an issue in most computer-science related fields, I doubt that Drupal is immune to this. Free Software has a lower % of women involved than computer science in general. In any case, until there is near parity, there is a gender problem.

I agree that 'we' are pretty bad at handling incidents. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. There's been an evolution in the last 10 years, but clearly more work to be done.

Speaking as a Drupalista, I think we are better than the norm in the tech world. I don't think there's been a recent survey but we wre 15-20% women about 4 or 5 years ago. I don't think the numbers have dropped, but that's only based on personal anecdote.

> “The Drupal community and its members treat one another with respect.”

Frankly, the DCOC is vague. If we want to kick out people with a reference to the DCOC, we have to define with mathematical precision what is “respect”, “poor manners”, “people outside the Drupal project”.

> I don't know for Drupal, but gender is an issue in most computer-science related fields, I doubt that Drupal is immune to this. Free Software has a lower % of women involved than computer science in general. In any case, until there is near parity, there is a gender problem.

You can always find an aspect which is underrepresented. Gender, ethnicity, solved tickets, religion, eye colour… Can we just focus on getting things done and being a welcoming toward everyone who would like to donate free time until that person does not restrict others to do so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com