Hacker News Reader

Comment by memefrog | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> traditional free software values (like respect for others' beliefs, freedom of conscience)

A. I'm not sure such a state ever existed in open source, this feels very "Make open source great again", pining for a time that never was

B. Nothing says "respecting others' beliefs" like trying to prevent others from marrying.

Mozilla was on the downslope long before Brendan and given what he did afterwards (Brave) it's clear he would only accelerated Mozilla's demise. I guess we all missed out on FireCoin or whatever other scam he would have run.

Brave grew from nothing to 22M DAU, while Firefox lost share pretty much every month over those 8 years.

Your "FireCoin" b.s. aside, you can't explain how Brave grew while Firefox shrank. Surely, ritually-impure me would have meant failure for Brave, which you assume falsely in order to claim I'd have wrecked Mozilla worse than it got rekt without me. This is counterfactual.

ESR used to be a widely respected figure in open source. Open source has pretty obviously become much less politically tolerant over time.

  Open source has pretty obviously become much less politically tolerant over time.

There was never a time when open source was tolerant of outright bigotry.

Okay? How is this relevant to the discussion? We're not talking about 'bigotry'.

You're a bit blind to it, but yeah, we are. Patience for ESR ran out over his calling all black people criminals, claiming all women were chomping at the bit to toss around fake rape accusations, and blaming homosexuals for HIV, etc., etc. That's bigotry whether or not you agree with his premise.

Show me a time when the open source community was ever okay with that kind of bullshit.

The time when ESR was a universally accepted member of it, given he literally invented the term. The time when he was a leader of it for many years. All time right up until a couple of years ago when entryists performed a hostile takeover to impose their niche Silicon Valley political views on everyone else.

IOW, you can't demonstrate the open source community being tolerant of bigotry? Got it. ESR ran his mouth and "suffered" the consequences. Fuck around and find out as the kids say. There was no so-called "hostile takeover" nor imposition of "niche Silicon Valley political views".

>IOW, you can't demonstrate the open source community being tolerant of bigotry? Got it.

As I already explained, the topic of this thread is not bigotry, but something that you, unilaterally, have labelled 'bigotry'. Those are different things.

>ESR ran his mouth and "suffered" the consequences. Fuck around and find out as the kids say.

Wow you seem such a nice and tolerant person. (inb4 you bring up the 'paradox of tolerance' in a way that demonstrates you didn't understand it at all)

>There was no so-called "hostile takeover" nor imposition of "niche Silicon Valley political views".

... he says, immediately after saying that someone was essentially blacklisted (oh no, I said one of the bad words! BLOCKLISTED, not blacklisted, SORRY FOR MY RACISM!!!!) for having a right-of-centre political opinion.

Given how much flak Brave (and by extension Eich) gets on HN, it's somewhat ironic that you identify his departure as the moment when Mozilla abandoned its traditional values.

HN is obviously, by its very nature, representative primarily of silicon valley.

Much less so than 10 years ago, when 2/3rds of the posts were about either combination itself or companies taking part in the accelerator.

This is VASTKY more popular and diverse now.

Diverse in nationalities and backgrounds, yes. Diverse in viewpoints, not so much.

The Overton window is quite narrow on HN, and I have the distinct impression it is narrowing further. Though I do admit that within that window, discourse is very lively, to the extent that a casual observer can easily be fooled into believing this is a place for free exchange of ideas.

> This is VASTKY more popular and diverse now.

How do you measure diversity on HN?

Looking at the amount of traffic coming from Non-US IPs would be a start. It was incredibly US centric back in the day.

Erm, diversity is a lot more than just geolocation

> [...] he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his firm opposition to same-sex marriage.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

Over his donation to a (very) popular political campaign in California.

Recall that Obama was elected in the same year as Eich's donation on a platform that marriage is defined to be between a man and a woman, and that the proposition in question passed with 52% support in California, one of the most socially liberal states in the USA.

People don't like Obama either. The virtue signalling by proxy is lame, no?

He won a landslide victory.

>the only view you are allowed is the one approved by people that spend their lives on Twitter.

I'm reasonably sure most of those people moved to Mastodon.

thanks memefrog

Based frog.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com