Drupal project imploding, core developers ejected for S&M hobbies | Hacker News Reader

Drupal project imploding, core developers ejected for S&M hobbies

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68 pointsdgtlmoon33 comments

I'm sorry, but how is this different than discriminating based on sexual preference (being gay)? This sort of stuff has no place in a business setting. Unfortunately this is the world we live in; everybody is outraged over something and claiming to be open and inclusive, as long as it prescribes to their own beliefs.

Where are the TechCrunch social justice warriors (Megan Rose Dickey) about this?

>how is this different that discriminating based on sexual preference (being gay)?

Garfield made that exact analogy in his reply (https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing).

It's no different, except that people who claim to be open and tolerant never really are. They are just tolerant of one or the other outgroup to the degree that that outgroup is socially acceptable.

I think the reason this happens is that people have no principles reason for tolerating other people. It just "feels right" for certain groups and wrong for others. So who gets tolerated trails changes in social acceptability.

>I'm sorry, but how is this different than discriminating based on sexual preference (being gay)?

Thats assuming he was ejected due to preferences. Buytaert said that Larry ommitted information from his reply, and that there was more going on. So, we don't even know what the exact cause was other than supposedly Larry actually believes that women are subservient to men. Not just sexually, but in life in general.

I can perfectly see how that makes a person who has to interact with a diverse community problematic. But I also understand that you should be judged upon what you have done, not about what you think, and none of the posts or responses qualify that in any way shape or form. So, either something bigger happened that the org is hiding for some protective purpose (either for Larry, or themselves, or both), or as Larry said, he is the result of a smear campaign.

At least one TechCrunch writer is on Garfield's side:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/26/sex-and-gor-and-open-sourc...

From what I've read they were offended at his views on women. Views that never seemed to be expressed in his professional life.

Seems very wrong to me. We don't need thought police. He should be judged on his professional actions not private beliefs.

He has beliefs from gorean philosophy, that are something along the lines of women submitting to men. While many wouldn't agree with him, those same views are present in many religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and many others. If he managed to work with women without any problems why was he kicked off the project?

The responses allude to something they refuse to disclose, but it all seems very wrong to me. People should be free to believe what they want.

If a gay guy was ejected for being into S&M, people would be screaming.

It's surprising that anybody cares at this point. "50 Shades Darker" just finished its run. SF has had Bondage a Go Go for over 20 years now.

The Gor thing is a joke at this late date. It's mostly something people do in Second Life now. It was cool in maybe 1975, when Norman's first books were out. He's still writing those books, and they sell to women as romances.

(An amusing note on political correctness: the State Department has some documents on line for their staff returning to the US and re-integrating into American society. One of the items covered is how political correctness has changed in the last few years. If you've been working in Ankara or Kuala Lumpur for the last few years, you may have missed the whole gay marriage thing.)

I don't agree with the decision. But, he was not ejected for S&M hobbies. He was ejected because he was perceived to believe that women are subservient to men (evidently this was part of some of his online writing).

Here's a timeline of blog posts:

1. Larry's (the ejectee) initial blog post: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing

2. Dries' (founder of Drupal) following blog post: http://buytaert.net/living-our-values

3. Statement from the Drupal Association's Exec Director: https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/a-statement-from-the...

4. Another blog post from Larry where he clears up misconceptions and answers questions: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-part-2

More Info:

* Drupal community discussion on /r/Drupal: https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/60y9mq/larry_garfie...

* A great non-partial tldr; blogpost from Drupal developer Mike Ryan: http://virtuoso-performance.com/blog/mikeryan/thoughts-drupa...

Gor is a fiction community, as others had said before the Bible and other fiction books have similar views on women. Gor as all bdsm is a game, it is a play, an act between consenting adults.

Garfield has never (to our current knowledge) acted in real life upon the things said in the context of Gor.

Ugh, the Drupal community strikes again. I have been working with Drupal for roughly 10 years, and outside of an initial flurry of commits rarely engage with that cesspit of a "community". I have the misfortune to have to do a significant amount of work with Drupal, which was badly designed and written, then badly redesigned and re-written, with the same pattern repeating twice more. There are many nice and helpful people in the community, but the majority of those in a leadership position are nasty little fascists hell bent on preserving their position of power.

I once got a salescall from Aqcuia, they tried to enroll me in some partner program or something. The salesguy got chatting with me, I explain in rough outlines how we train up our developers to become Drupal devs, this being the reason I wasn't really interested in their training program. Shortly thereafter, they launched a "Drupal Academy" or some ame, which was pretty much word for word what I told the lousy slimeball I was talking with on the phone.

I have no respect for these people, and this is just another unsurprising demonstration of what they are like.

Editorialized headline? The actual one is "Prominent Drupal, PHP Developer Kicked From the Drupal Project Over Unconventional Sex Life"

I'm confused. What was the issue for his firing? Was it because his sex life went public and thus gave the project a bad view?

Kind of if someone abuses legal some legal substance that is frowned upon (I couldn't think of such a substance, let's pretend it exists) and gets ejected when it gets out to the public because they now associate a frowned-on behavior with the project.

Was the issue just that he enjoyed sexual dominance?

Or even a mix of both? I feel like I'm missing something because I don't even understand the situation.

The Techcrunch story posted is better. It's linked in another comment here.

Edit: Sorry I meant the Inc. story.

"Garfield's accusers ... insist that Gor enthusiasts sincerely believe in the misogynistic philosophy of gender presented in the books. They point to Garfield's history of professing less-than-PC opinions about race and gender."

> They point to Garfield's history of professing less-than-PC opinions about race and gender.

What I don't understand is that if this is the case, why did it go unnoticed until someone specifically went to dig into Garfield's history?

I don't know where he has talked about race, maybe the master/slave comment is the one referred to but if you follow those links in the article to the actual posts he made you can see that what he wrote isn't that controversial, he's just not fully supporting changing the master/slave terminology or adding more options to the gender field of a user profile. The author of the article described it as "not agreeing with the SJW party line".

Drupal developer here. I've worked on core, maintain many contrib modules, etc. and have worked with Larry IRL on Drupally stuff. I really don't understand what this quote is talking about if they aren't specifically pointing at his history. He's never been less than pleasant and considerate of others in my IRL interactions with him. Also, from his post:

> Second: I've been involved in the Gorean community since 2002. I've been involved in Drupal since 2005. It took until late 2016 for anyone to realize I was in both. Moreover, from what I understand from the CWG the first "leak" was someone on that alt-lifestyle private forum who found my account there, screenshotted it, and started passing it around.

(source: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-part-2)

Reminder that Codes of Conduct are mostly feel-good and not legally binding, and there is a big asterisk on all of them; * Unless we feel differently

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13972307 which has more neutral reporting

The Code of Conduct strikes again.

Anyone here use drupal? I'm only vaguely aware of it. What does this mean for the project? I know my university uses it for their entire website.

Drupal is a fairly popular CMS. As for what this means for the project, nothing good, but probably nothing serious either. They've lost of of their major contributors, and they've gained a lot of bad press, but it's still a huge project with a major corporate backer. The long run trajectory probably hasn't changed too much.

(Note: Drupal is essentially controlled by Acquia, and it was Acquia's CTO who decided to purge Garfield.)

whitehouse.gov was a Drupal site for a time. Not sure if it still is.

<edit> yep, builtwith says it still is.

I believe Drupal seems to be the official of CMS of Stanford.edu and many of its departments' sites [0]. And back in the day, Drupal's adoption by President Obama's first CTO was noteworthy [1]. I don't think Drupal made huge inroads in the rest of the federal government, but the White House Github page shows that they still use and maintain Drupal module and theme code: https://github.com/whitehouse

[0] https://drupalcamp.stanford.edu/

[1] https://www.drupal.org/node/613892

It means the steady downward trend it's been on for the last 7-8 years is about to accelerate. PHP CMSes fill a niche of bespoke software deployments made irrelevant by more standardized collaboration and publishing tools with better usability.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=drupal

>It means the steady downward trend it's been on for the last 7-8 years is about to accelerate.

I don't see this downward spiral trend you're talking about. Drupal 8 is one of the most dynamic and thought out CMS's available. Your statement would fit Wordpress better, and even that would still be wrong because its so widely used.

> I don't see this downward spiral trend you're talking about.

He literally posted a graph showing interest over time in Drupal has steadily been declining.

> Drupal 8 is one of the most dynamic and thought out CMS's available.

Now you sound like a press release.

The common refrain in recent years has been that Drupal has been going for the enterprise instead of every single blogger like it used to. That could decrease search volume while still even growing in that segment.

Still, having both would obviously be better if somewhat difficult. Drupal hasn't completely given up on that idea but the trend has definitely been towards more about serving developers than a layperson who wants to set up a small website.

That's not to say everything necessarily is fine since Drupal 8's adoption has been slower than for previous versions but it looks like it may be finally picking up. The recent announcement that major Drupal versions will no longer be big backwards-compatibility breaks like they've been up until this point is something that could really help it too.

>He literally posted a graph showing interest over time in Drupal has steadily been declining.

They posted google trends. If software lived and breathed by how it was googled, there wouldn't be many options.

>Now you sound like a press release.

Making generalizations like 'this entire framework is going down' is a better press release.

It's used quite a bit for larger sites (universities, government agencies, large corporations, etc).

Link should be to the original source, https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/26/sex-and-gor-and-open-sourc...

The original source would be this link: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing

Followed by this by Dries Buytaert, Drupal BDFL: http://buytaert.net/living-our-values

And then there was this other response from Larry: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-part-2

And besides techcrunch, there was this other piece by inc.com: http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/drupal-larry-garfield-gor.html

Core developers? Plural?

Is it too soon to nickname this scandal Prudal?

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