Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

write.as

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#31

Post by Communitivity »

londons_explore wrote: post #9

Operations like the FSF have a single goal - to promote Free Software. If they can also promote equality at the same time, then great. But the goal of promoting equality and free software are not equal - free software is the primary goal. If the organisation is acting illegally , then it's a matter for the police. But if the organisation is focussing on it's primary goal rather than a 2ndary goal you think is more im…

I cannot disagree strongly enough.

We have lost sight of the idea that all organizations should use long term thinking and have the following priorities, in this order:

* Do nothing that harms our employees, customers, or our investors

* Accomplish our mission, whatever mission that is

* Create revenue for investors

If the OP's account is true (I have no reason to discount it) then the FSFE violated rule #1. I'd argue that the FSF mission is to promote free software and a healthy ecosystem of Open Source software and developers. If you accept that as the FSF mission, and the account is true, then they also violated rule #2.

We should not rely on the laws to prompt us to act for social good. The laws are there to isolate and protect us from those who do not act morally in the eyes of the state.

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#32

Post by mabbo »

wheybags wrote: post #26
mabbo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the lamest excuse I have ever heard. If my organizations goal is feeding the homeless, am I free to only hire white people because racism is not my organization's primary goal ? You can achieve your organisation's primary goal without being horrible human beings. That's allowed. In fact, it's basic human decency.

No, because discrimination in hiring on the basis of race is illegal. It does mean the org should probably not focus its efforts on running a big public pr campaign about hiring ethnic minorities though. That's all in the general case though, unfortunately it does sound like there was some bad practice in the fsfe specifically this time. There are two sides to every story though. I'd want to hear both before making j…

Some folks think that morality and law are the same thing. That the very meaning of "ethics" is "things not on the list of illegal things". And if the law was not involved here or did not force anything to happen, then clearly everything was ethical.

We call those people sociopaths.

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#33

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

I don't understand this 'wages gap' issue. Any organization is interested in extracting maximum value from hired labour, ideally paying the lowest possible wage that a person agrees to work for. There is no some special incentive to pay women less than men: the only reason it is possible is that because women agree to work for less. So, it's on them, not on 'sexist' 'misogynist' entrepreneurs.

As a consequence, if a woman agrees to work for less for doing the same job with the same results, it would make her much more attractive for hiring. A no-brainer, really.

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#34

Post by africanboy »

paganel wrote: post #16
ognarb wrote: post #4

> we both felt secure that the free software movement is progressive, and cares about being inclusive and equal opportunities oriented. Unfortunately it has been proved very often that this is not true. This is not the first case of racism and sexisme in FOSS and probably won't.

> This is not the first case of racism and sexisme in FOSS and probably won't. The fish rots from the head down, and apart from Stallman (which is mentioned in the article) I for myself would personally add Torvalds to that same conversation (even though with a little less overt sexism, but definitely with more bullying). But because Torvalds's project has had an incredible ROI, i.e. it has made lots of people lots o…

It has been proven very often that the good intension of people like Stallman that devoted their life to the cause have been hijacked by people that used FOSS to find employment in big corporations and infiltrated committees and standard bodies to keep pushing their employers' agenda.

No one can seriously believe that there exists an organisation that is completely free from tensions between members, sometimes people simply make mistakes, what counts is how the organisation react and the proportion.

If the fish rots from the head, what should we think about Apple where Steve Jobs was known for bullying and terrorising employees for no real reason?

Big tech in US have been condemned for the infamous no-hire agreement in SV After a class action filed on behalf of roughly 60,000 workers (sixty thousands).

For instance, after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee, Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired, court documents show. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.

That's the real issue nowadays in FOSS, not the lack of human perfection.

Nothing even remotely similar has ever happened inside the FSF, apart when they assaulted Stallman over a fabricated issue and forced him to resign

I could make names, but I don't want a shadow ban from HN, suffice to say that some of these people work at Google .

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#35

Post by dejw »

ognarb wrote: post #4

> we both felt secure that the free software movement is progressive, and cares about being inclusive and equal opportunities oriented. Unfortunately it has been proved very often that this is not true. This is not the first case of racism and sexisme in FOSS and probably won't.

I always thought FOSS should be about software and bringing smart people together. It is starting to look like a political movement that isn't about software at all. This post is so self centered I can't take it seriously. ''' “why do you refer to dates in this format and not in that format”, while there is no office policy on following a particular date standard '''. Date format is super important...

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#36

Post by detaro »

dejw wrote: post #35
ognarb wrote: post #4

> we both felt secure that the free software movement is progressive, and cares about being inclusive and equal opportunities oriented. Unfortunately it has been proved very often that this is not true. This is not the first case of racism and sexisme in FOSS and probably won't.

I always thought FOSS should be about software and bringing smart people together. It is starting to look like a political movement that isn't about software at all. This post is so self centered I can't take it seriously. ''' “why do you refer to dates in this format and not in that format”, while there is no office policy on following a particular date standard '''. Date format is super important...

Free Software "starting to look like a political movement"? Political advocacy is a large part of what its organizations do, and has been for a long time.

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#37

Post by DanBC »

londons_explore wrote: post #9

Operations like the FSF have a single goal - to promote Free Software. If they can also promote equality at the same time, then great. But the goal of promoting equality and free software are not equal - free software is the primary goal. If the organisation is acting illegally , then it's a matter for the police. But if the organisation is focussing on it's primary goal rather than a 2ndary goal you think is more im…

> If the organisation is acting illegally, then it's a matter for the police.

You need to learn the difference between öffentliches Recht and privatrecht.

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#38

Post by atoav »

dosshell wrote: post #28
GrumpyNl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense, "Under German law you are not only allowed to talk about your salary with your colleagues" and " it is expressly illegal for your employer to try and stop you from doing this", So its illegal to talk about it, but when you do its illegal for your employer to stop this?

English is not my native language but in many germanic languages "not only" does not mean "not" but rather the opposite of "not".

"Not only are you allowed to do X, also boss is explicitly forbidden to prevent you from doing X"

Re: “I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

#40

Post by nicolas_t »

Without context and without knowing what was her job, I'm very surprised at how poorly written this is. It should be much better organized, the points she makes should be made clearer and it shouldn't read like the rough first draft of a rant.

She should also include the excerpts of the judgement since they sided with her. If she was tasked with rewriting the text announcing Stallman's departure and she produced something this bad, it's no wonder it wasn't published.

I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but in a story about an employee who was fired due to discrimination instead of incompetence, competence does matter and if her job had anything to do with communication then she does fail spectacularly at this job.

If, however, she was a software developer, then it's another story and her complaint has probably more merit.

Post reply on HN