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Comment by troad | Hacker News Reader

> This raises interesting moral questions that I'm not sure I have an answer to.

It's not really all that much of a moral conundrum. Marcan's belief - expressed a number of times on his Mastodon - appears to be that he can prevent other people from discussing something, for the sole reason he doesn't want it discussed. It's not a particularly defensible position in an open society.

In particular, he is upset that people on Hacker News tend to point out that a contributor on Asahi - Lina - appears to be a computer-generated anime alter ego of Marcan himself.

Me, I have absolutely no problem with Marcan having an anime alter ego, but I don't think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to refrain from noticing this and remarking on it. Marcan disagrees, and this is the source of the HN-Marcan rift.

(As I've remarked before, I do mind OSS projects listing fake contributors, for both ethical and legal reasons, but that's another discussion.)

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Quit with the gaslighting. It's not about an anime avatar, and you know it.

The problem is more that HN is perceived, with good reason, to be transphobic, and Asahi has several trans developers. This is also the reason why a couple of other people I won't mention don't want HN to link to their projects either, because for every link, several people will bitch in the comments about the validity of their gender and pronouns. (As if creating a web app somehow makes one an authority in biology.)

I mean, obviously, it's not like everybody who comments here takes part in the abuse, but when you spend every damn day of your life seeing it and depending on where you live, possibly being harassed by the government over it too, HN turns out to be one more place where you simply can't have any peace.

(And honestly, even if Lina is a anime alter ego, which you haven't proven, and only suspect, why the fuck do you care? Don't you have something better to spend your time on?)

> gaslighting

> and you know it

I'm always so knowledgeable in the eyes of people who criticise me!

No, I didn't know Asahi had a single trans developer. I've never seen it come up on HN, where I most often hear about the cool work being done by the Asahi team. The vast majority of comments on here about every new Asahi article are effusive praise.

I dispute the characterisation of HN as some transphobic hellsite. That characterisation is simply not accurate, in the slightest, whatever perception may prevail on the Asahi Discord.

> why the fuck do you care

My other comment below, explaining the legal issue with fake OSS contributors, was already up by the time of your comment, so I refer you there. More broadly, I think Marcan should get to have as many anime alter-egos as he wishes. I'm just not particularly surprised that people find that noteworthy, and I think if you choose to have a public anime alter ego, you probably should be able to deal with that? I feel like Marcan's attempt to shut down this discussion is a perfect example of the Streisand effect - I certainly would have never found out about 'Lina' were it not for this silly feud.

> several people will bitch in the comments about the validity of their gender and pronouns.

I've seen these posts, and they're horrible, mean-spirited, and hurtful.

But as far as I've seen all those posts have also been downvoted to hell, flagged, and hidden, and the users often banned, and they're often from new "green" users rather than regulars. It's entirely possible that some of these posts remained (especially if they're posted after the conversation died down and there are less eyes), but I'm certain that if you email dang that he will take action.

At some point the first comment on one of my articles was "gay n---r soiboy" or something to that effect from a new account – a curious comment since my website has a picture of me being white enough to get a sunburn in Ireland – but how do you prevent that? Limiting sign-ups is the only thing I can think of.

I can definitely understand that people feel very negative about these things, but I think it's unfair to judge all of HN by it – you're essentially judging a community by the posts that were considered inappropriate and were removed.

And if you don't like HN (for any reason) then that's fine, so don't visit HN then. All this tomfoolery with referer blocks seems rather at odds with how the internet is supposed to work; "microsoft.com blocks links of the referer is from lwn.net" would cause a loud uproar here.

A good comment on this at last.

You are misunderstanding. You can discuss your conspiracies anywhere you want, just not on a post pointing to the people that have to deal with the fallout of your unfounded conjecture.

Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.

> Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.

If I contribute my code to an open source project, then I - as the copyright holder - agree to license my work under an open licence.

If I use an OSS project, I am using other people's copyrighted work under an open licence from them. Without that licence, I have no legal basis on which to use that work.

Only real people can (currently) hold copyright. If person X writes some code, but the licence (incorrectly) attributes the copyright to person Y, and person Y purports to give me an open licence to use that work, then - crucially - I have no license from the actual copyright holder (person X) to use their work.

Until an effective open source license is made, this code is not open source; it is completely proprietary. If person X chooses to sue you for copyright infringement, it is no defence to say that you're using it under a license from person Y, because person Y had no right to give you that licence.

This is a major ethical and legal problem. I would be very wary of the Asahi codebase.

If you wanted to split hairs this thin, you wouldn't use any project with at least one german citizen as contributor, since they can never truly yield all copyright on a work. You'll be fine. Anonymous contributions to free software (or even entire releases done anonymously, e.g. Bitcoin) are not actually uncommon.

As I said, very weird hangup to have, definitely not motivated by other reasons.

> If you wanted to split hairs this thin, you wouldn't use any project with at least one german citizen as contributor, since they can never truly yield all copyright on a work.

Nor can anyone else, copyright is not generally 'destructible'. That's why it's a licence. The holder keeps the copyright, but licenses the work to the general public. (Assignments are another way to achieve something like this, provided the assignee then licenses the work.)

I assume what you're referring to is inalienable moral rights - hence the reference to Germany - but those are a feature of many (most?) of the world's legal systems. They are included in one of the revisions to the Berne Convention, if I recall correctly, which is an international treaty on intellectual property.

I understand you're sceptical, but the legal dimension of OSS does matter. Using copyrighted material without a licence would constitute a major business risk. I would appreciate it if you could kindly refrain from making ungenerous assumptions about the intentions of others.

What makes ze Germans special?

Right to moral objection.

That doesn't explain anything. Can you elaborate?

The most commonly cited example is a musician objecting to use of their music during a neo nazi rally. They won that case as the court judged the integrity of the work to be compromised.

I see. Well, I don't think that would affect code in the same way. If they have already contributed it then it's out in the open, and unless the maintainer was doing something objectionable they wouldn't have a case, and even if they did it would only be enforceable in Germany.

> that he can prevent other people from discussing something

And again, when some rando says "they want to prevent people from discussing, free speech!" the topic is always the same, they want to be freely racist, homophobic, whatever. Cmon man, just stop.

Forced participation has no place in open society. In such a society, when in private spaces, the valid response when told "You are not welcome here" is to leave and not to harangue the host about open societies.

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