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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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
> They have already had an alarming degree of success at this through the institution of "Codes of Conduct" on many projects. This has led to the expulsion of productive contributors for un-PCness; it's not just a problem in theory.
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's quite interesting to read the last paragraph on that page that lists your offenses.
"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
> I have been banned from the Drupal project for Code Of Conduct violations in 2016.
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.
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.
I don't mean to dispute that ESR may be a jerk, but I'd ask you to consider what his position is:
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Torvalds has been exceptionally tame by comparison as of late. He's adopted a formal CoC, admitted he is often a real jerk, and is seeking professional counselling. You know, he is acting like an adult in this entire thing.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Any individual or group can do whatever they want in the OSS world, nobody is stopping anyone from being a jerk except those communities that voluntarily self-govern in such a fashion that excludes jerks. Where's the problem?
It's absolutely legitimate to have a F/OSS-licensed project with such a culture. But it shouldn't count as part of the F/OSS movement(s), any more than an MIT-licensed website about how you need to pay SCO for Linux licenses would be part of the movement.
The comparison to BDSM is incorrect. BDSM is about "abuse" that one enjoys due to established parameters. I don't think anyone at the receiving end of abuse within F/OSS enjoys the abuse and seeks it out. That's why the codes of conduct exist, to... bring F/OSS in line with the expected ethical standards of scenes such as BDSM, so to speak.
> 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?
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.
> where the idea is that nobody is kind to anybody and that's how everybody likes it?
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.
Whether FOSS implies open membership is a matter of semantics. FOSS can refer to the development model (bazaar vs cathedral), the community, attitudes ("patches welcome" as a way of saying "well do it yourself then", meant sarcastically as "patches welcome" is repeating the implicit), or ideological stance (blah blah freedom).
So I don't think "does FOSS imply open membership" even has an answer.
Maaybe, but you'd have to follow the "safe, sane and consensual" rules. Explain in advance that that's what you're doing. Ensure that everyone is on board. And not do it in public, because the public aren't consenting.
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)
I doubt OSI has stated a "culture of abuse" as their goal, their CoC even indicates the opposite.
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.
I don't see any reason you can't have an open source project which enforces a strong code of conduct, creates a "safe space" for members sensitive to various things, which doesn't tolerate rudeness, jerks, bullies, etc. Or one with a "show me the code, stick and stones" ethos.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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'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.
I'm not exactly sure where you draw the difference. Minority opinions are sometimes helpful in creating products that work for everyone (my favorite example here being a hand dryer that did not recognize black skin). It can be useful to amplify such voices. If you want to call that "SJWism", fine.
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.
> 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
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.
> You can ALWAYS voice your concerns in a productive manner in the "meritocratic" ideal.
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'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.
The part under discussion appears to be a quoted earlier message; HOWEVER I would much prefer a link to a message plausibly at least to be from the same server as ESR's other messages.
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.
Viewing that archive by date #1 and searching again, I cannot locate a message plausibly within range of the timestamp #2 of the supposed "Quoted" content.
#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.
In the same previous thread, people say that the offending emails were deleted from the OSI archive[1]. This seems, to me, like a very bad move for exactly the reasons you're highlighting here.
Other quotes from the chain by ESR about Eric Schultz:
> 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.
They do not assume bad faith. They define 'liberty and nondiscrimination' in a particular way that the other person, Eric Schulz, objectively opposes. Schulz would probably disagree about the definitions of those terms that ESR is using, but it is not an assumption of bad faith.
They don't assume bad faith, they are accurate depictions of what Schultz wanted to do. I mean, would he even disagree with that? The original proposal was for a license that'd allow anyone except US ICE to use the software, for example. That's ideological. It's pretty clearly different from the non-discrimination policies open source licenses normally have, that's why he had to propose the license to start with. And he wanted to use the OSI to endorse his new license as being open source, whilst it didn't meet the original criteria.
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.
Uh, I suppose the name calling, strawman-ing of arguments and insinuations of subterfuge.
> 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.
The "toxic loonytoon" part, referencing a prominent candidate to the OSI board? I mean, surely we can all have our own opinions about any candidate, but the optics aren't that good.
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.
It's inefficient, and occludes what the discussion is actually about. As someone not deeply familiar with the discussion, I am no further to understanding what ESD is, as the language used is mostly a string of assertions without proof, and little definitional value. In other words, there were better, more effective ways to answer the question, still completely unfettered by any need to be "PC".
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.
conflating a code of conduct with "political ratfucking" (whatever that means) and going into a rant about political correctness and Marxism is at best incoherent, not exactly original and at worst paranoid and adds nothing of value.
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.
>> * 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.
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)...
Making creators accountable to bureaucratic values using cynical techniques like whisper campaigns and deplatforming will destroy the culture and technologies it produced.
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.
Or we need a cycle of a band of foul-mouthed non-agreeable assholes breaking off from the stale norm and creating a programming counterculture that goes on to revolutionize the world before being taken over by entryists who grind its culture back in to placid oppressive normalcy, upon which a band of foul-mouthed non-agreeable assholes break off and...
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. 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.
> but this couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
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.
Once again, another person has been arrested and unfortunately cancelled by those who disagree with him over wrong-think. The OSI isn't really doing anyone favours over banning people like ESR because they have an opposing view over changing the organisation's policy, they just make the whole argument a one-sided echo-chamber which isn't healthy for any org if one is concerned about some changes like ESR was.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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 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.
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-sp...
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 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
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.
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.
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.
of course once that bridge is crossed they can attribute the work to someone currently approved of and more deserving
Deleted Comment
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.
"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...
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.
Dead Comment
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
So I don't think "does FOSS imply open membership" even has an answer.
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)
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.
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?
More like infiltration.
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).
Beware those whose sole argument is "you are a bully".
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.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
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.
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/
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521608
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 .
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518473
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>> * 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.
https://ethicalsource.dev/definition/
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)...
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A bit rough tone, sure, but I think that shows that he’s actually passionate about these things. That’s good, not bad.
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.
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.