Comment by yttrium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yttrium | Hacker News Reader

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You're right - you can't ensure that they won't use your work for bad, that's true. You can try to lessen the impact by making sure they're not part of your organization or community. Excluding them does help me, because I don't have to put up with someone who is actively trying to make my life worse.

I think if you manage an open source project you should feel comfortable taking a stand on contributors who have/advocate for actively discriminatory positions. Just because you organize a community project that may be used by people you fundamentally disagree with doesn't mean you have to check your sense of morality at the door.

If someone submitted a PR to my project who held openly racist positions, I would deny the PR. No amount of genius or technical merit makes up for that.

One could come up with a hypothetical of an open source project that is important enough to require any help it can get, and also somehow obscure enough that only a handful of developers are working on it. Nonetheless, I don't really think most open source projects (or even for-profit projects) fall into that category. At the point where work becomes so important that you need to compromise other parts of your character in order to finish it there are probably bigger things to worry about.

> If someone submitted a PR to my project who held openly racist positions, I would deny the PR. No amount of genius or technical merit makes up for that.

In contrast, I, and many other people, would evaluate it on its technical merits and merge it if it was good. It's just code; it inherits no sin from its writer.

But you discriminate against code--not even a person--based on your personal dislike of its writer. Isn't that bigoted?

Not at all - I don't read Orson Scott Card anymore, because he's a bigot. That is a decision that doesn't touch upon whether or not his books are any good. When it comes to code, there's no piece of code or software product that can't be replaced by someone who behaves morally.

Ultimately, you can't, and shouldn't decouple someone's work from the person themselves. We ought to feel ashamed when we support someone who's beliefs and actions are reprehensible.

> Ultimately, you can't, and shouldn't decouple someone's work from the person themselves.

This is a bizarre and grossly impractical idea. Do you interrogate everyone who sells you anything? Who prepares and serves your food at a restaurant? Who delivers your packages? If you don't, you are being a hypocrite. And if we all did that, society and economy would grind to a halt. You are truly an extremist and a totalitarian.

> We ought to feel ashamed when we support someone who's beliefs and actions are reprehensible.

By that logic, I would feel ashamed to support you. Nevertheless, I would accept your code if it were well-written, because I am tolerant of views differing from my own.

Of course not, because that's grossly impractical. There are easy ways of dealing with that - You can first work with the assumption that most people are fundamentally good human beings who don't carry hatred or bigotry around in their heart. This is not too much of a stretch. Additionally, you can try and have conversations with those who are wrong in their beliefs. This is not always successful, but it's a reasonable thing to do.

The thing is, to a large degree society and economy do already do this. If you're outed as a sexist, or a racist, you lose your job. We mostly operate under the assumption that people are not those things. We're just currently in the phase where we're defining additional boundaries to what is and is not acceptable in the workplace.

After all, everyone who starts a development job nowadays does several things that are akin to what you're describing: You voluntarily confirm that you will not harass or discriminate, and when you break those rules you get kicked out.

Your comment does not address mine.

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