Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
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Tone-policing, cancel culture, and identity politics are a real problem though, and it seems like they're getting out of hand. This is happening everywhere though - it's not unique to the open source world at all.
I don't know what the right solution is.
ESR and RMS (who recently got removed from the FSF) helped create the open-source movement that we have today. And they both were instrumental popularizing the hacker counter-culture that dominated Linux during its rise to prominence.
Would I like them as people? Maybe. Probably not. I don't know. It seems wrong to marginalize them and cast them aside though, even if they're socially awkward or say the wrong thing sometimes.
Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world.
> Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with.
I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM".
I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels.
We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too.
The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking.
That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.
> If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.
At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source:
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/
Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back.
FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.
Let's face it, when the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Microsoft, the open source movement has very little to do with RMS' ideals.
Either way, to your statement about "the movement", I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot of what passes for hacker culture today is quite different from where those two hail from. How much overlap is there between the Tao of Programming and modern web development, for example?
Whether that's good, bad, or just a value-neutral observation is pretty much up to the beholder.
ESR talked up his role and theories about how open source worked, but his writing was the main thing that he contributed. His attempts at contributing actual code did not have nearly the same impact. Nor has his description of how open source worked actually had the same impact.
Even the OSI definition owes more to Ian Murdock (the "ian" in "debian") than it does to ESR.
However if RMS and Brian Fox had not single-handedly set about reimplementing the Unix toolsystem back in the mid-1980s, the world would today be different.
As much as RMS annoyed people by saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux, he had a point. Linus contributed the kernel, but most of what people called Linux at the time was actually written by the FSF.
Language is power and can greatly influence and define what masses of people think about their world view and their experience. Those who get to define which language is "appropriate" and which is not have a certain power to take as they please. "Tone-policing", "cancel culture", and "identity politics" aren't unique in the sense that they are designed to seize power, as this is a tale as old as time. It's a strategy that proponents believe will help their in-group and followers acquire and maintain power over cultural resources.
I'm not saying this example is good, bad, or neutral - just what it is: Using language to project influence and power and take the cultural resources you want.
A code of conduct, AIUI, has two main effects:
1. You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away. 2. If there is a dispute then there's a formal method of bringing up the argument - a feature request or BG report on the CoC. Or more practically, when writing the thing in the first place.
And on the subject of whether it's warranted, this article[3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_...
[3]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...
If everything everybody ever proposed was only used in good faith, we'd be living in Utopia.
> You have written, formalised proof you can link to that e.g. you're expected to use XYZ pronouns - no tedious offtopic argument that drives people away.
They are usually way too vague to do that. "Be kind" hangs on who decides what is and isn't kind. It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement.
Indeed. I'm quite certain, for example, that if someone called ESR a toxic lunatic, no code of conduct violation would be found.
All true. In other news guns don't kill people, people kill people. The gun can be used in either way.
CoC's are like guns in that they can be lethal when deployed. That sounds great to many people: we final have a sure fire way of expelling arsehole's from our group.
Unfortunately the CoC's come with an inbuilt defect: they all boil down to "be intolerant of intolerance". That creates wonderful opportunity for attackers, because if they can goad someone in the project to being intolerant towards them they can get the project to shoot itself with it's on weapon.
The amazing thing I've never seen a instance where a CoC has been used in anger by a project where hasn't also been used in this way against long standing members of the project. Even worse, the long standing members use it against each other! Introducing a CoC seems to have the same destabilising effect as introducing a new weapon: people rush to use it in what looks to be a pre-emptive strike as soon as some dispute comes around. Maybe that's in an attempt to take out others before they use it against them.
It's so predicable it's extraordinary. There must be something deep within the human psyche priming us to seek out weaknesses like this in "enemy groups", along with the inbuilt knowledge of how to it.
My initial reaction was to compare your sentiment to nation states and consider it in its extreme to be a justification for despotic behavior, though your comment tries to rule that out. After further consideration I think the OpenBSD example is more illustrative and a more constructive reply. Outside of licensing wars which sometimes happen, there is not always a need to be the "original" fork.
I think maybe part of the problem across the board is a tendency to use analogous thinking to 'raise the stakes' of relatively minor matters by comparing them to very serious matters. It's important to keep ourselves grounded and remember that we're discussing programs, not pogroms.
Ah, but they can't do this freely and effortlessly if they've been labeled as Persona Non Grata in the license by the previous maintainer. (See, it's genius! This is such a great idea, I can't possibly tell what might go wrong with it. "Programs, not pogroms" indeed.)
Banning someone because they vehemently disagree with you? I mean, that's the only thing I can parse from their statement. It's basically saying, "I do not wish to discuss things with you, so you are banned".
The funny thing is, I don't think that's inherently wrong. In any group, I think you should be able to choose your friends. If you don't want to hang out with someone, then that sucks for that person, but lots of things in life suck. However, banning the co-founder because you no longer wish to talk to them is pretty much the definition of a power grab ;-)
While the moderators never stated their rationale, an unfortunate combination of off-list and on-list replies leaked one of ESR's blocked emails[1] although there were possibly others. Given the context of the discussion, ESR is not only deeply unprofessional here, but also making personal attacks against Coraline Ada Ehmke. Disagreement is OK, attacks are not.
And as Gil notes in that email, how ESR is promoting his cause is actually hurting and undermining open source, not rescuing it. I'd add that such attacks are even more unacceptable when they come from an ex-President or Cofounder.
If I had been the moderator to make that call, I'd even have considered banning ESR without any particular evidence. That guy isn't new to the scene but has a long history of troublesome behavior. Even his first message upon return did not provide anything new to the discussion, so there was no reason to believe that keeping him around would provide any value to anyone. When his messages were largely brushed off (because they contributed no novel points aside from BeInG wRiTtEn By ThE cOfOuNdEr) that only seemed to encourage him to get more extreme, thus running straight into a ban. If not after that message, surely after the next.
[1]: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
And the same adversary behind it as behind so many other similar bannings and near-bannings over the last few years. Does this person actually contribute anything _besides_ tone policing to the many communities they tone police?
It's beginning to feel like his characterization may well be defensible on the grounds of truthfulness.
If people are acting in good faith, I would expect at most something temporary.
This points at what I consider the real problem with CoCs: they're too vague and typically allow people to feel righteous while making truly toxic decisions. This stems from overly-broad language being adopted without an actual "litigation" (in the informal, community sense) of individual cases.
Failure to adhere to arbitrary vocabulary blacklists shows at least that you aren't just totally mindlessly executing directives, which is a bad thing to show powerful people, and in many cases, it betrays your true loyalties to "not-them", because if you really believed the "them" were noble and great, well, you'd be happy to learn that WordX is naughty and WordY is approved.
Look for this in a company near you. It's used frequently.
Is it any surprise that the hackers who built the open-source movement fail tests explicitly designed to fail anyone whose default mode is not just mindless complicity? These guys spent most of their lives slinging rocks at the multi-billion-dollar proprietary OS juggernauts and generally completely obliterated them. I think it's safe to expect that "complicity" isn't very high in their value system.
It feels like you constantly need to tip-toe around with every word to avoid the risk of offending someone. I'm much more bothered by people trying to police the world than someone who is rude or that disagrees with me.
In a properly functioning society, people need to be able to deal with beliefs they don't agree with and a certain amount of offensiveness. Sheltering people only makes them less able to function in society.
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-sp...
I grew up in a rather hard-core religious environment where shaming was a common tactic to enforce conformance. I have no desire whatsoever to return to that.
People expect a mechanism to first, punish the offending author (block, downvote, whatever), and then hide the offending content, and they refuse to engage on any platform that doesn't accommodate this. Not only that, but they often seem to try to destroy the platform for allowing the travesty of frank and honest discussion to take place.
There's a part of me that believes the restrictions of the physical world are really necessary for a productive dialogue. You can't stop anyone else from showing up, and the limits of dialogue are how far you can go before someone is throwing punches and you're both getting hauled off to jail. It seems to have a much better track record of producing acceptable middle-ground outcomes than "flag, block, ban".
The armor against true accusations is the same as it always has been: don't be a jerk. The armor against false accusations is very similar: don't be a jerk to people with whom you have a skewed power dynamic, as you may find your word against that of your accuser, and you may find yourself reliant on your accuser's peers to come to your defense.
This puts too much blame on the falsely accused.
of course once that bridge is crossed they can attribute the work to someone currently approved of and more deserving
Who is going to advocate for that now?
I don't think telling the truth, discussing divisive issues, and courtesy are mutually exclusive.
I don't think the people outraged over Stallman's comments are wrong. There are some issues that we, as a society, have not really figured out. A lot of this stuff have been a long time (centuries?) in coming. However, I don't think the rampage of the outrage machine is the way to go either. At some point, we're going to have to pick up the pieces.
The tyranny of structurelessness[0] strikes again.
All of the above are symptomatic (though sometimes known by different names) of movements whose members disclaim official, understood hierarchies of governance. Members who seem to repeatedly forget, century after century, that power abhors a vacuum, and end up forming increasingly concentric, cryptic, personality-driven, and paranoid structures of influence because whatever the movement's stated objectives may be, someone still has to do the often mundane networking chores necessary to maintain group cohesion.
These individuals then become natural nucleation sites for forms of power that have no direct relationship with the acknowledged objectives of the group.
Such power expressed through the arbitrary control of prevailing group narrative language (tone policing), gatekeeping of influence (cancel culture), and authority over defining the many subjective unspoken rules by which status is acquired and asserted within or with respect to the group (identity politics being an instance of this class that that is inherited by all groups with a degree of internal diversity sufficient to build multiple coalitions behind).
This is a bit of a wild theory, which I definitely can't prove, but I am tempted to blame part of it on "zero tolerance" schools.
Schools are meant to teach the material, but they're also meant to give students practice at working within a social framework. Being on time, speaking in turn, keeping track of assignments, relating to peers, etc.
People have a lot of opinions on that, but the point is, it's reality. Kids are definitely picking up from schools an idea of what is normal when it comes to how social groups work.
Before zero tolerance, when someone did something wrong, the normal way to handle it was to try to understand both sides, then exercise the discretion given to people in a position of authority, then make a judgment call that seemed fair, reasonable, and proportionate. But now the normal way to handle situations is to more or less unconditionally penalize the offender without any leeway being given.
So now we have a whole generation or so of people who grew up having that style of authority modeled for them. When it comes time for them to exercise authority, what are they going to do but what they learned by example?
If this wild theory is right, then a (long-term) answer is for schools to stop teaching our kids that this is how society should work.
Wasn't it noticed though? Paddling students fell out of favor decades ago, in no small part I suspect because people began to realize that hitting kids wasn't teaching kids how to resolve conflicts effectively.
The status quo before 'zero tolerance' was itself a radical departure from what came before it.
Administrators and teachers have very little leeway to ascertain circumstances, utilize context, or employ personal judgment. They feel obliged to follow the letter of the policy because they have no authority.
A little more "authoritarianism" -- trust that the authorities positioned to ascertain the facts will do so competently and shouldn't be trivially second-guessed -- would probably help a lot.
Talk to me.
Seriously, you can not talk about this topic without talking to me because you are talking about me anyways. (And no, ESR never reached out to me.)
I have been, by any measure, the most prolific code contributor to the Drupal project for many years, 2005-2012 at least, maybe a year or two more even.
I have been banned from the Drupal project for Code Of Conduct violations in 2016.
It shattered me. They have been right to do so.
Relevant blog posts:
https://medium.com/@chx/women-of-drupal-ive-failed-you-and-i... (I just updated this with an archive.org link to a post that is now absent from its original place.)
https://medium.com/@chx/a-note-from-an-open-source-lead-deve... this specifically deals with meritocracy and this post is the most important: you need to understand it's not about some abstract PC-ness it's about driving people away. Do read https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in... about how to formulate a message without this sort of language.
And now I am back with a much diminished role https://medium.com/@chx/here-we-go-again-not-quite-a9d52ad93... and life is good again.
Out of curiosity, how long did they ban you for and will they give you any 'parole hearings' for good behavior? Or is this a lifetime ban without possibility of parole? In most countries somebody convicted of murder might hope to one day be declared rehabilitated, but it's not clear to me what role rehabilitation plays in CoC enforcement.
at the time, this was never clearly stated but I believe the shared understanding was indefinite
> will they give you any 'parole hearings' for good behavior
noone even thought of that
> but it's not clear to me what role rehabilitation plays in CoC enforcement.
This is not as simple as sitting on the bench for a time and then you are back and yay.
I'd say the road to rehabilitation is rare. You do not get the banhammer for straying just once and so if you are hell bent on being so toxic that you need to be banned then bending out of that shape is probably quite rare. It took the entire #metoo movement (for me especially Susan Fowler's incredible Uber blog post, the Hungarian accusations I blogged about and the infamous Drupal one I alluded to in the blog post) to shake me badly enough to make it possible to re-investigate my entire world view on these topics. And then came the time when the CoC was introduced to Linux and the bro avalanche again provided me a unique opportunity to say "no. this is not right." and I spent an entire day on reddit trying to answer all this crap. I got lucky but as they say, luck is when preparedness meet opportunity and I am not sure others will have these opportunities.
If you haven't read Susan Fowler's Whistleblower book, do so now.
Neither are parole hearings. I wouldn't expect them to let you rejoin after a predetermined amount of time, but I would expect them to periodically reconsider the ban given the latest up to date evidence about your personality/character. If you came to understand the error in your ways and made demonstrable moves to improve the way you conduct yourself (it sounds like you have), surely that should be considered.
"We are now looking forward to Linus Torvalds to be shown the door from the Linux project. He has long steered it abusively and has even been identified on mass media publications as a verbally insulting jerk. Him being a white male, the epitome of exclusivity, is just the cherry on top."
That sure sounds like someone on a mission (also caring a lot about other people's business).
Also (as someone occasionally working with Drupal 8) I found it interesting that commenting on the routing/menu system was one of the reasons that got you kicked out. Although I could not find any of the alleged "comments ... aimed at" Larry Garfield. On a side note this was obviously before Garfield himself was removed from the Drupal community about a year later due to violation of the code of conduct.
> Due to repeated Code Of Conduct violations two years ago I was banned from Drupal. This story is known and frankly, not worth a damn discussing it again. It’s only a background.
Second, let me state this extremely clearly and forcefully: it was better for the community and at the end of the day, for myself, to ban me at the end of 2016. It is absolutely pointless and a fruitless waste of time trying to dissect the specifics leading up to that (especially for people who were not part of the community and can't remember how it was -- and frankly, why should anyone remember? Almost all of this is 5+ years ago.). And despite it gave me an opportunity to grow as a person, it is still a wound that hurts prying into so I respectfully ask not to.
and
> We are now looking forward to Linus Torvalds to be shown the door from the Linux project
This was a joke. Nonetheless, Linus was seen industry wide as a jerk (again check https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2018/a-case-study-in... ) and a few months after that blog post, Linus stepped away for a month and a CoC was established -- how effective that all was, well, https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/6/13/1892 and for the consequences of such behavior see https://lwn.net/ml/linux-fsdevel/20200217001153.GE10776@drea...
That makes it worse. Some people's "jokes" are allowed, some are punished by censoring and expulsion. Selective enforcement is a central part of the criticism toward CoCs.
Really, come now, I have grown up behind the Iron Curtain, do you think I don't know what censorship is?
Having NO "bright-line" CoC whatsoever is preferable by far to having one which makes a project utterly unmanageable in the face of bad actors. This is not rocket surgery; it's simply astounding to me that some people can simply fail to see these problems when they are so clearly apparent to everyone else.
> Having NO "bright-line" CoC whatsoever is preferable by far to having one which makes a project utterly unmanageable in the face of bad actors.
The only bad actors here are people spouting nonsense like this. It doesn't happen. Show me the open source project that because unmanageable because they enforced their CoC.
Exactly. You state that reporting a bug/potential feature, or issuing a pull request, are inherently "confrontational" processes, but this is far from the truth in well-managed projects. And to the extent that it has become so, it's precisely because of procedural roadblocks like CoC's. CoC's make it so project maintainers can no longer use effective moral suasion to require of all contributors to be less confrontational and keep professionalism and the goodness of the project as their shared, common goals.
Their hands are tied; they are now only allowed to act as enforcers of a legalistic "code" that focuses on punishing perceived discrimination against a laundry list of overtly-acknowledged ("protected") groups - even the perception of such outside project spaces! - but leaves literally everything else as a toxic free-for-all where the loudest and most obnoxious trolls win, and the maintainer's hard-won wisdom and judgment ultimately counts for nothing. And that's only the slightest of problems with the most common CoC's; other issues are far more serious.
Well, don't stop there, the exact quote is
> all these bug trackers, issue queues, mailing lists are inherently confrontational spaces. Someone consideres contributing, OK? They write a patch, and what happens? They need to compete at least for the attention of others .
> in well-managed projects.
Show me the well managed projects which are not short on reviewers.
If this thread didn't already include https://lwn.net/ml/linux-fsdevel/20200217001153.GE10776@drea... titled "FS Maintainers Don't Scale" ... from someone much, much more qualified to judge that topic than either of us unless of course you are also a kernel maintainer because the author of that email sure is.
Of course this is nothing new. For example, https://opensource.com/business/16/10/linux-kernel-review also at https://lwn.net/Articles/703005/
http://sei.pku.edu.cn/~zhmh/linux.pdf is a scientific paper stating, among other things, "In summary, adding more maintainers to a file yields only a power of 1/2 increase in productivity, thus, four parallel maintainers are needed to double the overall output. This suggests limits to the scalability that can be achieved by adding multiple maintainers to the same files."
Um, that article includes quotes stating that cautiously expanding commit rights to the submaintainer's tree can help solve this scalability problem? And the more recent email you quote says this about the underlying reason this sometimes fails (and the lead developer can't cope with incoming patch volume, thus tending to burn out in the process - this is the "can't scale" they're talking about):
"...they [others] don't want to do it because they are scared of making a mistake and being yelled at by Our Mighty Leaders. That is a result of the fact that a Linux Maintainer is seen as a _powerful position_ because of the _control and influence_ it gives that person. It's also treated like an exclusive club (e.g. invite-only conferences for Maintainers) ... How many people do you know who have voluntarily given up a Maintainer position because they really didn't want to do it or they thought someone else could do a better job?"
So I fail to see how contentiousness and being more confrontational than not is helping there. The linux-kernel developers are in fact doing a pretty good job of not yelling at the real newcomers (which is what most people calling for CoC's usually focus on) yet the newcomers' patches still go unreviewed. And fiddling with rules of conduct is supposed to change this for the better, how? The more you do that, the less maintainers will be inclined to renounce their formally-acknowledged influence over the project.
You acknowledged nothing of this, rather singled out one email and spout nonsense:
> So I fail to see how contentiousness and being more confrontational than not is helping there.
What the hell, everything I talked about up to now is being LESS confrontational.
This was my last reply, don't bother replying to me, I am not engaging further. This was a waste of my time.
On one hand, esr has a point. There is a credible argument that cancel culture has gone too far, and that expressing disagreement itself is now becoming dangerous as those with whom you disagree will take the opportunity to play victim and attempt to defame you simply for disagreeing. Identity politics along these lines have lately become unproductive and distracting. I generally don’t participate in groups that permit that sort of thing. There’s a real problem afoot.
On the other hand, esr is a real jerk. Real jerks in f/oss are also a real problem. f/oss groups should ABSOLUTELY eject bullies: not for wrongthink, but for bullying. We must be kind.
I think the solution is to continue to repeat his warning message, but also to eject him and any other bullies like him. (Including those who bully with the extreme-PC victimization hammer.)
One can fight excessive-SJWing and remain kind and considerate to others whilst doing so.
So, is it illegitimate, then, to have a FOSS project with an intentional/cultivated "culture of abuse", where the idea is that nobody is kind to anybody and that's how everybody likes it? Sort of a... "BSDM but we build something along the way" thing? (For example, picture "Twitch Plays Pokemon" but, rather than a game, the peanut gallery is "playing" an IDE.)
I mean, it's not like every FOSS project needs to be treated as a serious attempt at being productive above all else, right? Fundamentally, for a lot of people, FOSS is a hobby of theirs, and if some people want to do whips-and-chains FOSS as a hobby, I don't see why anyone needs to butt in between them doing so.
Which gets to a deeper point: does FOSS imply open membership? It doesn't obviously in the case where it's a one-author library; but beyond that, things seem sort of fuzzy right now. You'd think it could be made clear which projects are "for joining", and which projects are more in the vein of "you can certainly fork it, but our own version will stay exactly what we, the static set of existing maintainers, want, and nothing else." Where in the latter case, the culture of the project doesn't really matter to anyone but the existing static set of maintainers, because it's not like anyone else is going to be exposed to it but them.
When you want to do something as serious as exiling someone from cyberspace, you need a high standard of rigor in your arguments; and you need to be wary of thinking you can "read through" rhetoric to "what they clearly meant", without having false claims made for rhetorical purpose still affecting your judgement.
I invite the GP to restate their argument with more precision, and see if it still sounds compelling.
If someone and his three friends want to be politically incorrect, great, let them.
If they open up their little club to the world at large, without any indication that their club is "special", then I guess the world is right to assume some standards of behaviour.
The topic under discussion is the OSI's policies and the application thereof. It seems pretty evident to me that the OSI sees that first part (people not enjoying the way they're spoken to or about) as the potential problem: they want people to voluntarily participate in a group, and feel like others in that group can be expected to treat them with dignity and respect even if they disagree.
Furthermore, to your "100% voluntary" part: OSI just revoked their voluntary association with ESR. It cuts both ways.
I don't think it's unreasonable for a large group that is open to the public to publish some pretty standard "don't be a rude and inconsiderate jerk" rules, and to enforce them. As you've pointed out, they can always go fork if they don't like it. Maybe ESR can go start the 'R(ude)OSI' if he thinks that's a productive use of his time, but I don't think most people in general want to have to deal with having textual abuse hurled at them just to participate.
Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and such an effort would be successful! I encourage someone who believes that to try; I'm not against the words, I'm against being rude to people who wish to come and contribute who are shunned or discouraged or driven away as a result of it. Many hands make light work. I'd like to see free software take over the world, and I truly believe that it won't be able to do that if many/most groups creating and promoting it give first-timers a terrible negative experience, which has been the status quo since I was a child.
That said, there is probably space for a ROSI: a group with similar benefits to OSI but which prioritizes software over feelings. Being tactful, even for those who can and want to, costs time and energy. Dispensing with that saves time.
Why not? If the end result is a high quality piece of open source software, why do I need to care about the politics or behavior of the developers?
The only reason I can think of would be from a risk-assessment standpoint, i.e. is another censorious asshole going to waltz on in and damage the team that produces this product so that it dies and becomes orphaned.
Why anyone would want to contribute to a project they don't like the developers of is beyond me; either fork it or go do something else. It's not a requirement. This is not your livelihood, for the most part. Just walk away.
Maybe if censorious assholes could just step the fuck off, and let people be, this would be less of a problem. As far as I can see, they've caused far more problems and far more discontent than anyone posting aggressively has ever done.
I'm saying it doesn't count as part of the F/OSS movement. Whether you want to contribute, not contribute, etc. is your own choice and doesn't need to be correlated in any way.
Why not? Who gets to determine what counts as being part of the movement? I thought that, broadly speaking, the movement was about the method of producing and licensing software. If a certain group produces F/OSS software, but is internally abhorrent, they're still part of the F/OSS movement.
And if it rose to public prominence while remaining a men only club, that would probably cease to be OK.
(It remains unclear to me what the long term psychological effects of participating in a community where "nobody is kind to anybody" are, and what kind of trauma they are replicating)
This assumes that people choose their way into this state. What if "software as performative BSDM" is the state of nature, that people are in unless they decide otherwise? (A bold claim, I know, but I can think of some good examples, and I bet you can too.)
> And if it rose to public prominence while remaining a men only club, that would probably cease to be OK.
What defines prominence? There are a lot of FOSS projects that are critically relied-upon by thousands of downstream projects, which nevertheless only have one contributor—and not even because that contributor doesn't accept PRs, but rather just because nobody else has ever thought to help them.
And then there are the tiny projects everyone ends up using because they're transitive dependencies of one thing or another. This comes up a lot in the Node.js ecosystem.
And then there are literal art-projects that people end up relying upon for some strange reason. _why's libraries were this kind of thing: open-source in a sense, but not for the sake of improving them qua software, but rather instead to improve them qua the original artistic vision, if you understood and shared it; and otherwise only open to view and learn from.
This is a stupid claim and you know it.
-BZZT-, CoC violation detected. ;)
Those rules are entirely arbitrary and were made up as part of this new Code of Conduct bullshit. They didn't used to exist and plenty of productive developers contributed plenty of useful code. You're arguing the rules matter from within the context of the rules; that's begging the question.
> long term psychological effects of participating in a community where "nobody is kind to anybody" are
99% of people toughen up and move on with their lives and learn to not be so serious.
1% of people don't manage to do this. Some subset of that 1% get mad about it, and now they're using this as a hammer against massive numbers of normal, volunteer developers who just wanted to happily code without having to acquiesce to a particular brand of American progressivist moral licensing.
I've seen a few cases now where a FOSS project community—one that is nominally open to new members, but is in practice a closed and static group of close-knit friends—starts off all perfectly happy with a sort of raunchy/abusive internal demeanor; but then someone comes to them with a suggestion of some Code of Conduct or other standard of decorum; and then everyone suddenly decides that it's a good idea, not because they personally want to change how they interact, or even to see others interact differently with them, but because they don't want to be the one caught arguing against the CoC if it turns out that everyone else wants it.
If you want to stand up for a lack of decorum in your community, there's nothing stopping you; but the behavioral economics just don't work out in favor of anyone following after your example, and do in fact work out in favor of the rest of the group tearing down the presumed-social-more-violator to protect themselves from being associated with you. (Again, even in cases where everyone turns out to secretly agree with you!)
This is wrong. The "magic" (i.e. the thing that distinguishes it from social pressure) is threat of violence or imprisonment from the state if you don't comply with the law.
> If someone is forced into bankruptcy because a twitter campaign got them fired, that's practically the same consequence
No it isn't. You are employed at-will by your employer, they are free to fire you if they decide they want to do that, but they don't have to. If the business makes the decision to fire you based on public pressure that's their right unless you're making an argument for stricter labor laws (I suspect you aren't).
Again, though, any violence is ultimately going to be carried out by humans for social reasons. While these online outrage mobs are, as yet, nowhere near as powerful as governments, they're already making credible threats of violence, so that's not the clear bright line you seem to think it is.
> No it isn't. You are employed at-will by your employer, they are free to fire you if they decide they want to do that, but they don't have to. If the business makes the decision to fire you based on public pressure that's their right unless you're making an argument for stricter labor laws (I suspect you aren't).
I am, among other things; at-will employment has always seemed unreasonable to me, as proven by the very existence of protected classes. It's popular to say "asshole isn't a protected class", but as far as I can see the whole rationale for protected classes applies just as strongly to those who have said legal but unpopular things.
Every interaction with another human falls under the label of "social", the word ceases to mean anything when used to describe everything, abusing that rhetorical ambiguity to equate tweets on the internet with civil order enforced by armed agents of the state is absurd.
> While these online outrage mobs are, as yet, nowhere near as powerful as governments
Correct, not even close, and never will be in any conceivable future. The idea that a twitter mob could somehow ever be comparable in power to a government demonstrates a serious disconnection from reality and the power that governments exercise over their people all around the world and all through the annals of history.
> I am, among other things; at-will employment has always seemed unreasonable to me,
So what are you proposing?
> It's popular to say "asshole isn't a protected class", but as far as I can see the whole rationale for protected classes applies just as strongly to those who have said legal but unpopular things.
An asshole is not a "class" of people, it's a behavioral disposition. Nobody needs to be an asshole. The social advantages of being an asshole come with the consequences of people not wanting to interact with you.
That's a trick of definitions: when an organisation acquires particular kinds of power we call it a "government", regardless of how it's structured or operates. Historically it's completely normal for states to be taken over by religious groups, by social movements, by corporations, by criminal gangs. And in most of history there has been very little respect for freedom of speech, for the right to say unpopular things and not suffer devastating personal consequences, for the idea that there's such a thing as a loyal opposition, or an honest mistake. If we believe that's important - and I do - then it's not enough to just protect speech from governments. Maybe 200 years ago only governments and major religions wielded enough power to ruin lives, and so constitutional protections and strict laws on freedom of religion were enough. But in these days of megacorps and large social movements that's no longer true.
> So what are you proposing?
That firings should be required to be for cause, and there should be reasonable protections even for fired workers in terms of notice periods, payments and the like - similar to the way it works in France (or most developed countries really). That really vital things (in particular, healthcare) should be done by a provider that's obliged to serve everyone rather than a private company that's permitted to arbitrarily withdraw coverage.
> An asshole is not a "class" of people, it's a behavioral disposition.
Or it's anyone you don't like. In any case, the rationale for protected classes isn't about the fact that they're classes, it's about the risk of suffering coordinated action from others - which nowadays applies to people who've said unpopular things too.
> Nobody needs to be an asshole.
Nobody needs to be a particular religion, but that's still a protected class.
Crocker's Rules[0] as CODE_OF_CONDUCT? That's an interesting idea indeed. Especially if you want to actively preempt entryism by the usual faction of CoC-pushers.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20021202223742/http://sl4.org/cr...
People deciding to subject themselves to this does not allow them to be abusive towards others, nor would it be stretch to argue that for a project to be "open", there ought to not be a culture of actively being inconsiderate.
It's nonviable for anything beyond a small hobby project, for the simple reason that such a culture would make it essentially impossible for anyone to participate in the project as a representative of their employer.
There are a lot of projects that are factored into small pieces with separate maintainership, where the project as a whole—or its "core"—might be corporate-sponsored; yet individual parts/plugins/connectors—including fairly-critical ones!—might turn out to be one person's hobby-project.
How many maintainers do you think the average Kafka connector has? The average Postgres extension? The average Redis or Nginx module? Etc.
These ecosystem components move the project-as-a-whole forward, and yet they don't necessarily need to be as "corporate" as the project-as-a-whole does to accomplish that. Even though, in the end, a corporation might use one of them, it won't really matter as long as nobody sees them doing so. (If they ever need to patch the un-corporate extension, though, they'll probably fork the thing and flense out all references to the original. I've seen that happen a lot, and done it a few times myself.)
Freedom to fork is a thing. Start a CoC-friendly fork of the project, for the benefit of those who require this as a condition of participation; but stipulate that both forks will freely share code between one another. (Meaning, no PNG-like clause whatsoever. This ensures that the choice between the "nice, CoC" and "sticks and stones" project leadership styles is kept free and open, with nobody being forced into one choice or the other. This of course is a compelling reason to actively reinforce the status quo of Persona-Non-Grata clauses in a copyright license being regarded as incompatible with the OSD or any other definition of FLOSS.)
The thing about this hypothetical is that it's wildly different from what Linus Torvald mailing list abuse winds up being. The approach is "we have a culture of anything goes, not because anyone likes abuse, but it's best way to get things done, and because most competent people do things that way, starting with Linus himself, who's clearly ultra-competent".
Essentially, while there might be some similarities to each, the abuse in open source culture is far more similar to cult abuse than BDSM activity. In cult-style abuse a person entering a project would confronted by escalating abuse and they either flee or accept and begin to normalize it whereas in BDSM, a person is given a description of what they're getting into from the start (though shading towards other "styles" is a hazard here too, of course).
Thing is there are a spectrum of approaches on the Internet but with the Internet no longer young, it's understandable people are concerned about where various styles end up. I have a friend who frequents 4Chan and says they get a lot out of the anything goes styles - "you just have to be willing to accept being called a fag and not taking any of it seriously". The problem is it's known that a substantiale-enough-to-dangerous group of people take the abuse as exactly that point and rather than seeing at restricting it naming calling in forums, live stream mass murder (say, they guy in Australia). This takes people a little aback.
BDSM irl has a lot of controls to prevent people from taking it "seriously", the point isn't to have some who want to torture in a no-limits fashion. If you could have some equivalent way to filter out people who can't separate play from reality, that would be great but I haven't the more abusive nooks of the Internet being very good at that.
I'm talking more about, for example, the FOSS communities around game-console homebrew tooling, where any given project is usually an outgrowth of some private Discord somewhere—some pre-existing group of friends—and so everyone on the project calls one-another names in the [public] GitHub issues; often actively trolls one-another with counter-productive PRs or issue-filings; sometimes creates new projects from scratch to replace/obsolete someone else's project just because A disagrees with B about some minor non-software-related thing, e.g. taste in music, and so "can't respect them or their software"; etc.
These people are clearly playing around as they make this software—and often producing the software rather sub-optimally in the process—but the goal of most of these project communities is clearly to have fun with the process of making software, not to end up with useful software.
And now, back to the question: are these projects, and their processes, to be considered societally acceptable? Or are they "canceled?" Would adding a Code-of-Conduct stating clearly what they're doing in the project even help? (IMHO it doesn't seem like it'd make much of a difference; it's not like these projects get outside contribution anyways.)
My guess is something like this: Once the project becomes big/useful enough and normal people are now using and relying on it, then they can start ousting the eccentrics/untolerables because at a large enough population, normal people just naturally outnumber them.
Disclaimer: Image is just an example to express an idea/concept. I do not endorse whatever is in the image and my post does not represent my employer, Unemployed Inc.
But my question still stands. Let me be more precise with it. Is Code-of-Conduct-space actually wide in practice, or is it narrow? Is there really only one societally-acceptable way to run an open-membership out-in-public software project, with the differences coming down only to the fine details; or is it actually possible to do something very different, e.g. having a CoC containing "We like to call each-other names here. Only join if you're into that."?
Would a project that claims different limits than the ones of wider society, be tenable? Or would it, and every other project attempting such a thing, be boycotted, simply for its members being weird and liking things people don't normally like (and therefore making it squicky to contribute to the software if you don't like what they're doing, which must therefore be a moral failing on their part)?
So I don't think "does FOSS imply open membership" even has an answer.
But this is literally just a call for civility, recognizing that many people may not want to subject themselves to this kind of toxic atmosphere. You can ALWAYS voice your concerns in a productive manner in the "meritocratic" ideal.
Added to this, note that the attack surface for such toxic behavior might be much bigger if you're a minority group. Let's take the assumption that women need every fucking thing explained to them - which is quite alive and really fucking annoying. I don't think that's banworthy, but certainly noteworthy and, if you wanna continue to talk down to your peers, maybe you need a break from the mailing list after all.
The problem here is that "toxic" is something that gets to be defined by those who would use it as a hammer against everyone else. What one person considers to simply be a spirited conversation may seem as a deafeningly aggressive argument to someone else; but such is life!
The free market dictates that products will survive on their merits, and this is triply true when the product itself costs nothing - people use what works. If a particular development style ends up resulting in more contributors and better code, so be it; but there's no guarantee of that whatsoever. Some of the best code in the world has been written by megalomaniacs who would never pass a CoC sniff test.
> Added to this, note that the attack surface for such toxic behavior might be much bigger if you're a minority group.
Maybe, but there's only one group you're allowed to attack in every modern newspaper, and are not allowed to acknowledge positively in any political campaign.
Oh, I'm not the only one to notice the rampant transphobia in UK media and the labour party, nice.
See how easy I proved your premise wrong?
As for straight white men, I'm trying to remember the last time the leader of a political party or writer of a newspaper column went to bat for those people's rights. Can't actually recall one.
Huh? That's certainly not what the free market dictates at all. There's no sense of "merit" imbued anywhere inside anything in the free market. There are assumptions behind the shapes of the supply and demand functions (namely convexity) and a belief in price signaling information. That's all.
You, and perhaps most people believe that, but there's a vocal minority who considers even the concept of meritocracy as an aspirational ideal to be offensive. cf. Github having to throw out their dumb pompous rug: https://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/
I also don't think that has to be every open source project. Put another way Tumblr and 4chan can exist on the same internet and we can complain about both.
I think what perturbs me is this sense that the people who actually contribute to f/oss are less and less in control and I think this is largely what Raymond was talking about. "Code of conducts" inherently drive power away from the contributors to some sort of moderator enforcing the CoC. More and more I see this almost stereotypical situation of somebody who doesn't contribute to a project demanding adherence to some progressive shibboleth, saying that the project and themselves and people they know have been victimised by violence due to said lack of adherence. Which comes off as mutinous.
Could we have both? e.g. CoC moderators elected by contributors from the ranks of contributors?
Granted, that's still open to abuse if the quorum requirements are small enough (how small would depend on the quantity of abusers), but I feel it's more in spirit than centralizing the power into a sub-group.
I will further grant that it's likely that, in any group, only a subset will care enough about these things to police them, so the point may be moot.
More like infiltration.
I'm more goal oriented, it's about getting to the destination, not the adventures we find along the way. If somebody is curing cancer but has a habit of calling everyone an asshole and is a prick in general ... let him. He's curing cancer, don't mess with that.
The same goes for software imho. If you can deliver great software AND always be kind and all that, great. If you have to choose, I'm always choosing the great software. I do agree though that you don't need to make those your public representatives. Insulate them with a layer of people that are more diplomatic.
Also, I believe a lot of this is because it's online, and even people that have been online for decades don't always realize how wildly different other people's backgrounds are and how they might misunderstand something/how their communication style might trigger some traumas.
The fact that the "be kind, be considerate" route gets abused by power grabbing people also doesn't help, because every honest appeal to kindness is hard to tell apart from the beginning of an unfriendly take-over.
> It's less bad that people sometimes got their feelings hurt than it is to institutionalize a means by which dissenting opinions are crushed under the rubric of “not nice”.
His point, as I take it, is that a "cancel culture" is antithetical to an open culture. I agree. Excluding someone due to tone, without warning or clear explanation of the violation, especially when it appears the content is a contested opinion, is bigoted censorship.
To steal the Paine quote ESR himself used, "He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
The liberty to use strong rhetoric[0] in defense of ideas is what I see under attack by banning ESR from these discussions.
[0]: To my reading, the most inflammatory remarks he said on the mailing list are:
> With whatever moral authority I still have here, I say to all advocates of soi-disant "ethical" licensing not just "No" but "To hell with you and the horse you rode in on."
in the opening email for that thread and in his penultimate email:
> I am not fooled. You are mounting an ideological attack on our core principles of liberty and nondiscrimination. You will not succeed while I retain any ability to oppose this.
Compared to a typical rant from Torvalds this is pretty tame debate-speak.
Ever hear the expression "Your right to your fist only extends as far as my face?"
In order to express ideas openly, even firmly and directly, one does not need to be explicitly RUDE to others, and apply personal insults and attacks.
For people who seem to be deeply intellectual, ESR and Linus (though less these days) have an apalling inability to differentiate between "This is a stupid idea" and "You are a stupid person".
They seem to revel in additional personal attacks on other people rather than engaging in a free marketplace of open ideas, and their behaviour has been unchecked for decades because they are brilliant and their contributions are meaningful.
It turns out, history is full of examples of that.
It also turns out that you don't HAVE to be a jerk, and you can express your strong beliefs in an idea without calling someone a looneytune.
The issue is that "rude" is up to whoever feels treated rudely. If you tell someone they are wrong in no uncertain words, they might consider you rude. If you sugarcoat it, you're a) lying, b) doing the community a disservice by not opposing something that you consider wrong.
> For people who seem to be deeply intellectual, ESR and Linus (though less these days) have an apalling inability to differentiate between "This is a stupid idea" and "You are a stupid person".
Funny, it always struck me that it's people who are deeply emotional who have a problem with it. If you're emotional, you will feel personally attacked and aren't able to put that aside and deal with the issue at hand. If you're intellectual, you will notice the insult, but it will not dominate your take-away, and you will easily be able to address it if you think it's necessary (hint: it's not) and move on to the content. If you're playful, you might just add something similar in your response. If you just want to lighten the mood, you'll make a joke. And then you move on and address the issue they were talking about, because there's usually an issue in there, they aren't just saying "no, you're dumb" just because, they are saying "no, you're dumb, because you're doing xyz".
> They seem to revel in additional personal attacks on other people rather than engaging in a free marketplace of open ideas, and their behaviour has been unchecked for decades because they are brilliant and their contributions are meaningful.
I believe you're putting way too much weight on the insults here. I don't think that Linus sits there and laughs all day because he "owned some noob". More likely, he fires of an email and moves on with his life, the insult not being something that brings him a lot of pleasure, but just a part of his communication style. Not a sadist that wants to see other people experience pain and emberrassement but somebody who has little concern for the feelings of the recipients of his outbursts, either because he himself doesn't mind being called an asshat or because he believes that the stakes are too high to hold back.
> It also turns out that you don't HAVE to be a jerk
I agree if what you're trying to say is "there are highly-productive people that are not jerks". I strongly disagree if you're trying to say "you can choose whether you are a jerk or not, and you don't have to choose being a jerk".
I have. A "community guideline" or social disapproval of threatening violence may disallow those sorts of expressions, but they're quite common in certain communities (sports, games, etc - may be known as "trash talking").
> In order to express ideas openly, even firmly and directly, one does not need to be explicitly RUDE to others, and apply personal insults and attacks.
I agree. What one person interprets or intends as "explicitly RUDE" may be interpreted or intended differently by another individual, though, so an open community should assume good faith, correct the socially-determined, arbitrary language violation, and try to focus on the content of the message rather than delivery mechanism.
If you'd like to share examples of what makes you believe ESR[0] is unable to differentiate between a stupid idea and a stupid person, I'd be happy to examine them with you. I myself used Linus as an example of someone who can be famously insulting[1], yet I'm unaware of him actually permanently banning people from submitting new patches to the Linux kernel because he flipped out in a code review.
Indeed, as I think everyone can agree they've been polemic regardless of how you agree with them, the fact that they've engaged with the public at large seems contrary to your statement that they revel in personal attacks rather than engaging a free marketplace of ideas: They share an unambiguous position and offer defense of their ideas against all comers. I suspect most of this defense is done today by the organizations and the legacy they've created rather than them personally, which is why it's more noteworthy when they feel the need to make such strong statements.
> turns out that you don't HAVE to be a jerk, and you can express your strong beliefs in an idea without calling someone a looneytune.
You don't "HAVE" to be a jerk, but you may. I will listen to the content of your words rather than the appearance of your statement, and I believe ESR is aggressively asserting his position the Open Source Initiative should do the same.
I find it interesting you used "looneytune", because I don't see any message from ESR in the month of February using that word.[2][3] Quoting Russell McOrmond later in the thread[4] that does use the word "loonytoon", "ESR tried to post a message where he named and shamed some individuals and activities which he considers to be seriously problematic not only in society as a whole, but software communities as well. The moderators rejected his email to this list. Some might even suggest he is being de-platformed by being blocked from expressing personal political views. I'm not suggesting this, as I'm advocating strongly that those who wish to use software and software licenses to discriminate be invited (strongly if required) to go elsewhere than the OSI mailing lists."
[0]: Or Linus, I suppose, though that's less relevant to the specific topic
[1]: https://www.fudzilla.com/media/k2/items/cache/7a3a7dc8bbb8eb... - I don't mean to insult him and use/appreciate his work/writings practically every day!
[2]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...
[3]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists... is quoting a message that was rejected by the moderators. It appears ESR rephrased without public discussion and it never went out to the list.
[4]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...
Equating physical violence with someone who called another a "looneytune" is completely unreasonable as they are NOT the same thing. The uncomfortable truth is, the freedom of expression guarantees the right of someone else to say something people disagree with, hurt your feelings, offend, or even make others angry.
Also, who gets to decide when someone is being a jerk? In this case, it's a group of people who are comfortable deleting almost all evidence of Eric's supposedly offensive remarks, thereby ensuring that no one can even debate the subject reasonably. That alone, would keep me from jumping to their defense even if I agreed with their actions.
The world is full of roided up assholes who would scream at someone in the face, have their victim "push them away", only to proceed to punch them back because once you cross the line into physicality a shove is the same as a punch in the face.
It's bullshit.
Obviously being "a jerk" to someone is not the same as physically hitting someone.
But in the context of a workplace, an online forum, or a community contributing to an open source project, the choice isn't between punching someone or yelling at them.
The choice is between civility and not. Between being an asshole for no reason and not. People like Linus Torvalds and ESR have significant trust in their technical leadership. If they don't like an idea they can just say "that is a bad idea. here is why". Their position is not strengthened by screaming insults at the other side. All it does is make them look childish and make people not want to contribute their time and energy to the cause.
Linus figured this out eventually. ESR hasn't.
A slightly sneakier version of the same monster would antagonise more non-physically and perpetually.
There's slippery slopes and giving inches; there are deleterious attractors all human interaction ecosystems can fall into through a tragedy of the commons (see meditations on moloch by slatestarcodex). How do you prevent this, or even start to stand against it? Schelling points.
The guy shouting on the corner is reliable. He's obvious and slightly unpleasant. But he's a lesser evil than the creeping decay that girdles you and smothers you while whispering honey into your ear.
Beware those whose sole argument is "you are a bully".
I disagree with this argument as it is stated, because it is much too broad.
If you had limited it to saying that you will eject bullies from f/oss groups that you have control over, and will refuse to participate in f/oss groups that have bullies in them, that would be fine. But you don't get to tell every single person who does f/oss what kinds of people they should be willing to work with. That kind of "I presume to tell everyone else what they should do" mentality is exactly what is wrong with the "cancel culture" that you rightly condemn.
I also disagree with the particular opinion you have stated regarding esr, as you stated it, because again it is much too broad, and indeed goes in the wrong direction if anything. I have worked with esr on a small part of one of his f/oss projects (porting reposurgeon to Python 3, and then co-authoring a HOWTO explaining the methods we used), and I did not find him to be a jerk at all in that context. He was focused on solving the problem and writing good code, and was extremely helpful and productive in his communications. I think you will find plenty of other people who have worked with him on actual coding who have had similar experiences. So if he does exhibit jerkitude, I think it's in contexts that do not involve getting actual f/oss work done. I think that makes a big difference.
I also think people who view his sometimes forceful method of expressing himself as jerkitude are failing to understand his reasons for taking such a tone when he does, and which he has on his own blog with regard to the OSI affair. The game he sees being played with OSI is not an isolated incident: the general MO of playing on people's innate sense of fairness to get control of an organization under the guise of "we must be kind", and then completely subverting that organization's original purpose, has been a staple of the Left for centuries, if not longer. It's the same game that was played at universities across the US in the 1960s. People who are aware of that historical background are understandably greatly concerned to see it happening again.
There is a difference between "should" (which is clearly an opinion) and "must" (which implies some level of force to back it up).
"Should" can turn into "must" very quickly when the "force to back it up" is obtained. So the time to object is at the "should" stage. If you wait until the "must" stage, it's too late. (Note that "cancel culture", when it reaches the "must" stage, which is exactly what it's trying to do with FOSS projects, does not tolerate dissenting opinions.)
http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
I'm not familiar with the culture or standards of the OSI but I don't think I'd wanna participate in a community where this kind of engagement is normal, so good for them I suppose?
Edit: replaced plorkyeran's account link with their post. I also now notice others posted the link, but I saw plorkyeran's post.
IMO: His opinion has a lot of weight here. He founded the project. Without his philosphy in the start you wouldn't be where it is today.
So this was clearly one of those no recovery situations. Either guidelines for civil behavior or "show me the code" meritocracy wins but it's hard to see "agreeing to disagree" being possible here.
My concern is if you're drawing the line over this what you're communicating to people is that you cannot negatively sum up another individual, even when it's warranted. A productive conversation can be had on the merits of the label. Are you trying to incentivize long posts about all of the non-sensical policies that the individual is pushing?
The point is it's pretty plausible the ESR was breaking guidelines that had been laid down already. Maybe he should have broken them for all I know but all I'm saying really is that for an authority to remain credible they have to enforce guidelines specifically when someone is openly defying them. That's it.
If there is some sort of evidence that the candidate in question is in fact a toxic loonytoon, by some sort of objective standard, then it's perfectly fine to use that language.
At some point, you have to call a spade a spade, and a toxic loonytoon a toxic loonytoon.
Otherwise I think you only 'persuade' people that already agree with you and others that might have otherwise changed their minds are alienated.
That said, I generally like the idea of not banning people and I have a high tolerance for this kind of communication not really bothering me that much - but I still think it's generally bad form and probably does scare away others.
The CoC people will not like that any better.
Suppose you write a mailing list post which absolutely names no names, but only presents expressions of specific ideas, and then calls those ideas "toxic" and "loony", with justifications and all. That will still be equally offensive. It will be still be interpreted as an attack on the identifiable person or group behind those ideas, even though they have not been named.
Focusing on ideas is better, but breaking down why you think something is wrong without being an ass is really the goal.
I've loosely followed this stuff for a few years, and I just don't see it. I just see people trying to punish the people they hate.
Anyway, search and form your own opinion.
He is referring to one of the people running for the board of directors whose major goal is to introduce Codes of Conduct into open source projects.
I can’t wait until this identity politics pendulum starts swinging back. Some people are going to be really embarrassed about the legacy they left for themselves while it was still around.
>"Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too." (OSD FAQ) It doesn't have to be like this.
It's time to stop bad actors from using our work in unethical ways. It's time to give open source developers around the world the tools they need to exercise their ethical responsibilities as engineers and members of human society. It's time for us to stop shirking our ethical obligations, and take responsibility for the use of our work.
From:
https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/OSI+Board+of+Directors/...
Also:
https://mobile.twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/12294568573176...
(Edited to include her position in her own words)
The problem for people like Ehmke is there aren't really many evil people in society, and those who do exist tend to get handled by the justice system. So she just ends up picking fights with random people. She's bad news and anywhere she shows up is best recommended to evict her post-haste.
https://where.coraline.codes/blog/ethical-source-osi-electio...
She has done more than anybody else to cause destructive internal strife in Open Source software projects. Her being on the OSI board is simply appalling. OSI needs to be defunded and ignored if she can not be removed.
This one incident turned me off of not only that person but the entire cancel culture movement.
Are you perchance saying that you "cancelled" the cancel culture movement based on a single interaction you didn't enjoy?
They have noble goals, but the approach is wrong in a lot of cases. Many of the people have the same toxic personalities that they rail against so loudly.
From other comments, you seem to be drawing a distinction between "social pressure" and "individual choices". Can you explain when one becomes the other?
If the mob is acting to achieve an ends I perceive as righteous, I might never see the mob for what they really are.
I've found many people do even less well than I do, at this.
If one shopkeeper won't serve you, they're exercising their own rights and you can take your business elsewhere. But if every shopkeeper won't serve you, you're probably being discriminated against. I don't presume to draw the line precisely, but we recognise the difference.
>> * The "Persona Non Grata" clause is best understood as an attempt to paralyze resistance to such political ratfucking by subverting th freedom-centered principles of OSI. It is very unlikely to be the last such attempt.
> Make no mistake; we are under attack. If we do not recognize the nature of the attack and reject it, we risk watching the best features of the open-source subculture be smothered by identity politics and vulgar Marxism.
I mean, if you are this much out of touch with reality, maybe it's time to quit Facebook, Twitter etc.
I don't agree with him but I feel a bit sorry for him. He's passionate about this and he believes what he's saying. Perhaps nothing could make him see things differently, but banning him definitely won't.
I fully agree with the idea that "ethical" licenses aren't free software, but the dude is a terrible actor in this. He violated the rules, and got banned. That's not a bad thing!
For the sake of fairness, consider the case that people opposing him would use similar lunatic language.
They would drop fighting words like neoconservatives, greedy capitalist, far right nuts into the discussion. That would be crazy just as well.
----
For the record, I think ESR was mostly right on the issues. He is just communicating like lunatic angry person.
I stand by my assessment it's not classy language though.
Etymonline says, "pertaining to or characteristic of a (high) class," from 1891. https://www.etymonline.com/word/classy GCIDE says, "having elegance or taste or refinement in manners or dress," and "exhibiting refinement and high character. Opposite of low-class." WordNet says, "Elegant and fashionable." What brings all these definitions together is that something is good in the particular way that the upper class values.
It's true that many people who admire the manners of the upper class consider their behavior standards to be "high standards", and they certainly are demanding standards. But "classy" is not used to describe conformance to any demanding standards of personal behavior, such as a soldier's enthusiastic yelling and physical fitness, Clarence Darrow's unyielding advocacy of the welfare of the world's poorest, Feynman's profound mathematical learning and epistemic humility, or the brutal, unvarnished honesty demanded by Dutch society. As you know if you are a native speaker of English, none of these are considered "classy", however demanding they may be, because they do not belong to the [English and North American] upper class, which demands very high standards of etiquette, euphemism, diplomacy, fashion, and stoicism. Those virtues are "classy"; the other virtues I described above are not only not "classy" but in many cases positively opposed to "classiness".
It's interesting to look at the older roots of the word and see links to social class there but I'm not using the term in that sense. The definition I referred to is a modern one from Mirriam Webster.
The ideological line you're laying down here is a specifically upper-class ideology, as revealed by its content, not just the words you use. Your lack of awareness of the origin of that ideology comes from does not liberate you from that origin; on the contrary, it enslaves you to it, making you an instrument of agendas you do not understand and cannot question. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22551881
The question is really which set of values will determine the future course of the Open Source Initiative: the values of foulmouthed mullet-wearing truck drivers or the values of refined ladies and gentlemen who couldn't possibly, oh, how simply dreadful.
† Personae non Gratae, you might say.
I'd agree that ESR might have received a better reception for his point of view if he'd expressed himself differently though.
That's how it seems to me, anyway. God help us.
It makes you sound like you're one bad day away from chasing swans through the park nakedly and it isn't really productive in any community.
People like Eric need to come to terms with the fact that being a productive contributor is not an excuse for anti-social behaviour, that open source communities these days are huge and people from many places who may not get your jokes or your political discussions are participating, and that cultures change.
There are strong criticisms of CoCs and questioning of the necessity of that. I don't think that's too much of a reach in how that was communicated. A bit exaggerated yes.
Sure there is a nuanced discussion about what is too much for a CoC but the sort of discussion that he thinks is supposed to be cut out actually needs to be shut down. I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest.
That might sound like generic senseless profanity, but it's actually a term with specific meaning: "Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
Whether or not ratfucking is indeed happening here as ESR asserts is another matter. I mean only to comment on the meaning of the term.
> toxic loonytoon
> The actual goal of the movement behind the ESD
> banishing contributors for wrongthink
> The "Persona Non Grata" clause is best understood as an attempt to paralyze resistance to such political ratfucking
Like I said I don't know the OSI culture (or this context) but nothing about this message strikes me as someone who's acting in good faith. There's lots of nonsense out there, but engaging in good faith is about taking what people say in collaborative environments as given in good faith.
I'm open to being wrong and this tone being appropriate. I don't mean ESR has to be nice to people he doesn't like outside of the official policy discussion. But if people are trying to do work this doesn't seem like an appropriate way to engage.
And now he is banished.
Are you really arguing against this?
ESR could be acting within the community standards of OSI, in which case I don't think he should be banned.
I also find the way he engages to be more hostile than I'm comfortable with and probably wouldn't want to work an environment where it was the norm.
I'm not an expert on government and law, but it is my understanding that due process is rooted in the recognition that circumstances are often more nuanced than laws can accommodate, and so evaluation of the circumstances are necessary for every case.
I'm not saying OSI actions should follow the same due process as criminal courts, but my point is no, saying the things he said at countless companies, corporations, environments, under some context or another, would not result in firing.
Or at the very least explaining rationally why you feel the other person is not acting in good faith.
These people are HUGE fans of triangulation, their supporters will tear you a new one on twitter if you don't toe the line.
What does “triangulation” mean in this context?
Triangulation refers to when your primary aggressor has their associates perform social pressures (sometimes without them applying much themselves.)
For lack of a better example, consider the aspect of Shunning in some religions/cults; If the leader thinks someone is out of line, word quickly spreads, and the entire group will focus their behavior on making the target feel unwelcome.
Source: dealt with more culty shit than I ever wanted to, which is why these movements creep me out so much.
So you don't know who ESR is, and you're going to act like the man who has put his entire life into this effort as though he's not "acting in good faith". Wow.
If anything, I'd question whether everyone else on the list even knows what 'good faith' is, as they voluntarily proceed to censor themselves.
However, that's still a ridiculous email, and inappropriate for any context where grownups are trying to have a serious conversation about adult matters.
First off, it's unprofessional. But even beyond that, the email is either intended to persuade through facts and reasoned argument, or bully though shouting. It's clearly not written to persuade (there are no facts or reasoned arguments), ergo its intended to bully.
> Its originator is a toxic loonytoon who believes "show me the code" meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist plot by straight white cisgender males.
"Show me the code" is a good principle, and not just in programming. Hard data is much better than ad hominems or making arguments from authority. It is, therefore, sadly ironic that ESRs linked email is purely comprised of ad hominems, and the best his defenders can do is to make arguments from authority. Your code isn't automatically right because you're the CTO, and your arguments aren't automatically right because you're the co-founder, and the more heated and inflated your claims get, with no citations or links or proof, the less time I have for you.
ESR remains correct on the principles he has spent his life advocating for. His email is still garbage, and I fully support the removal of anyone who authors emails like that from a mailing list until they apologise and commit to behaving better in the future.
This isn't a profession. It's a volunteer effort. ESR has spent enough time talking about this now that expecting every single email he writes to include a total re-encapsulation of the entire effort is ridiculous. Of course, this is why arguing with these sorts of people is such a pain; they forget everything you've ever said, and any point ever admitted-to is forgotten the next day like as though no such admission had ever been made.
I would suggest that is a distinction without a (in this context) relevant difference.
Also, you didn't address my other, larger point.
>Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks
ts originator is a toxic loonytoon who believes "show me the code" > meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist > plot by straight white cisgender males."
I think open source has a serious problem in the sense that there are a lot of projects headed by single, rather abusive and obsessed individuals. And moreover, where a stream of obscenities in an email is considered a normal way of communicating, accompanied by a "if you don't like the heat, stay out of the kitchen" attitude. "Show me the code meritocracy" can be more or less this.
My guess is that OSI has been attempting to change the situation. Part of the change would demanding people avoid streams of "strong language" as ESR uses above. Moroever, I suspect people already said "we're aiming for a better standard of communication".
As far the practical value goes, I'm not sure if there is an easy way to change the situation. Installing an ombudsman on projects is kind of hard given the projects are indeed going to belong to those who produce a lot of decent code. People create open source software that scratches their itch, not to conform to others' values.
Why not fork those projects and makes those awesome forks full of code with unicorns and glitter?
If those single rather abusive individuals have to compete with code + unicorns + glitter, I'm certainly going to switch to that and I bet the others will too
It deserves a warning, maybe, but banning him? Cancel culture indeed.
But I think if I was in charge and I had to police behaviour a warning would be my first reaction, rather than an immediate ban.
I mean, aren't we supposed to tell people when they're wrong first, and only resort to harsher means later?
Would that kind of language/dialog be tolerated if it was directed at other people present or on the team? Or towards stakeholders? Of course not.
Of course, our discussions don't get immortalized on a public mailing list for every interested busybody to critique, and that does change the dynamic a bit...
The ESR comment clearly directed at an OSI "person present" who also was a stakeholder, FYI.
Individuals, who, let's not forget that, are the reason the projects exist in the first place, and who may feel more attachment to the projects than others. That they react more strongly to the impression that some other group is trying to take over their project, often years or decades of their life, and destroy it (by their standards) is understandable, I think.
And also, let's not forget that those seeking control via CoC are often equally abusive, they just strategically limit their abusiveness to Twitter & co and keep it off of official mailing lists to be able to say "I always stayed professional (here, while I was backstabbing everywhere else)".
Absolutely, it's quite a quandary. The thing is, there's a difference between "random tool ten people use and no one would create with person X" and, say, Open Office and there are a variety of shades in between. At some point, the "I created this and I can manipulate it any way I want" thing is really problematic and stands in the way of a semi-important standard/application/library but at other points, there is no easy alternative.
What I do like about the "there's no place for niceness here" is one thing over all: if you can make it there, you can take the heat. And if you're in a position of responsibility, that's really something that is extremely important. It sorts out the people that can't stand the heat, and that's ugly and hard on those people, but it's good for the project, because you can't have them only experience the heat for the first time when they are in power and Amazon leans on them with their billion dollar law team and the promise of a cushy office job.
I understand the idea of "this madness and chaos got us this far, but we'll have to grow up and start doing it the way the people do it that we didn't like when we started it, it's just too big and too important". It's very similar to what happened in the crypto scene when a bunch of guys did some cool stuff and then they realize that their little project now is worth more than many countries' GDP, that's probably a sobering talk.
I don't know that it's necessarily a good idea, though. So far, benevolent dictators have worked out great, even if some of them ruled with a sharp tongue and an iron fist. Whether the alternative will work as well remains to be seen.
The person behind ESD has a history of getting people 'removed' from projects.
To them, I say: physician, heal thyself. I'm really sorry that they've lived a life being bullied so much that they derive such pleasure from doing so to others.
There's expressing yourself fully and accurately, and there's expressing yourself respectfully. It's entirely possible to do both, and that quoted response really didn't do much of either.
> I am not fooled. You are mounting an ideological attack on our core principles of liberty and nondiscrimination. You will not succeed while I retain any ability to oppose this.
and
> Because that way he couldn't use our prestige to advance his goals. He couldn't use OSI to pretend to be pro-freedom while actually being against freedom.
Both of these messages are hostile, assume bad faith and (as noted by some supporters of ESR's position) unhelpful for resolving the issue.
In some issues there's no way to helpfully resolve them. What sort of meet-in-the-middle do you propose here, exactly? Either open source licenses as determined by the OSI don't discriminate against particular users, or they can, and that's a values based decision. There's no real way to be 'helpful' about it: no is no.
A bit rough tone, sure, but I think that shows that he’s actually passionate about these things. That’s good, not bad.
What I find interesting are the ways that CoCs are sometimes selectively weaponized.
I would like a link to the source, rather than someone saying a given source happened to send X.
I could not in a quick 5 min of searching through Eric S. Raymond posts on that thread, see the actual source that is quoted.
#1 https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...
#2 ""On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 1:09 PM Eric S. Raymond <esr at thyrsus.com> wrote:""
Before potentially defaming anyone I would very much like a reference to the actual words they said, and would hope everyone else similarly judges based on confirmed content.
For example, the source you link may have just attempted to reconstruct the message based on what can be seen in the reply. However the chain of authenticity has been extended to contain those who may have motive to unfaithfully reproduce or even fake a/the message. We can't know as the transparency of the archive is now also in question.
Edit:
Under the assumption the reproduction is faithful, my own personal OPINIONs...
Calling someone a loonytoon is uncouth, deserving a brief lecture for attacking someone rather than debating the ideals they happen to believe in at the current time (or in the past if it's a clear reference to such). (Edit 2:) Also in that paragraph, there's a term I'd hesitate to Google for not knowing it's meaning offhand... I'm not sure how good/bad it might actually be.
The vividly disgusting and offensive description (which could very easily have been added in the quoted reply) of rat* (censored) is something that a rational adult just shouldn't use on such a forum. If that's what OSI acted on, they really should be more transparent about it as well as their decision process.
Most of the version you linked on TechRights is otherwise speech that should be protected and encouraged. It is a protest and valid expression of feelings; save for some charged language.
https://ethicalsource.dev/definition/
I worry that "open source" is already a slippery and ambiguous term.
It makes RMS's work to clearly define free software (not open source) both hard and important .
http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
Seems odd that someone should be banned for life for a fairly tame message that was already automatically filtered (one assumes for the various word choices not the content)...
FOSS was started as a divergence from corporate bureaucratic software, and now political bureaucracy is coopting and subverting it.
An intolerant minority is poisoning the well of creativity in multiple disciplines by subverting the organizations that support it instead of producing the tools people want and use. It's the same crowd that is causing campus problems. These people aren't civil or "nice," they're nihilists who understand bureaucratic power and align with whatever meaningless words achieve their end.
It's not just right/left either, this particular flavor of bureaucracy affects progressivism, but it's a wave of the same force that hollows out creative endeavors and turns them into hosts for bureaucratic governance.
The only way to defeat it is individual competence and peer recognition of the excellence of their work, which people who exploit bureaucracy are necessarily incapable.
Rant over, but this issue is crucial to everything from net neutrality, crypto policy and backdoors, and software freedom everywhere. It cannot be allowed to be shut down.
What I think the moderators should have done in this circumstance is actually moderate. In cases like this where things are getting heated and you're obviously in an un-usual circumstance, schedule a real conversation to diffuse the situation. Slack, Zoom, Hangouts, phone call, whatever. Anything where tone and emotion can be effectively communicated.
Can you do this always? No. Should you do it when you're founding member is at risk of being banned from the mailing list? Obviously, yes.
This is what happens when people rely too much on email.
Data point. Read http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/.
Data point. It took ESR less than 15 minutes from meeting my ex in late 1999 to make an undesired pass at her. (He knew she was married to me, and was turned down.)
Data point. I was at a PerlMongers meeting in 2003. And happened to remark that, "Someone needs to tell ESR that he's not God's gift to women." After the laughter died down, a woman at the table gave an account of his making an unwanted pass at her. This opened a floodgate as every woman at the table had her own similar story in turn.
There are many more such data points. But clearly ESR's behavior has been a problem for a long time.
However I am still deeply concerned that he establishes a convenient precedent that will be applied to other, much less problematic, people.
I think maybe you meant "couldn't have happened to a more deserving person"?
The way you phrased it implies you think ESR is actually quite a nice person who didn't deserve what he got, while the remainder of your post clearly shows that's not what you mean.
See https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/couldn%27t+have+happene... for verification.
Interesting! I've never heard this used in a sarcastic way. My mistake.
The cancel-culture attitude over people who you disagree with is so dangerous to any organisation. It's like it has become a crime on the internet these days. If someone was to say an opposing opinion with evidence towards a PC crowd, they will be locked up in the dungeon, charged with high treason and banished forever.
"This special exception makes clear who the community considers a bad actor and initially imposes greater obligations on them than anyone else. [....] As in the Persona non Grata Preamble, this special exception serves as a clear statement on the community's view on who is welcome in their community. Additionally, if the bad actor wants to redistribute, they have to distribute the license shaming them."
RMS was not compelled to resign from the FSF.
RMS decided to resign since he felt it was for the good of the organization, and he could no longer be effective there.
While there was a lot of external pressure, there was zero pressure from within. It was RMS trying to do the right thing.
My major concern about the sequence of events there were external appearances. It seems that problem materialized.
That's just the cover story, and nobody in their right mind buys it.
It was more likely a "you can appear to go spontaneously, or there will be a big fuss and you will be out anyway".
It's the same old thing like when any public figure "steps down" in the midst of a scandal. That just means they picked the least unpalatable item from a menu that was handed to them, so to speak.
RMS had no more real option to stay at the helm of the FSF than he had to keep that MIT office.
This is eloquently put. The "fetishization of niceness" he talks about is such a strange trend to watch. It started in universities but it's like it wants to eat all of society and social interactions
The world is full of assholes. I think it's better to get used to it than to shelter yourself, try to make every space safe or withdraw from interacting with other people.
I know I'm biased though. I am pretty thick-skinned so it's hard to see it from the other perspective.
If it helps, people are not actually like that (or least people that far along the bell curve are much rarer than you seem to believe). The people you're seeing are taking (no, I don't mean feigning) offence in a strategic attempt to shut down someone who disagrees with them politically.
But if you're successful despite a mental illness (by any measure of success), its worth celebrating that so others with that condition can see it can be overcome. And it'll help reduce stigma.
If you celebrate mental illness itself, fetishise it, blast out images of good-looking successful people with SHE'S BIPOLAR next to it, people will emulate it. It's fashion. It's what we do with everything.
The way mental illnesses are 'discovered' and grouped, as best as I can tell from what I've heard psychologists talk about it, is by a duck method. If it looks, talks, walks like depression, we'll call it that. The actual underlying causal networks are yet mostly mysterious, so they're not the basis of the defintions. The way they're defined is basically behavioural.
Then I see Eric write this:
> Usually (and in this case) accompanied by a lot of bafflegab about “inclusion” and “diversity” so thay anyone who isn't a fan of the new, censorious rules can be cast as some sort of bigot.
:/ Eric, we can have it both ways. I hammer it home into the engineers I’ve lead that code is the ultimate source of truth. I‘ll guide them from, for example, “do we need a mutex here” through to object code to generated assembly through to an intel reference manual, because I want to demonstrate that as engineers, we are in full control of our creations. The engineers I work with all challenge each other, and ask difficult questions, and put ideas through difficult tests. Because we’re mature adults, we can do so with language more advanced than “this is shit” (an open source favorite). It’s real easy. How about, “what happens when <state concern>” or “have you considered <alternate approach>”.
In fact, by soliciting more feedback and criticism, you are being more inclusive - as long as the conversations play out in a constructive way! Yes, it can be hard to teach that, but that’s why we pay people managers and technical leads to do a job.
Honestly, though, what sucks most of all is when you see that people who were so influential to you early in life would apparently look down on the person you are, just because you would ask to be respected in return.
You are taking what he wrote out of context and interpreting it to mean something very different than what he intended.
Eric is not arguing that insults are preferable to dispassionate feedback. (As I noted in another comment upthread, I have worked with him on a small part of one of his coding projects, and in that context he is all dispassionate feedback and no insults whatever. So in actual work he does not exhibit the bad behavior you describe at all.) He is looking at what is being done to OSI, and what is being done to open source projects around the world, in the name of "social justice", and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose. If you don't understand that historical context, of course you're not going to understand why he is being so forceful about this. He is not trying to stop people from being constructive and non-insulting about actually writing good code. He is trying to stop people whose ultimate agenda has nothing to do with writing good code from taking over open source projects and ruining them, making us all much worse off in the process.
> and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose
"""Out of context""" that looks REAL similar to a certain other group that seems to be making a name for themselves in this thread. Glad to know he's a conspiracy theorist and so are his current followers.
Which other group are you referring to? If you're going to make charges of conspiracy theory, then you shouldn't use innuendo. Just come right out and say what you mean.
To be clear, the historical context for this point is that this is a Nazi conspiracy theory ("cultural Marxism") that posits left-wing Jews sought (and continue to seek) to subvert academic institutions.
Um, what? I don't know where you're getting this from. The historical pattern I refer to, as I said, goes back centuries. And the subversion of academic institutions, for example in the US during the 1960s, had nothing to do with Jews.
It's ridiculous to stand atop the work of the people you bury and call yourself holy for it.
He has gone insane after 9/11. He thinks homosexuals are pedophile. I have the cathedral and the Bazaar at home, and I live that book, but he isn't part of the healthy open source community anymore.
Do you have a primary source for that? This sounds like a cancel-culture rumor intended to attach negative ideas to a person in order to discredit them.
Hit "D" for doubt. ^
That being said, he never says all gays are pedos though -- he says they are three to ten times more likely to be pedos.
"He thinks homosexuals are pedophile[s]"
is false. The rant asserts that homosexuals may be more predisposed to pedophelia and/or ephebophelia than those who are straight. Though as an astute commenter on the post pointed out that basically no evidence for the central thesis was provided by ESR.
And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.
No, Jeffrey Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.
Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.
The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.
Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.
I'm queer, but have a LOT of empathy for the previous generation and the crap they had to put up with. Can you just imagine trying to say you were a LGTBQ ally in the 1970s when these people were in their formative years??? It was a different time. They are a product of that time. Be thankful.
I'm thankful for his work, but today people like him are driving away people from open source.
And this is not a Linus Torvalds sometimes uses rude language kind of thing. It's about a person spewing hatred and toxic lies.
No, he's not. He's fighting against codes of conduct because he sees them as a Leftist attempt to gain control of open source software as an institution and subvert it, in other words, a Leftist power grab. This is not by any means the first such Leftist takeover in history. You can agree or disagree about his reading of what's going on, but either way it has nothing to do with normalizing homosexuality.
Since we all know that some homosexuals are pedophiles, what is the point of saying "he thinks homosexuals are pedophiles" without a proportion modifier?
I'd say this might be case-in-point.
Banning ESR will, of course, only reinforce and further his fury and disdain for what he seems to believe is political correctness gone awry.
Even if it drives him further into his current beliefs, it keeps him from throwing personal attacks on public mailing lists, which is what the OSI wants.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
The OSI has their own rights as well, and part of their own freedom of speech is that they get to chose who does or doesn't use their platform for speech.
Promoting something isn't the same thing as supporting or allowing it. Many mailing lists have allowed a self governing style of free speech. If you don't want to hear from someone, you add then to your banlist. The extreme and consistently offensive get marginalized by each person, rather than by a singular authority.
Your comment about never hiring someone who was said what ESR says about race, gender, or sexuality is a broad and unspecific brush. I've read the links provided, what specifically did he say, and when that would make him un-hireable forever?
> "Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp."
In my job I regularly have to talk to women. I wouldn't hire a developer who treated half the population differently. That's just one example too.
> There is no "be nice" rule in life
Golden Rule?
I think I used fetchmail once. Did you have something else in mind?
ESR has always been someone who has created drama. Look up the CML2 controversy on the linux kernel mailing list where ESR created so much drama that in the end the kernel devs just gave up on trying to work with him.
It's quite possible that the OSI just decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Because OSS is successful, unless you're in college, the majority of people contributing are those who are being paid to or are independent consultants, as that's possible now.
It's no longer a hobbyist interest, solely the domain of prolific idealists.
ESR has been a victim of his own success. Back when OSS was the upstart ideal, an iconoclast could herd the (small) number of cats and motivate people. The fight against Goliath made it easier to overlook/distract from one's foibles.
This is no longer the case. His fore-bearers are thankful for what he's done, but he's no longer critical. He's not a guy holding a torch in the dark anymore, for which you are grateful to stand near, whatever your personal feelings towards them.
I also suspect that because his influence has diminished as the movement has become normalized, this loss of power might be perceived "de-platforming" by more imagined forces (in his own words, feminism, SJWs, socialists, etc.), when it reality it is just him coming to terms with his no longer being a giant on whose shoulders it is necessary to stand.
That can kinda make a guy feel small, especially for someone who seems to lack humility (based on his own writings)
Seems like an attempt to intimidate an opponent and win an argument by making the opponent afraid (or banned) to participate
>>> ESR's “sharp language” is not an attempt to persuade. It is an attempt to intimidate opponents; to “win” an argument by making others afraid to participate. Indeed, even today OSI mailing list composition is entirely folks with enough privilege to be resistant to personal attacks. That's a sad, terrible thing. It's not “free speech” when it's an attempt to shout others down so that they have no voice. It's something else entirely. Further, not one of ESR's points is original or even original to this list. In his absence, not one of the ideas he so “colorfully” expressed will be lost. In the meantime, we're missing the input of so many people who will not participate in OSI because of our tolerance for wholly uncivilized behavior like his posts.
The way to stop this is to just disregard the contributions of those who’s asking price is everyone else’s slavish obedience to their standards of conduct.
I support getting rid of Raymond, but they couldn't have made themselves come off worse to your average internet commentator.
Until demonstrated how it might be otherwise, I contend that to be lunacy. Without a dog in the fight, or frankly much interest, I looked at the thread to make my own conclusions. I found nothing from ESR that I consider offensive, and I have much less tolerance for ass-clown behavior than I used to (coincidentally about the time I started working on becoming less of an ass-clown myself).
So I walk away thinking, yup, some special dandruff flake got their panties in a bunch over something silly. Because the message that might have changed my mind on that, well, it's not visible anymore.
Anyway, you can read ESR's dodgy message quoted in this post:
http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
IMO the "Persona Non Grata" clause is a mistake and ESR is right to oppose it. I don't agree with ESR on a lot of things but we should all agree that licenses that support/permit/include these clauses are not "Open Source". This endorsement from OSI is important and I don't think it should apply.
Indeed.
Well, assume that ESR was running for a board seat at OSI, and that the person did so shortly before the board elections. Maybe they wouldn't be banned for it, but one could argue whether that would be the right call. It's an interesting analogy, because the "folk" perception of both E. S. Raymond and C. A. Ehmke is quite similar, in a way.
http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
Toxic people exist. We must be able to discuss our opinion that someone is toxic.
"Loonytoon" is indeed a gratuitous insult, but a very mild one. Silly, even.
It doesn't make sense to me that OSI would react so strongly and dramatically to such a mild insult. I suspect there is another element to this which no one is discussing.
Pretty much represents HN community too.
> Only...that cold and mechanistic a way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one. For full understanding, the Apollonian/scientific mode is essential; for direct experience, the Dionysian/ecstatic mode is the only way to go.
That resonated surprisingly strongly with me.
Mind you, I disagree with Raymond on quite a few things, but he's clearly far worthier of being read (at least on OSS matters) than these Chestek and Berkus persons.
Founding shit like this took a special kind of dinosaur, the kind who criticizes everything. The self critique being the most important kind. In an ideal world you can never have enough of that. Sadly for other people, if you have a lot of it, it is hard not to project it outwards as well. It takes a great struggle to not subject others to the same standard one holds himself to. It can be done... until codez of conduct are coined then such person just explodes - which is funny. Fuzzy little creatures then make a home in the hard shell they leave behind.
ESR: "The effect – the intended effect – is to diminish the prestige and autonomy of people who do the work – write the code – in favor of self-appointed tone-policers. In the process, the freedom to speak necessary truths even when the manner in which they are expressed is unpleasant is being gradually strangled."
Which is what happened in the end.
Unfortunately, my respect for OSI has bottomed out after reading it.
Simply disagreeing with politically charged topics gets you a boot from many open source projects.
Many people that claim to want tolerance, actually want nothing less than exuberance for their own causes and have no problem painting people they disagree with as non-human, so they can harass, get them fired from their jobs or positions (canceling), and then finally silence.
This comes right out of the 'rules for radicals' playbook.
If you can't respect my freedom of speech, why should I protect yours?
This is absolutely brilliant
That’s not ironic. It would be ironic if a supporter of cancel culture got canceled.
More sources: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
> In 2015 Raymond accused the Ada Initiative and other women in tech groups of attempting to entrap male open source leaders and accuse them of rape, saying "Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp."
> Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."
These players want volunteers to do free work for them, but otherwise to be in control.
They can't have some scruffy old ultra-libertarians who speak their mind running the projects; they want weaklings and pushovers.
To be in control means being able to inject dubious changes into code that are against the interests of the public. Crypto Backdoors, DRM, vendor-specific crap, subversions of open standards, you name it.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
I would ban someone for that. "Toxic loonytoon" is not a productive way to have a discussion.
(Originally quoted it here but getting formatting right here is terrible).
I might want to relicense some projects I have...
If the correct way is to censor certain opinions, then naturally organizations that tend to do that will outcompete organizations that don’t.
And if not, then not.
I'm too not hopeful this time.
To paraphrase, "revolutionaries" can remain irrational longer than the you can remain alive and willing to contribute.
Because coding is a job, and open source coding is a job these days. And you are expected to behave in a somewhat professional manner.
ESR's email in any reasonable workplace would lead to a disciplinary hearing. It was a bad email that should not have been sent.
In what possible world do you expect such a story to end any other way, regardless of the forum and people involved?
It's unfortunately that the esr clown show has derailed that with the ravings of a man who, quite to the contrary of one of his sayings, doesn't contribute much code and won't shut up; and the rather than introducing any cogent or interesting thoughts on the topic, has simply sprayed abuse around like an out-of-control honeywagon. The OSI will be a great deal better off for his absence.
I think ESR is a dabbler and popularizer who has built his personal brand around being a Man-in-Tech rather than a person who actually produces significant technical contributions. RMS or Torvalds he ain't.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar