Where do all the censored developers go? | Hacker News Reader

Where do all the censored developers go?

danielpocock.com

83 pointsyasp23 comments

What if a lot of this culture war stuff is happening in the US because of geographic clustering? I'm not sure why a couple hundred twitter-addicted people from Portland/Seattle/SF get to pontificate all the time about who or what should be allowed in 'tech', which is a giant global industry...

I appreciate the 'Awokening' in American political culture to some extent but I've never really been comfortable with stances like, "by including X person, you are excluding me." There's some creepiness to it I can't quite put my finger on. Also, the more you take this to an extreme and purge everyone who isn’t fully aligned with your thoughts and values, you’re just going to end up in a very insular group that isn’t reflective of how things work in the outside world.

> What if a lot of this culture war stuff is happening in the US because of geographic clustering?

FWIW, it seems like a lot of the people named in the current Debian drama are in Cambridge (the original one).

> very insular group that isn’t reflective of how things work in the outside world

Yes, that Cambridge.

American politics is incredibly toxic and counter productive. Why can't people keep politics and productive work separate. This goes for both sides, people need to stop sharing political rants in spaces dedicated for work and people need to stop digging in to contributors social media pages to find something bad.

>Why can't people keep politics and productive work separate.

They do. Most of the toxic political bullshit happens when you have a large enough group of people that don't have enough productive work to engage in.

Take any profitable bootstrapped company behind a product with an actual user base and the toxicity levels drop exponentially.

That said, in the current investment climate, toxic bullshit unfortunately pays more than productive work.

It's really remarkable how the tone of certain types of discussion shift depending on the time of day, and what timezone is awake or asleep. The Europe crowd has a very different tenor than the East Coast crowd, and then the West Coast crew is something else entirely.

The journey to software freedom has been bogged down for too long by people that drive away large chunks of potential developers & users[1].

If you want to be caustic, we won't stop you, but you can't come into community events like LinuxFest Northwest, SeaGL & such, shit on people there who are writing libre software, and expect us to invite you to come back.

1 - https://www.networkworld.com/article/2988850/linux-kernel-de...

I thought the idea was to keep software free, not attract as many people as you possibly can

That is my point, AGPLv3 is rarely used due to the antics of certain free software advocates.

Ethically, there is a huge swath of developers that aligns with writing code under libre licenses, but gets turned off when they see our community filled with people that lash out at them needlessly.

I personally have never considered anything other than the license text when choosing a license, and from my experience, anyone I've worked with chooses MIT because it makes open-sourcing easier. Never have I seen anyone in the wild discuss FSF as a reason for not choosing any GPL-class license, but maybe I'm hanging around the wrong places.

AGPL is rarely used because it is incredibly restrictive and prevents sharing code with other open source projects. The world only has room for one restrictive license and GPL has taken that spot.

For those of us sitting here reading this and thinking it sounds like the ramblings of a madman writing on a public bathroom wall, can someone explain what this is about?

I clicked some links and ended up reading [1], and if anything, i understand even less than when i started. Mollamby.

EDIT: And the author has another piece featuring none other than Debian Grand Champion of Drama, Ian Jackson! [2]

[1] https://danielpocock.com/assets/mollamby.pdf

[2] https://danielpocock.com/codes-of-conduct-and-hypocrisy/

That's just what it is: some guy channeling some injury to his ego into an attack on institutions and people he is envious of, masquerading as some sort of heroic political fight.

Plus, of course, a sympathetic slice of very online personae who relentlessly complain about "identity politics" and can-we-focus-on-technology-please (case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21307367) but consider this guy some sort of model for even-keeled disinterested rationalism.

Catch 22 just happened.

This was just "censored" by being flagged itself. Made me laugh.

Why is that a catch 22?

Damned if its shared, damned if it isn't.

In other words, there is no course of action for discourse (no discourse if it isn't shared, banned if it is shared).

This may be a false dichotomy? Perhaps it could be shared elsewhere? But where else (other than here) is there such a concentration of people in tech?

At the risk of talking about fight club, the weekly culture war thread on /r/TheMotte is where I would post something like this, if I wanted discussion by smart people without the risk of it getting deleted.

This post was flagged while I was writing a comment. I had to "vouch" for it to get it unflagged -- I didn't see anything wrong with it.

We've tried free speech, and it always turns into a cesspit of spam and abuse and illegal activity. Censorship is inevitable. That's not the question. The only questions are: who? whom?

The writer linked here rants and raves, and gets censored for ranting and raving. I might have had a modicum of concern if he had something meaningful to say.

Whenever grassroots level organizations (genuine and pseudo), become successful, corporate organisations get their agents to work their way in to take it over eventually.

Others get involved with the intention of taking over and selling out to corporations.

This is what is happening. It is nothing new.

When I posted this comment just 52 minutes ago. This article was no 3 on hackernews. It is disappeared so fast I can't believe it.

I have scrolled to page 10 and it still nowhere to be found. amazing

Calling this a 'lynching' is remarkably offensive and tone deaf. People focus on the latest remarks RMS made and pretend that was his only offense, while ignoring the years of egregious behavior and anecdotes others have brought up about him.

Not only that, he has a habit of frequently equating minor acts performed as part of free software politics to terrible crimes perpetuated by ceaucescu , Iran, etc

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