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Comment by nrclark | Hacker News Reader

I've read a bunch of ESR's writing, and I disagree with him on an awful lot of political and social issues. Chances are we wouldn't get along very well.

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.

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It's just a power grab and has gone on forever in many forms. Redefine language and classify certain language as non-compliant under the guise of whatever it is that works to your advantage. Then use this to create systemic policy to dictate towards your goals and ultimately control whatever resource it is you were trying to colonize or acquire.

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.

More than that, once some entity is in power, language policing and other types of arbitrary rulemaking are widely-deployed to allow the power broker to quickly expose troublemakers and wrongthinkers.

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.

Why do you consider it a power grab sooner than, say, people acting in good faith who really believe in their stated values?

For me, personally, it would be easier to accept a good faith answer if they explained what "sharp tone" led to the expulsion. I mean, I can completely understand if threats were made, or if disparaging comments against protected categories (i.e. sexist, racist, etc comments). Or hate speech, or content that is clearly against policy (i.e. links to pornography). Personal attacks, doxing, stalking, extended periods of harassment etc, etc, etc. There are lots of things that people get banned for and it's pretty easy to say what they are.

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 ;-)

ESR was not banned for having the wrong opinion – many others expressed similar opinions both before and after his messages. But ESR, over the course of a few days where he returned to the mailing list, was increasingly unable to express those opinions in a professional manner.

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....

Can you provide examples of the "unprofessional" messages or the "personal attacks"?

Thanks for giving some context. I really believe that if you are banning someone you should explain your rationale. Personal attacks are not good and if that email is to be believed then it certainly seems like a justified decision. Hopefully the moderators will be able to improve on the optics of their decisions in the future.

So, you’re saying “toxic loonytoon” is what got him banned?

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.

maybe it was ratf*cker. He then going off saying if you don't let me say my words, the world is doomed. It seems it wasn't the first time he did this.

It can be both. Many power grabs and coups are performed by people with a good faith belief that they're right and the current administration is wrong or dangerous.

Yet I feel like "power grab" is a loaded description that implies such a "grab" is unjustified and that the grabber is primarily interested in power for power's sake, not for otherwise justifiable, altruistic, or benevolent reasons.

Because it is a bad thing regardless who does it. If the supposed good guys were actually as good as they thought they were, they would simply aim to do whatever jobs need doing with as much integrity as they posess. They wouldn't be grabbing power, for any reason. There is no "enlightened" reason to grab power. If you don't like how someone else runs something, it's not your only option to try to take it over from them. You can also simply not join that club and not care what it does or how it does it. An organization like OSI isn't like a geographical country where you are forced to be in it, and so there is some legitimate excuse for actively vying for control over it and it's policies.

The whole idea of merit and meritocracy is that power and influence (and perhaps control, if applicable) should be allocated fairly and transparently, via processes that reliably correlate with good decision-making. Notably, a stridently authoritarian leadership style calling for bans on "evil" and "unethical" software use (as featured in the so-called "Ethical Software Definition") does not correlate with such; but to be fair, neither does the use of obnoxious name-calling like "toxic loony". To me, the latter just feels sad! So, I'd say I can see "both sides" in this, so to speak.

It's weird for open source because the ousted party can usually take the tree and fork. A prominent example of this is OpenBSD, which started with Theo being ousted from NetBSD. In many ways that fork is now more influential than the original.

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.

> It's weird for open source because the ousted party can usually take the tree and fork

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.)

> My initial reaction was to compare your sentiment to nation states and consider it in its extreme to be a justification for despotic behavior

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.

But then, if the prospective oustee is a long-standing member of the already-existing community — and it's hard to argue that the co-founder is anything but that — then shouldn't it be the Johnny-come-lately constable of the tone police that should be the one to fork the tree and start their own community around that?

From the description, this sounds like a permanent ban, which is a really blunt tool -- and overly convenient, given how controversial ESR is. Keep in mind that this is about a discussion that's not in a technical, but in a political forum. After all, the OSI is a political institution, not a technical one.

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.

OSI is also a technical institution. Why is he controversial then? It's because of his statements.

AIUI, the point of codes of conduct (when used in good faith) are basically like FAQs or What Wikipedia Is Not[1] in that they're social bludgeons to avoid having the same fucking discussion with stubborn idiots, where they do this[2] to cause tedious repetitive arguments of how the project should be run.

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_...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1277/

[3]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...

> codes of conduct (when used in good faith)

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.

when used in good faith is the key part there, though.

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.

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.

You make it sound like a deliberate strategy. But even if it was playing out that way (I refuse to be the judge about that, fortunately I'd never be). I'd take it as a given that this "takeover" is a pure chance outcome, even if repeated, kind of like how Columbus never intended to discover America. Organizations like the FSF or any open source project are just not plausible targets for an elaborate takeover scheme, people with that kind of ambnition would surely look elsewhere.

The Cultural Revolution in Maoist China was a deliberate strategy. The whole Gramscian idea of attaining "hegemony" in a "long march through the institutions" is just as goal-oriented, though success of the core idea is far more mixed than is generally acknowledged.

I don't know about others, but personally, I find the overly politically correct "safe spaces" much less welcoming and counter to the spirit of the internet.

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.

> I find the overly politically correct "safe spaces" much less welcoming and counter to the spirit of the internet.

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.

In my experience, a lot of these people say they want tolerance, but what they really mean is tolerance of the ideas (and people) they agree with.

Agreed. Whatever happened the old "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" spirit? Somehow, it just seemed to vanish over the past decade without any explanation.

Yeah, you see this everywhere -- "filter bubbles" and all that. People have been trained to expect protection from anything that even vaguely intrudes on their own sense of self-righteousness, and consider this breach the failing of Someone Else (TM), generally the platform operator (whether that's an employer, school, webmaster, mailop, etc.).

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".

Probably the best we can do is to have a variety of places to discuss things, with a variety of rules and norms and purposes -- and an acknowledgement that one person's safe space is another person's nightmare.

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-sp...

The issue seems to be that if something fun happens in a place that's not a safe space, other will come, demand to participate and then demand that it turns into a safe space so they can participate on their terms.

Needing to tip-toe around with every word to avoid the risk of offending someone isn't really new, it's just that many people in skewed power dynamics have been able to be avoid doing so for years. Nowadays, if you're the one being offended, you have a lot more tools to connect with others who may feel the same way, and bring attention to your point of view.

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.

> 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.

> Tone-policing, cancel culture, and identity politics are a real problem though

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).

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

> I don't know what the right solution is.

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.

Authoritarianism in schools is very old; it definitely didn't begin with what are now called "zero tolerance" policies. I'm pretty sure we would have noticed if attending an authoritarian school gave you an authoritarian personality style, especially given the interest in the latter in post-WW2 psych studies.

The problem is exactly the opposite of authoritarianism. People don't believe that any person can be trusted with authority, so it was all transferred into the dead letter of a massively generalized district-wide policy which, of course, says "anything bad is bad and should be punished".

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.

> I'm pretty sure we would have noticed if attending an authoritarian school gave you an authoritarian personality style

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.

We also don't know what the movement would look like today if it weren't dominated by their personalities (and their personality conflicts) in its formative days. It's pretty clear that a lot of people were interested in the ideals behind their movements and contributed in massive ways to the success of the movements - it's not clear that either of them were needed to get the movement off the ground (see also, Great Man Theory).

I seem to recall a post on his blog where he addressed this point. IIRC, his conclusion was that if it had not been him, then then the culture/movement/whatever would have eventually invented someone else like him. That is, someone would have eventually noticed the same things, come to the same or similar conclusions, recognized (or at least thought) they had the social skills/aptitude needed to successfully promote the ideas to the wider world, and gotten started. I can't disagree with that. The question to me is whether that would have happened around the same time, or if it would have taken several more years for the same things to click for someone else.

What it would look like: an army of docile microserfs beavering away for free to make FOSS work better for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, IBM, ... and the odd government who wants a crypto backdoor or two.

As opposed to the current open-source movement, which mostly consists of microserfs beavering away for a salary to make FOSS work better for all of the above?

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.

It is lamentable indeed, and this infiltrated, subverted movement now wants to purge itself of the old guard, who are not good for business.

This is a weird rejoinder to make in a thread about ESR, who was one of the loudest voices arguing for corporate-friendly language ("open-source" not "free software") and licenses (permissive, not copyleft).

And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it...

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.

> Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches?

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.

One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking.

Linux was a really nice hobby before then.

I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums.

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.

There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.

Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not.

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.

Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter.

We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.

BSD was around, popular, and much more mature than the Linux ecosystem in that early 90s, but was dogged by the BSDi lawsuit. (In fact, SunOS was derived from BSD for most of the 80s, through 1992 or so, when they jumped to AT&T/USL Unix — likely as a result of the lawsuit.) This is arguably the raison d'être of Linux as well[1]:

> If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.

[1]: https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html

In 1998, Linux was reliable and performant. It just hadn't made inroads into big corporations to give it pointy-haired-boss cred.

In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could do.

I was using Linux and Solaris in 1998, and doing things on Solaris was a constant pain compared to doing the same things on Linux. (Sun was still trying to push CDE at that point, for crying out loud.) I compiled KDE and Samba for our Sun and dramatically increased its utility.

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.

Speaking of Sun machines, in 1997, I was running Red Hat 2 Linux on a Sun SparcStation 20 at Nortel.

BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.

Ah, but a license, no matter how permissive, does not ipso facto cause the admission of questionable changes into the upstream of a project that everybody trusts.

It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.

This might be a good thing then. This has become a pet peeve of mine.

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.

".. parties who seek to limit the promise of free software" that's an interesting phrase as Free Software has always also been about limiting freedom. After all a license is something that puts certain restrictions on the usage of a piece of software. This is not much different to accusing the GPL of "limiting the promise of free software". Or the AGPL for that matter, which is probably what the OSI proponents are thinking anyway.

The MongoDB license they are picking on barely differs from the AGPL.

This doesn't seem to be accurate, especially as far as OSI and OSD is concerned. Say what you want about the AGPL, but the license does not discriminate against any field of endeavour - it does not state "you can't use this software to offer a network-based endpoint" or anything like that. It just triggers a source distribution requirement in case of such use, by analogy with distributing the software itself to the public (an analogy which is in fact supported by copyright law itself, viz. "public performance" of a copyrighted work). The MongoDB approach post-relicensing is very different.

ESR probably wasn't personally needed. RMS may have been.

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.

Strongly agreed.

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.

I read RMS's article articulating what he called "kind communication". It was philosophically consistent with what he has been espousing for years -- free software, the concern for making sure that people have access to software. He expressed UI design philosophies along those lines, which I interpret as making sure people who were otherwise disadvantaged could still access the same powerful tools people with better devices can access.

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.

All that is left is removing their names from code and projects they contributed so they do not exist. Don't that some won't try this and worse many will cheer it on.

of course once that bridge is crossed they can attribute the work to someone currently approved of and more deserving

that is illegal and will never happen.

I'm reminded of the saying "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

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