* One of the lead devs' laptops is named after Hitler's hideout in the forest
* Their 2017 conference had a torchwalk that was a staple of Nazi youth camping (and heavily encouraged by the SS as a nationalism thing)
* Multiple of the core devs are just assholes to people on and offline.
* Most of the suckless philosophy is "It does barely what it needs to and it was built by us, so it's superior to what anyone else has written". A lot of it shows in dwm, dmenu, etc.
Open Source Software used to be about individuality.
They're not actively campaigning to remove other window managers are they? That seems to be a feature of "community software" for whatever reason.
What I love is that I forget it's there. For years I simply forget I have a "window manager" because to me its a dozen keyboard shortcuts as a shim for managing terminals. If emacs could do that as invisibly I'd be a super happy chappie.
Yes, there are definitely also normal torchwalks in Germany (I have been part of some as part of church youthgroups). However with all the other information that has surfaced about suckless over the years, it really doesn't look like a coincidence that they choose that as a group activity on their get together over all other possible things you could be doing.
This really doesn't matter. For reasons that I won't get into, I pay attention to Dutch news and most things that happen in The Netherlands don't make the news in the US. This doesn't mean you can't pay attention to another countries news. If you have certain ideologies you are more likely to pay attention to media that isn't mainstream.
As for "all the other information that has surfaced about suckless": there really isn't anything other than that hostname. I have actually asked the person with that hostname directly twice, and they opted not to answer. I agree it's not a good look, especially in the context of some other posts from that person. But it's not a good look for that person, not for all of suckless. If you look at all Python devs, or all Rust devs, or all HN posters, or all people 1.86cm in height: there's bound to be some unpleasant people there. It's just how things work.
And if you're going to make an accusation as serious as that then you really need to do better than "surely it can't be a coincidence..." Personally I'd say that a community which coalesced around a particular view on software also happens to have similar extreme political views as something that's rather unlikely.
The entire reason this whole "suckles are Nazis" thing is even a thing is because a single person kept bringing it up on HN, Lobsters and Twitter. As near as I can tell, it's a pretty successful campaign from one exceedingly toxic person with a grudge.
If by "their" you mean a suckless.org host, no, that's not true. A hostname in the outgoing mail headers of one person posting to the mailing list was "wolfsschanze", i.e., a machine on that user's LAN, not a suckless.org server. The person in question was FRIGN. This got attention because he personally repeatedly pestered Lennart Poettering, who noticed that string in the mail headers and called it out on Twitter. https://web.archive.org/web/20190404160024/https://twitter.c...
Lennart correctly noted that this hostname was one person's laptop, but this morphed in the public consciousness to "a suckless host is named after Hitler's HQ".
> one of them has been known to go off about "Cultural Marxism,"
This person is also FRIGN. Specifically it's a reference to this lobste.rs comment: https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm#c_ze5ccy
I hear these same two things repeated over and over as evidence of nazism within suckless (example, the Wikipedia talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org), but it is one person (who, granted, maintains at least one suckless.org project https://suckless.org/people/FRIGN/). I think badly of him as a result, but I don't see any reason to disbelieve the multiple Germans who tell me that torchlit walks are a common German tradition, or to tie it to the Charlottesville march, which was extremely untraditional in the region it took place in.
I work on Xfce in my spare time with a small group of other developers from around the world, and if I learned that one of them was a neo-nazi, I would immediately call for them to be expelled from the community. If the other maintainers refused, I would step down and leave the community myself.
To me, any other response would be tolerating and accepting neo-nazism, to the point that I would assume and expect outsiders would suspect the entire development team is ok with neo-nazism. None of that is ok in my book.
I think FRIGN is odious but my judgment is that a gross edgy joke (the hostname) and one reference to "cultural marxism"* isn't sufficient to call someone a neo-nazi. Well, more importantly, believing it isn't sufficient (as I do, and I suspect the suckless people do) does not mean people like me or the suckless people are, as you word it, "tolerating or accepting neo-nazism".
*Despite Wikipedia's only page on cultural marxism being a redirect to "Cultural Marxism anti-semitic far-right conspiracy theory", it is not unusual to rail against cultural marxism in normal conservative circles, including respectable anti-Trump anti-anti-semitic circles like National Review and Tablet. See for example https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-becaus... ; but I don't want to veer this thread into off-topicness, only to provide evidence that complaining about cultural marxism doesn't make someone a neo-nazi.
He seems very comfortable repeating what is essentially the propaganda of Neonazi groups like PEGIDA.
I agree that we should be sceptical of extreme claims. Maybe it's a coincidence that they did their torchlit walk just after the Charlottesville march. Maybe it's just one of them who is willing to use Nazi references when naming his devices. Maybe it's just a weird fringe that posts Neonazi propaganda online. But the more these individual things come together, the more they build a picture, and the more it behoves us to take this picture seriously.
Yep, that seems straightforwardly bad. Even so, I don't consider metux a suckless.org guy, but rather a deplorable person who contributes to multiple projects, one of which is hosted on suckless.org. The link you posted was from a Devuan mailing list.
Someone else used the example of Xfce, but suckless.org is a much more informal place that basically is a collection of separate projects with a similar aesthetic.
> But the more these individual things come together, the more they build a picture,
Sure, judgmments like yours are reasonable. I wouldn't begrudge someone choosing to avoid suckless over it, or even publicly voicing concern about the suckless community. But it's tiresome when every comment thread ostensibly about dwm, dmenu and st receives wild accusations of suckless.org being a community of nazis.
And I really think there's zero evidence of the torch walk being anything at all.
Having one far-right loon in your team might just raise some eyebrows. A second, however, shows a pattern.
At risk of putting myself out there, it shows how crazy things have gotten when neo-nazi sympathies are described as "just some political beliefs".
How is dwm, a piece of software, part of a political ideology? If the program and its source code promoted a specific belief, that would be one thing. But I haven't seen that in any of the suckless tools I use.
My comments weren't meant to trivialize anything the authors may or may not believe. I'm just saying that I personally don't care what that is, even if I may disagree with it. The software they produce is not in any way tainted by this.
I'm pretty bummed out to hear about all of this. I thought the suckless style software was pretty cool, easy to grok, minimalist. I use a lot of it. Granted, I've been planning on translating all of the minimalist C software I've been using to R7RS scheme, so maybe this just gives me more motivation to get started on porting my stack to that.
Someone in an earlier thread said something like, if he avoided software written by assholes then he would have a hard time using his computer, something like that. I think that's kind of true, but there are definitely red lines when it comes to violent ideologies.
ReiserFS. The creator was convicted of murder and it went away. It was open source and could have been carried on by others, but wasn't.
Granted, the technical advantages of ReiserFS had already been replicated elsewhere by that point.
I don't think this counts as "cancellation". Interest in the filesystem waned over the years, in part surely due to the criminal case. But it was also technically superseded by other filesystems, so there wasn't any reason for keeping it. There was some chatter about Reiser4/5 a few years ago, and someone somewhere is probably still running and maintaining it outside of the kernel.
As awful as that case was, I think it speaks to the possibility of separating art from artist. There's no reason that awful human beings, by whatever criteria we decide to label them as such, can't produce things that have artistic or technical merit. At the end of the day, we're all flawed in different ways. Chances are that many of the authors, artists, and celebrities we hold in high regard have thought or done things we wouldn't agree with, yet we never hear about it. Dismissing someone's entire existence because they've done something objectionable, or in this day and age simply said or implied something objectionable, is wrong IMO. Outrage travels like wildfire online, and can often be sparked by a misunderstanding, which is then amplified in various echo chambers.
I'm not saying that wrong behavior should be swept under the rug. People should be held accountable for their words and actions. But at the same time, let's not crucify people because of some collective moral outrage against them. Context and nuance matter. The world would be a better place if we knew how to talk to each other despite of our differences.
I was googling this again and surprised that it took that long.
In distro land the response was much faster. Close to the murder, distros had it in the stock install, selectable from the installer, even some as a default. That changed pretty quickly.
I guess the kernel itself needs to move slowly on a deprecation like this, because some users will have the FS lying around on disk for many years after it is common. Effectively locking people out of their data is a big step.
“The Wolf’s Lair” (but in German) sounds like it could plausibly be selected coincidentally.
There are a lot of IRC nerds who use wolves as part of a moniker, “Canis”, “Lupine” & “Aardwolf” spring immediately to mind.
I do. You are wrong. Not specific to wolves, tho.
When i learned about Hitlers base, i my first thought was whether Hitler was some kind of animal fan (what i later learned was called "being a furry")
Linus Torvalds, for example, used to be a raging asshole, but as far as I know he was just a dick to other people who had pissed him off. He wasn't advocating for genocide or stripping rights away from people or whatever.
This FRIGN guy seems like he might be a part of the latter group. If true, that makes him a very different kind of asshole, the kind we do not welcome into our communities.