Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Groups that don't have a code of conduct (which in my experience increases rather than reduces the amount of jerkdom) get pressurised to add one. Conferences that don't have one attract twitter harassment campaigns. It's not really a free choice.
Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
261–270 of 447 posts
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Oh, I'm not the only one to notice the rampant transphobia in UK media and the labour party, nice. See how easy I proved your premise wrong?
You haven't proved anything other than the fact that you know exactly what I meant, and are using tactical nihilism to pretend that a tiny fraction of the population not having their every whim catered to is an issue the rest of us should care about.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know exactly who you are talking about. I’ve had some heated exchanges with them on Twitter. What started out as me just trying to understand the viewpoint of someone who is different than me, quickly turned into them turning their followers into an angry mob that flooded me with personal attacks. This one incident turned me off of not only that person but the entire cancel culture movement.
> This one incident turned me off of not only that person but the entire cancel culture movement. Are you perchance saying that you "cancelled" the cancel culture movement based on a single interaction you didn't enjoy?
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#264I'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…
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 pe…
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with.
I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM".
I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Let's face it, when the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Microsoft, the open source movement has very little to do with RMS' ideals.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#267I’m torn on this. 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 i…
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This one incident turned me off of not only that person but the entire cancel culture movement. Are you perchance saying that you "cancelled" the cancel culture movement based on a single interaction you didn't enjoy?
There is no problem with an individuals choosing not to engage based on their own experience. The problem with cancel culture is that we are encouraged to treat people as "cancelled" based on hearsay.
From other comments, you seem to be drawing a distinction between "social pressure" and "individual choices". Can you explain when one becomes the other?
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#269What's going on in FOSS these days is that the world of large, multi-national corporations, as well as governments, has become dependent on FOSS for critical infrastructure. These players want volunteers to do free work for them, but otherwise to be in control. They can't have some scruffy old ultra-libertarians who speak their mind running the projects; they want weaklings and pushovers. To be in control means being…
ESR is not only an ultra-libertarian, he’s also a vile scumbag with a considerably inflated ego.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Linux might be where many people's minds go by default in this comparison, but it's not the example I meant to conjure here. I'm talking more about, for example, the FOSS communities around game-console homebrew tooling, where any given project is usually an outgrowth of some private Discord somewhere—some pre-existing group of friends—and so everyone on the project calls one-another names in the [public] GitHub issu…
My guess is something like this: Once the project becomes big/useful enough and normal people are now using and relying on it, then they can start ousting the eccentrics/untolerables because at a large enough population, normal people just naturally outnumber them.
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