Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond

lunduke.com

328 pointssabas_ge420 comments

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.

Why do you consider it a power grab sooner than, say, people acting in good faith who really believe in their stated values?

For me, personally, it would be easier to accept a good faith answer if they explained what "sharp tone" led to the expulsion. I mean, I can completely understand if threats were made, or if disparaging comments against protected categories (i.e. sexist, racist, etc comments). Or hate speech, or content that is clearly against policy (i.e. links to pornography). Personal attacks, doxing, stalking, extended periods of harassment etc, etc, etc. There are lots of things that people get banned for and it's pretty easy to say what they are.

Banning someone because they vehemently disagree with you? I mean, that's the only thing I can parse from their statement. It's basically saying, "I do not wish to discuss things with you, so you are banned".

The funny thing is, I don't think that's inherently wrong. In any group, I think you should be able to choose your friends. If you don't want to hang out with someone, then that sucks for that person, but lots of things in life suck. However, banning the co-founder because you no longer wish to talk to them is pretty much the definition of a power grab ;-)

It can be both. Many power grabs and coups are performed by people with a good faith belief that they're right and the current administration is wrong or dangerous.

From the description, this sounds like a permanent ban, which is a really blunt tool -- and overly convenient, given how controversial ESR is. Keep in mind that this is about a discussion that's not in a technical, but in a political forum. After all, the OSI is a political institution, not a technical one.

If people are acting in good faith, I would expect at most something temporary.

This points at what I consider the real problem with CoCs: they're too vague and typically allow people to feel righteous while making truly toxic decisions. This stems from overly-broad language being adopted without an actual "litigation" (in the informal, community sense) of individual cases.

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].

[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-...

> codes of conduct (when used in good faith)

All true. In other news guns don't kill people, people kill people. The gun can be used in either way.

CoC's are like guns in that they can be lethal when deployed. That sounds great to many people: we final have a sure fire way of expelling arsehole's from our group.

Unfortunately the CoC's come with an inbuilt defect: they all boil down to "be intolerant of intolerance". That creates wonderful opportunity for attackers, because if they can goad someone in the project to being intolerant towards them they can get the project to shoot itself with it's on weapon.

The amazing thing I've never seen a instance where a CoC has been used in anger by a project where hasn't also been used in this way against long standing members of the project. Even worse, the long standing members use it against each other! Introducing a CoC seems to have the same destabilising effect as introducing a new weapon: people rush to use it in what looks to be a pre-emptive strike as soon as some dispute comes around. Maybe that's in an attempt to take out others before they use it against them.

It's so predicable it's extraordinary. There must be something deep within the human psyche priming us to seek out weaknesses like this in "enemy groups", along with the inbuilt knowledge of how to it.

when used in good faith is the key part there, though.

If everything everybody ever proposed was only used in good faith, we'd be living in Utopia.

> 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.

They are usually way too vague to do that. "Be kind" hangs on who decides what is and isn't kind. It's my impression that that is generally by design, because they are supposed to enable selective enforcement.

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.

The Cultural Revolution in Maoist China was a deliberate strategy. The whole Gramscian idea of attaining "hegemony" in a "long march through the institutions" is just as goal-oriented, though success of the core idea is far more mixed than is generally acknowledged.

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.

In my experience, a lot of these people say they want tolerance, but what they really mean is tolerance of the ideas (and people) they agree with.

Agreed. Whatever happened the old "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" spirit? Somehow, it just seemed to vanish over the past decade without any explanation.

Yeah, you see this everywhere -- "filter bubbles" and all that. People have been trained to expect protection from anything that even vaguely intrudes on their own sense of self-righteousness, and consider this breach the failing of Someone Else (TM), generally the platform operator (whether that's an employer, school, webmaster, mailop, etc.).

People expect a mechanism to first, punish the offending author (block, downvote, whatever), and then hide the offending content, and they refuse to engage on any platform that doesn't accommodate this. Not only that, but they often seem to try to destroy the platform for allowing the travesty of frank and honest discussion to take place.

There's a part of me that believes the restrictions of the physical world are really necessary for a productive dialogue. You can't stop anyone else from showing up, and the limits of dialogue are how far you can go before someone is throwing punches and you're both getting hauled off to jail. It seems to have a much better track record of producing acceptable middle-ground outcomes than "flag, block, ban".

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.

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-sp...

The issue seems to be that if something fun happens in a place that's not a safe space, other will come, demand to participate and then demand that it turns into a safe space so they can participate on their terms.

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.

> 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.

This puts too much blame on the falsely accused.

> 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).

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

> I don't know what the right solution is.

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.

The problem is exactly the opposite of authoritarianism. People don't believe that any person can be trusted with authority, so it was all transferred into the dead letter of a massively generalized district-wide policy which, of course, says "anything bad is bad and should be punished".

Administrators and teachers have very little leeway to ascertain circumstances, utilize context, or employ personal judgment. They feel obliged to follow the letter of the policy because they have no authority.

A little more "authoritarianism" -- trust that the authorities positioned to ascertain the facts will do so competently and shouldn't be trivially second-guessed -- would probably help a lot.

> I'm pretty sure we would have noticed if attending an authoritarian school gave you an authoritarian personality style

Wasn't it noticed though? Paddling students fell out of favor decades ago, in no small part I suspect because people began to realize that hitting kids wasn't teaching kids how to resolve conflicts effectively.

The status quo before 'zero tolerance' was itself a radical departure from what came before it.

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.

As opposed to the current open-source movement, which mostly consists of microserfs beavering away for a salary to make FOSS work better for all of the above?

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.

It is lamentable indeed, and this infiltrated, subverted movement now wants to purge itself of the old guard, who are not good for business.

This is a weird rejoinder to make in a thread about ESR, who was one of the loudest voices arguing for corporate-friendly language ("open-source" not "free software") and licenses (permissive, not copyleft).

And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it...

Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.

Ah, but a license, no matter how permissive, does not ipso facto cause the admission of questionable changes into the upstream of a project that everybody trusts.

It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.

This might be a good thing then. This has become a pet peeve of mine.

At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source:

https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/

Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back.

FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.

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.

Strongly agreed.

ESR talked up his role and theories about how open source worked, but his writing was the main thing that he contributed. His attempts at contributing actual code did not have nearly the same impact. Nor has his description of how open source worked actually had the same impact.

Even the OSI definition owes more to Ian Murdock (the "ian" in "debian") than it does to ESR.

However if RMS and Brian Fox had not single-handedly set about reimplementing the Unix toolsystem back in the mid-1980s, the world would today be different.

As much as RMS annoyed people by saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux, he had a point. Linus contributed the kernel, but most of what people called Linux at the time was actually written by the FSF.

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

that is illegal and will never happen.

I'm reminded of the saying "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

> 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 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.

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.

First, to quote myself:

> 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...

> This was a joke.

That makes it worse. Some people's "jokes" are allowed, some are punished by censoring and expulsion. Selective enforcement is a central part of the criticism toward CoCs.

> 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.

> Out of curiosity, how long did they ban you for

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.

> This is not as simple as sitting on the bench for a time and then you are back and yay.

Neither are parole hearings. I wouldn't expect them to let you rejoin after a predetermined amount of time, but I would expect them to periodically reconsider the ban given the latest up to date evidence about your personality/character. If you came to understand the error in your ways and made demonstrable moves to improve the way you conduct yourself (it sounds like you have), surely that should be considered.

thank you for recognizing there was an issue, and thank you for trying to do better

I’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 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.

> Ever hear the expression "Your right to your fist only extends as far as my face?"

Equating physical violence with someone who called another a "looneytune" is completely unreasonable as they are NOT the same thing. The uncomfortable truth is, the freedom of expression guarantees the right of someone else to say something people disagree with, hurt your feelings, offend, or even make others angry.

Also, who gets to decide when someone is being a jerk? In this case, it's a group of people who are comfortable deleting almost all evidence of Eric's supposedly offensive remarks, thereby ensuring that no one can even debate the subject reasonably. That alone, would keep me from jumping to their defense even if I agreed with their actions.

And drawing an impassable wall between physical violence and verbal abuse is also completely unreasonable.

The world is full of roided up assholes who would scream at someone in the face, have their victim "push them away", only to proceed to punch them back because once you cross the line into physicality a shove is the same as a punch in the face.

It's bullshit.

Obviously being "a jerk" to someone is not the same as physically hitting someone.

But in the context of a workplace, an online forum, or a community contributing to an open source project, the choice isn't between punching someone or yelling at them.

The choice is between civility and not. Between being an asshole for no reason and not. People like Linus Torvalds and ESR have significant trust in their technical leadership. If they don't like an idea they can just say "that is a bad idea. here is why". Their position is not strengthened by screaming insults at the other side. All it does is make them look childish and make people not want to contribute their time and energy to the cause.

Linus figured this out eventually. ESR hasn't.

> 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.

The issue is that "rude" is up to whoever feels treated rudely. If you tell someone they are wrong in no uncertain words, they might consider you rude. If you sugarcoat it, you're a) lying, b) doing the community a disservice by not opposing something that you consider wrong.

> 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".

Funny, it always struck me that it's people who are deeply emotional who have a problem with it. If you're emotional, you will feel personally attacked and aren't able to put that aside and deal with the issue at hand. If you're intellectual, you will notice the insult, but it will not dominate your take-away, and you will easily be able to address it if you think it's necessary (hint: it's not) and move on to the content. If you're playful, you might just add something similar in your response. If you just want to lighten the mood, you'll make a joke. And then you move on and address the issue they were talking about, because there's usually an issue in there, they aren't just saying "no, you're dumb" just because, they are saying "no, you're dumb, because you're doing xyz".

> 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.

I believe you're putting way too much weight on the insults here. I don't think that Linus sits there and laughs all day because he "owned some noob". More likely, he fires of an email and moves on with his life, the insult not being something that brings him a lot of pleasure, but just a part of his communication style. Not a sadist that wants to see other people experience pain and emberrassement but somebody who has little concern for the feelings of the recipients of his outbursts, either because he himself doesn't mind being called an asshat or because he believes that the stakes are too high to hold back.

> It also turns out that you don't HAVE to be a jerk

I agree if what you're trying to say is "there are highly-productive people that are not jerks". I strongly disagree if you're trying to say "you can choose whether you are a jerk or not, and you don't have to choose being a jerk".

> Ever hear the expression "Your right to your fist only extends as far as my face?"

I have. A "community guideline" or social disapproval of threatening violence may disallow those sorts of expressions, but they're quite common in certain communities (sports, games, etc - may be known as "trash talking").

> 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.

I agree. What one person interprets or intends as "explicitly RUDE" may be interpreted or intended differently by another individual, though, so an open community should assume good faith, correct the socially-determined, arbitrary language violation, and try to focus on the content of the message rather than delivery mechanism.

If you'd like to share examples of what makes you believe ESR[0] is unable to differentiate between a stupid idea and a stupid person, I'd be happy to examine them with you. I myself used Linus as an example of someone who can be famously insulting[1], yet I'm unaware of him actually permanently banning people from submitting new patches to the Linux kernel because he flipped out in a code review.

Indeed, as I think everyone can agree they've been polemic regardless of how you agree with them, the fact that they've engaged with the public at large seems contrary to your statement that they revel in personal attacks rather than engaging a free marketplace of ideas: They share an unambiguous position and offer defense of their ideas against all comers. I suspect most of this defense is done today by the organizations and the legacy they've created rather than them personally, which is why it's more noteworthy when they feel the need to make such strong statements.

> 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.

You don't "HAVE" to be a jerk, but you may. I will listen to the content of your words rather than the appearance of your statement, and I believe ESR is aggressively asserting his position the Open Source Initiative should do the same.

I find it interesting you used "looneytune", because I don't see any message from ESR in the month of February using that word.[2][3] Quoting Russell McOrmond later in the thread[4] that does use the word "loonytoon", "ESR tried to post a message where he named and shamed some individuals and activities which he considers to be seriously problematic not only in society as a whole, but software communities as well. The moderators rejected his email to this list. Some might even suggest he is being de-platformed by being blocked from expressing personal political views. I'm not suggesting this, as I'm advocating strongly that those who wish to use software and software licenses to discriminate be invited (strongly if required) to go elsewhere than the OSI mailing lists."

[0]: Or Linus, I suppose, though that's less relevant to the specific topic

[1]: https://www.fudzilla.com/media/k2/items/cache/7a3a7dc8bbb8eb... - I don't mean to insult him and use/appreciate his work/writings practically every day!

[2]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...

[3]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists... is quoting a message that was rejected by the moderators. It appears ESR rephrased without public discussion and it never went out to the list.

[4]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...

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.

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 issues; often actively trolls one-another with counter-productive PRs or issue-filings; sometimes creates new projects from scratch to replace/obsolete someone else's project just because A disagrees with B about some minor non-software-related thing, e.g. taste in music, and so "can't respect them or their software"; etc.

These people are clearly playing around as they make this software—and often producing the software rather sub-optimally in the process—but the goal of most of these project communities is clearly to have fun with the process of making software, not to end up with useful software.

And now, back to the question: are these projects, and their processes, to be considered societally acceptable? Or are they "canceled?" Would adding a Code-of-Conduct stating clearly what they're doing in the project even help? (IMHO it doesn't seem like it'd make much of a difference; it's not like these projects get outside contribution anyways.)

The thing with semi-abusive, semi-fun-loving group of friends and the perhaps multitude of kind of ambiguously abusive relationships one might notice small circles of people, is that these seldom scale to millions of people nor do they scale to long periods of time.

https://filepush.co/2Hvm/degradation-of-hobby.jpg

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.

Disclaimer: Image is just an example to express an idea/concept. I do not endorse whatever is in the image and my post does not represent my employer, Unemployed Inc.

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?

Mostly the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox.

I've seen a few cases now where a FOSS project community—one that is nominally open to new members, but is in practice a closed and static group of close-knit friends—starts off all perfectly happy with a sort of raunchy/abusive internal demeanor; but then someone comes to them with a suggestion of some Code of Conduct or other standard of decorum; and then everyone suddenly decides that it's a good idea, not because they personally want to change how they interact, or even to see others interact differently with them, but because they don't want to be the one caught arguing against the CoC if it turns out that everyone else wants it.

That's still a voluntary choice made by those individuals. If the group doesn't want to follow the suggestion of an outsider they don't have to do that.

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.

It is absolutely a free choice, social pressure isn't the law.

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.

> But it shouldn't count as part of the F/OSS movement

Why not? If the end result is a high quality piece of open source software, why do I need to care about the politics or behavior of the developers?

The only reason I can think of would be from a risk-assessment standpoint, i.e. is another censorious asshole going to waltz on in and damage the team that produces this product so that it dies and becomes orphaned.

Why anyone would want to contribute to a project they don't like the developers of is beyond me; either fork it or go do something else. It's not a requirement. This is not your livelihood, for the most part. Just walk away.

Maybe if censorious assholes could just step the fuck off, and let people be, this would be less of a problem. As far as I can see, they've caused far more problems and far more discontent than anyone posting aggressively has ever done.

You don't have to care, and I am not saying you should.

I'm saying it doesn't count as part of the F/OSS movement. Whether you want to contribute, not contribute, etc. is your own choice and doesn't need to be correlated in any way.

> But it shouldn't count as part of the F/OSS movement(s)

Why not? Who gets to determine what counts as being part of the movement? I thought that, broadly speaking, the movement was about the method of producing and licensing software. If a certain group produces F/OSS software, but is internally abhorrent, they're still part of the F/OSS 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.

Certainly. I wouldn't expect a big, open-membership FOSS project to "get away with" being abusive in a non-consensual way. That isn't what BDSM is—which I had hoped was carrying some of the weight in explaining what exactly I meant here, by making you picture what an actually-analogous-to-BSDM software community would be like.

But my question still stands. Let me be more precise with it. Is Code-of-Conduct-space actually wide in practice, or is it narrow? Is there really only one societally-acceptable way to run an open-membership out-in-public software project, with the differences coming down only to the fine details; or is it actually possible to do something very different, e.g. having a CoC containing "We like to call each-other names here. Only join if you're into that."?

Would a project that claims different limits than the ones of wider society, be tenable? Or would it, and every other project attempting such a thing, be boycotted, simply for its members being weird and liking things people don't normally like (and therefore making it squicky to contribute to the software if you don't like what they're doing, which must therefore be a moral failing on their part)?

It think it would be difficult if it isn't feminist, in particular, considering prominent biases in the software development community.

I think it’s pretty clear that OSI does not want to be a “BDSM but we build something along the way” group.

Did I say they did? The GP poster just made a unilateral assertion, and I was trying to point out a case where the assertion is false. That case doesn't apply here; but nor should you implicitly accept the GP's conclusion (that ESR should be kicked out of this community), since one of the premises used in their argument (that all FOSS "must be kind") isn't true-as-stated.

When you want to do something as serious as exiling someone from cyberspace, you need a high standard of rigor in your arguments; and you need to be wary of thinking you can "read through" rhetoric to "what they clearly meant", without having false claims made for rhetorical purpose still affecting your judgement.

I invite the GP to restate their argument with more precision, and see if it still sounds compelling.

> 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.

That assumes a monolithic design style, I think.

There are a lot of projects that are factored into small pieces with separate maintainership, where the project as a whole—or its "core"—might be corporate-sponsored; yet individual parts/plugins/connectors—including fairly-critical ones!—might turn out to be one person's hobby-project.

How many maintainers do you think the average Kafka connector has? The average Postgres extension? The average Redis or Nginx module? Etc.

These ecosystem components move the project-as-a-whole forward, and yet they don't necessarily need to be as "corporate" as the project-as-a-whole does to accomplish that. Even though, in the end, a corporation might use one of them, it won't really matter as long as nobody sees them doing so. (If they ever need to patch the un-corporate extension, though, they'll probably fork the thing and flense out all references to the original. I've seen that happen a lot, and done it a few times myself.)

> would make it essentially impossible for anyone to participate in the project as a representative of their employer.

Freedom to fork is a thing. Start a CoC-friendly fork of the project, for the benefit of those who require this as a condition of participation; but stipulate that both forks will freely share code between one another. (Meaning, no PNG-like clause whatsoever. This ensures that the choice between the "nice, CoC" and "sticks and stones" project leadership styles is kept free and open, with nobody being forced into one choice or the other. This of course is a compelling reason to actively reinforce the status quo of Persona-Non-Grata clauses in a copyright license being regarded as incompatible with the OSD or any other definition of FLOSS.)

In some cases that would be a feature.

> 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.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20021202223742/http://sl4.org/cr...

> Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you.

People deciding to subject themselves to this does not allow them to be abusive towards others, nor would it be stretch to argue that for a project to be "open", there ought to not be a culture of actively being inconsiderate.

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)

> Explain in advance that that's what you're doing. Ensure that everyone is on board.

This assumes that people choose their way into this state. What if "software as performative BSDM" is the state of nature, that people are in unless they decide otherwise? (A bold claim, I know, but I can think of some good examples, and I bet you can too.)

> And if it rose to public prominence while remaining a men only club, that would probably cease to be OK.

What defines prominence? There are a lot of FOSS projects that are critically relied-upon by thousands of downstream projects, which nevertheless only have one contributor—and not even because that contributor doesn't accept PRs, but rather just because nobody else has ever thought to help them.

And then there are the tiny projects everyone ends up using because they're transitive dependencies of one thing or another. This comes up a lot in the Node.js ecosystem.

And then there are literal art-projects that people end up relying upon for some strange reason. _why's libraries were this kind of thing: open-source in a sense, but not for the sake of improving them qua software, but rather instead to improve them qua the original artistic vision, if you understood and shared it; and otherwise only open to view and learn from.

> What if "software as performative BSDM" is the state of nature, that people are in unless they decide otherwise?

This is a stupid claim and you know it.

> but you'd have to follow the "safe, sane and consensual" rules.

Those rules are entirely arbitrary and were made up as part of this new Code of Conduct bullshit. They didn't used to exist and plenty of productive developers contributed plenty of useful code. You're arguing the rules matter from within the context of the rules; that's begging the question.

> long term psychological effects of participating in a community where "nobody is kind to anybody" are

99% of people toughen up and move on with their lives and learn to not be so serious.

1% of people don't manage to do this. Some subset of that 1% get mad about it, and now they're using this as a hammer against massive numbers of normal, volunteer developers who just wanted to happily code without having to acquiesce to a particular brand of American progressivist moral licensing.

99% of people don't participate in open source, and much of the behavior we're talking about wouldn't be tolerated at any Western employer (except among the most senior untouchables).

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.

Why does opening up your rude little club imply anything of the sort? Why would you join a club that you don't enjoy the discourse within? I don't understand how people can't see that participation in all of this is 100% voluntary. This isn't like inclusion and diversity efforts in corporate enterprise, this is a different beast, and over-corporatizing it defeats the reasons why many people moved to working in / on open source stuff to start with.

> Why would you join a club that you don't enjoy the discourse within? I don't understand how people can't see that participation in all of this is 100% voluntary.

The topic under discussion is the OSI's policies and the application thereof. It seems pretty evident to me that the OSI sees that first part (people not enjoying the way they're spoken to or about) as the potential problem: they want people to voluntarily participate in a group, and feel like others in that group can be expected to treat them with dignity and respect even if they disagree.

Furthermore, to your "100% voluntary" part: OSI just revoked their voluntary association with ESR. It cuts both ways.

I don't think it's unreasonable for a large group that is open to the public to publish some pretty standard "don't be a rude and inconsiderate jerk" rules, and to enforce them. As you've pointed out, they can always go fork if they don't like it. Maybe ESR can go start the 'R(ude)OSI' if he thinks that's a productive use of his time, but I don't think most people in general want to have to deal with having textual abuse hurled at them just to participate.

Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and such an effort would be successful! I encourage someone who believes that to try; I'm not against the words, I'm against being rude to people who wish to come and contribute who are shunned or discouraged or driven away as a result of it. Many hands make light work. I'd like to see free software take over the world, and I truly believe that it won't be able to do that if many/most groups creating and promoting it give first-timers a terrible negative experience, which has been the status quo since I was a child.

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.

> "Code of conducts" inherently drive power away from the contributors to some sort of moderator enforcing the CoC.

Could we have both? e.g. CoC moderators elected by contributors from the ranks of contributors?

You're still centralizing a power. It would probably be better to have some rule that's based on quorum and consensus than specifically elected people. E.g. at least some percentage (say 60%) of active contributors must weigh in and some percentage of those (perhaps a simple majority) must agree that a violation took place.

Granted, that's still open to abuse if the quorum requirements are small enough (how small would depend on the quantity of abusers), but I feel it's more in spirit than centralizing the power into a sub-group.

I will further grant that it's likely that, in any group, only a subset will care enough about these things to police them, so the point may be moot.

Debian does that (indirectly, as in the DPL is elected and the buck stops with them), and people still complain and disagree about CoC-related decisions.

I doubt there has ever been any serious democratic process in which some participants didn't complain. That seems to be the nature of the beast; if you want to suppress complainers you leave democracy behind and enter into the realm of authoritarianism.

Isn't this what ultimately happens anyway? If the CoC moderators go against the will of the contributors, they can always fork the project.

The maintainers aren't likely to do that though, for a multitude of reasons. Why not let the CoC-people fork it and see how much better they can do it? Why would we need to oust the maintainers to see whether they are better at maintaining the project they built than some random person from Twitter that decided this is the project they're going to inject themselves into today?

> Which comes off as mutinous.

More like infiltration.

> 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.

>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.

There is a difference between "should" (which is clearly an opinion) and "must" (which implies some level of force to back it up).

> There is a difference between "should" (which is clearly an opinion) and "must" (which implies some level of force to back it up).

"Should" can turn into "must" very quickly when the "force to back it up" is obtained. So the time to object is at the "should" stage. If you wait until the "must" stage, it's too late. (Note that "cancel culture", when it reaches the "must" stage, which is exactly what it's trying to do with FOSS projects, does not tolerate dissenting opinions.)

A truth stated passionately doesn't become false. A falsehood stated calmly doesn't become true. Appeal to emotion is always a logical fallacy.

Beware those whose sole argument is "you are a bully".

> 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.

> The free market dictates that products will survive on their merits

Huh? That's certainly not what the free market dictates at all. There's no sense of "merit" imbued anywhere inside anything in the free market. There are assumptions behind the shapes of the supply and demand functions (namely convexity) and a belief in price signaling information. That's all.

> 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?

The Labour party is having a leadership election in which Rebecca Long Bailey is an outspoken proponent of trans rights and issues. The statement you're trying (and failing) to disprove said "are not allowed to acknowledge positively in any political campaign" but she's clearly both allowed to positively acknowledge trans rights in a political campaign and is actually doing so. Thus your attempted counter-example is wrong, and I think you knew that.

As for straight white men, I'm trying to remember the last time the leader of a political party or writer of a newspaper column went to bat for those people's rights. Can't actually recall one.

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.

> 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/

Pretty clearly the deal there is that false claims that a place is meritocratic makes the actual injustices worse.

From the previous discussion, plorkyeran[1] found the email that they suspect got ESR banned:

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

I was wondering what the ESD was. It appears to be this:

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 .

Duh, that's why they got rid of RMS first.

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.

#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.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518473

This is problematic because as I point out without an __IMPARTIAL__ __witness__ that I can trust to relay the truth, no matter how horrid, all I (we) have to go on is the hearsay of others.

For example, the source you link may have just attempted to reconstruct the message based on what can be seen in the reply. However the chain of authenticity has been extended to contain those who may have motive to unfaithfully reproduce or even fake a/the message. We can't know as the transparency of the archive is now also in question.

Edit:

Under the assumption the reproduction is faithful, my own personal OPINIONs...

Calling someone a loonytoon is uncouth, deserving a brief lecture for attacking someone rather than debating the ideals they happen to believe in at the current time (or in the past if it's a clear reference to such). (Edit 2:) Also in that paragraph, there's a term I'd hesitate to Google for not knowing it's meaning offhand... I'm not sure how good/bad it might actually be.

The vividly disgusting and offensive description (which could very easily have been added in the quoted reply) of rat* (censored) is something that a rational adult just shouldn't use on such a forum. If that's what OSI acted on, they really should be more transparent about it as well as their decision process.

Most of the version you linked on TechRights is otherwise speech that should be protected and encouraged. It is a protest and valid expression of feelings; save for some charged language.

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.

What parts of that email are so objectionable?

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.

> but nothing about this message strikes me as someone who's acting in good faith

So you don't know who ESR is, and you're going to act like the man who has put his entire life into this effort as though he's not "acting in good faith". Wow.

If anything, I'd question whether everyone else on the list even knows what 'good faith' is, as they voluntarily proceed to censor themselves.

I know exactly who ESR is, have read his blog off and on over the years, and agree with him on many political points.

However, that's still a ridiculous email, and inappropriate for any context where grownups are trying to have a serious conversation about adult matters.

First off, it's unprofessional. But even beyond that, the email is either intended to persuade through facts and reasoned argument, or bully though shouting. It's clearly not written to persuade (there are no facts or reasoned arguments), ergo its intended to bully.

> Its 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.

"Show me the code" is a good principle, and not just in programming. Hard data is much better than ad hominems or making arguments from authority. It is, therefore, sadly ironic that ESRs linked email is purely comprised of ad hominems, and the best his defenders can do is to make arguments from authority. Your code isn't automatically right because you're the CTO, and your arguments aren't automatically right because you're the co-founder, and the more heated and inflated your claims get, with no citations or links or proof, the less time I have for you.

ESR remains correct on the principles he has spent his life advocating for. His email is still garbage, and I fully support the removal of anyone who authors emails like that from a mailing list until they apologise and commit to behaving better in the future.

> engaging in good faith is about taking what people say in collaborative environments as given in good faith.

Or at the very least explaining rationally why you feel the other person is not acting in good faith.

Explaining rationally will still get spun by the party as 'bad faith'. I still remember the Ruby thread where the same person started trying to force Matz to either adopt the COC, or otherwise have him step down (presumably so that the right people could get installed to do so.)

These people are HUGE fans of triangulation, their supporters will tear you a new one on twitter if you don't toe the line.

I was not familiar with this term:

>Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

> banishing contributors for wrongthink

And now he is banished.

Are you really arguing against this?

Wrongthink shouldn't make you immune from banishment for being an asshole.

I think communities have the right to decide on what kind of engagement they want.

ESR could be acting within the community standards of OSI, in which case I don't think he should be banned.

I also find the way he engages to be more hostile than I'm comfortable with and probably wouldn't want to work an environment where it was the norm.

He is banished for being an ass, not for his exhaustive level-headed critique of known supermarxist coraline ada ehmke /s

That's what would detract you from the community? You must be joking.

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.

That sort of language is normal in the parliament houses of the developed world, upon which our constitutional democracies are based.

If there is some sort of evidence that the candidate in question is in fact a toxic loonytoon, by some sort of objective standard, then it's perfectly fine to use that language.

At some point, you have to call a spade a spade, and a toxic loonytoon a toxic loonytoon.

Well okay, if you insist: Eric S. Raymond is a toxic loonytoon. And there’s plenty of evidence to support that assertion.

I don't agree - I think you come across a lot more persuasive when you attack the ideas rather than the person and you do it with less colorful language.

Otherwise I think you only 'persuade' people that already agree with you and others that might have otherwise changed their minds are alienated.

That said, I generally like the idea of not banning people and I have a high tolerance for this kind of communication not really bothering me that much - but I still think it's generally bad form and probably does scare away others.

Calling a person a "toxic loonytoon" for the offense of trying to establish standards of acceptable behavior is ridiculous by any sort of "objective standard". If anything, it demonstrates the importance of having those standards, by serving as an example of the sort of behavior that such a standard should condemn.

Yes, he has his own opinion. What is wrong with that?

IMO: His opinion has a lot of weight here. He founded the project. Without his philosphy in the start you wouldn't be where it is today.

I'm pretty the point is that OSI already laid down guidelines that asked for civil communication - and name calling is epitome of uncivil communication. Indeed, his comment is basically contesting those guidelines.

So this was clearly one of those no recovery situations. Either guidelines for civil behavior or "show me the code" meritocracy wins but it's hard to see "agreeing to disagree" being possible here.

I think it's a reference to one of the people pushing very hard on spreading CoCs everywhere. Can't recall the name. (Corin?) Reading some of that person's tweets, though, left me with a very bad impression.

Anyway, search and form your own opinion.

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.

Any idea who that may be?

Below email is the quoted statement:

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.

His statements seem more like the words of a man who feels strongly and passionately about his cause. It's a little suprising that the OSI keeps such high standards for decorum if that was the message that got him banned.

It deserves a warning, maybe, but banning him? Cancel culture indeed.

If you said that at work how well would it go you think...

>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.

The person behind ESD has a history of getting people 'removed' from projects.

To them, I say: physician, heal thyself. I'm really sorry that they've lived a life being bullied so much that they derive such pleasure from doing so to others.

> 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.

Individuals, who, let's not forget that, are the reason the projects exist in the first place, and who may feel more attachment to the projects than others. That they react more strongly to the impression that some other group is trying to take over their project, often years or decades of their life, and destroy it (by their standards) is understandable, I think.

And also, let's not forget that those seeking control via CoC are often equally abusive, they just strategically limit their abusiveness to Twitter & co and keep it off of official mailing lists to be able to say "I always stayed professional (here, while I was backstabbing everywhere else)".

Individuals, who, let's not forget that, are the reason the projects exist in the first place, and who may feel more attachment to the projects than others.

Absolutely, it's quite a quandary. The thing is, there's a difference between "random tool ten people use and no one would create with person X" and, say, Open Office and there are a variety of shades in between. At some point, the "I created this and I can manipulate it any way I want" thing is really problematic and stands in the way of a semi-important standard/application/library but at other points, there is no easy alternative.

> 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.

Why not fork those projects and makes those awesome forks full of code with unicorns and glitter?

If those single rather abusive individuals have to compete with code + unicorns + glitter, I'm certainly going to switch to that and I bet the others will too

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.

> " "political ratfucking" (whatever that means)"

That might sound like generic senseless profanity, but it's actually a term with specific meaning: "Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

Whether or not ratfucking is indeed happening here as ESR asserts is another matter. I mean only to comment on the meaning of the term.

> conflating a code of conduct with "political ratfucking"

There are strong criticisms of CoCs and questioning of the necessity of that. I don't think that's too much of a reach in how that was communicated. A bit exaggerated yes.

Context is probably required to understand what 'free discussion' he thinks is under attack. Over the years ESR has blamed gay people for HIV, women for their own suicide, Chinese conspiracy theories and whatnot. To put it simply, he has basically gone mad.

Sure there is a nuanced discussion about what is too much for a CoC but the sort of discussion that he thinks is supposed to be cut out actually needs to be shut down. I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest.

insane political rant part probably.

>> * 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.

"ratfucking"? Classy.

I don't agree with him but I feel a bit sorry for him. He's passionate about this and he believes what he's saying. Perhaps nothing could make him see things differently, but banning him definitely won't.

Are you objecting to the word "ratfucking" or the ratfucking itself? As vulgar as it sounds, the word itself has a well established meaning.

I find it rather concerning that they're that quick to ban him for voicing dissidence. Was there anyone threatened by his speech?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

What does ESD stand for? I did a quick google search but there were too many seemingly irrelevant hits.

Looks like "Ethical Source Definition" defining "ethical open source" analogous to "Open Source Definition" defining "open source" license characteristics.

https://ethicalsource.dev/definition/

One needs to read this, if one assumed that the above-cited e-mail got him banned:

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)...

And if you wanted to read a thoughtful critique of the license in question then try https://twitter.com/wwahammy/status/1229668961131864064

I find that email a perfect summary of the current situation.

A bit rough tone, sure, but I think that shows that he’s actually passionate about these things. That’s good, not bad.

Passionate speech is not allowed in the borg-cube of a culture we're growing.

One could argue that it is possible to speak passionately while following the CoC, and that only certain kinds of passionate speech are forbidden.

What I find interesting are the ways that CoCs are sometimes selectively weaponized.

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...

I side with ESR, this is silly.

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.

Hell, even a private email chain (i.e. off-list) would be better than nothing.

I am conflicted. I generally despise SJWs and identity politics, but this couldn't have happened to a nicer person.

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.

> 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.

That is what I meant, and that is what the idiom usually means.

See https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/couldn%27t+have+happene... for verification.

> Sometimes used sarcastically when referring to a negative event happening to an unpleasant person.

Interesting! I've never heard this used in a sarcastic way. My mistake.

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.

The enthusiasm for shaming in this mail from the thread makes my stomach turn. They seem to be either blissfully unaware or malevolently aware that it would lead to more marginalization, not less: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists...

"This special exception makes clear who the community considers a bad actor and initially imposes greater obligations on them than anyone else. [....] As in the Persona non Grata Preamble, this special exception serves as a clear statement on the community's view on who is welcome in their community. Additionally, if the bad actor wants to redistribute, they have to distribute the license shaming them."

There's no greater feeling than the crunch of the bones of the unworthy beneath your heel.

I wanted to address one error in this article: "Richard Stallman being compelled to resign from the Free Software Foundation."

RMS was not compelled to resign from the FSF.

RMS decided to resign since he felt it was for the good of the organization, and he could no longer be effective there.

While there was a lot of external pressure, there was zero pressure from within. It was RMS trying to do the right thing.

My major concern about the sequence of events there were external appearances. It seems that problem materialized.

> RMS decided to resign since he felt it was for the good of the organization, and he could no longer be effective there.

That's just the cover story, and nobody in their right mind buys it.

It was more likely a "you can appear to go spontaneously, or there will be a big fuss and you will be out anyway".

It's the same old thing like when any public figure "steps down" in the midst of a scandal. That just means they picked the least unpalatable item from a menu that was handed to them, so to speak.

RMS had no more real option to stay at the helm of the FSF than he had to keep that MIT office.

No. I know the personalities involved. It was not a cover story.

> 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”.

This is eloquently put. The "fetishization of niceness" he talks about is such a strange trend to watch. It started in universities but it's like it wants to eat all of society and social interactions

Worse, it's not actually about being nice. I'm speaking in general and not about this ESR situation, but subtle forms of bigotry, bullying and intimidation are often part of the tone policing culture.

It makes me sad that people are so sensitive that reading a message like the one ESR wrote drives them away from participating in projects and communities that otherwise would interest them. At least this seems to be the narrative of the "PC supporters" here.

The world is full of assholes. I think it's better to get used to it than to shelter yourself, try to make every space safe or withdraw from interacting with other people.

I know I'm biased though. I am pretty thick-skinned so it's hard to see it from the other perspective.

> It makes me sad that people are so sensitive that reading a message like the one ESR wrote drives them away from participating in projects and communities that otherwise would interest them.

If it helps, people are not actually like that (or least people that far along the bell curve are much rarer than you seem to believe). The people you're seeing are taking (no, I don't mean feigning) offence in a strategic attempt to shut down someone who disagrees with them politically.

The open source community might want to think long and hard about ceding control to groups of people that proudly list their mental illnesses in their twitter bios (like actually, they really fucking do this). I predict a serious split in open source culture once people realize they have been played by narcissists seeking power.

Uh, what's wrong with listing if you have a mental illness? To me, its no different than listing any physical illness you're a survivor of.

There should be no shame in having a mental illness, but there are many mental illnesses that I would highly highly advise not disclosing publicly. It isn't a simple matter of discrimination, if you disclose that you have BPD or ASPD or are bipolar people will avoid you and view you negatively with actual reason, these conditions are absolutely devastating.

I don't see a problem with an individual that discloses a mental illness. I do see a problem with a subculture that celebrates mental illness.

Why? Mental illnesses are not a choice, so its not others will start getting mental illnesses if its celebrated.

But if you're successful despite a mental illness (by any measure of success), its worth celebrating that so others with that condition can see it can be overcome. And it'll help reduce stigma.

>so its not others will start getting mental illnesses if its celebrated

If you celebrate mental illness itself, fetishise it, blast out images of good-looking successful people with SHE'S BIPOLAR next to it, people will emulate it. It's fashion. It's what we do with everything.

The way mental illnesses are 'discovered' and grouped, as best as I can tell from what I've heard psychologists talk about it, is by a duck method. If it looks, talks, walks like depression, we'll call it that. The actual underlying causal networks are yet mostly mysterious, so they're not the basis of the defintions. The way they're defined is basically behavioural.

You are correct on the benefits of reducing stigma, but that is something else altogether. You response doesn't seem to have anything to do with my statement. Celebrating success is not the same as celebrating mental illness. While discreet thresholds and states exist in mental illness, many exist on a spectrum. The real world consequences of some mental illness are influenced by the choices made by the person. Subcultures which celebrate mental illness often have the effect of enabling the worst forms of irresponsible mismanagement.

TBH, cancellers, who pull this kind of "cancel" drama, are no better than their cancellees. They are actually worse, because they are turning a personal drama into an organizational drama, rather abruptly. Not to mention that this process mostly involves ad-hominem, cherry-picking, and non-public decisions. I mean, these people create a bigger political mess while trying to "clean" a tiny irrelevant mess. Lame. Unproductive.

That's distressing, but unsurprising. I've been watching the OSS community engaging in slow-motion self-destruction for a while now. This sort of thing is right in line with that.

You know, this really sucks for me personally. Not the ban, but the sorts of things Eric appears to stand for. I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar when I was 13, and it was probably my gateway into advocating for open source. Somewhere around that age, I ended up speaking on a panel, among other OSS advocates, that successfully sold one of the local school divisions on OSS (we also helped them integrate it, on-site :). To be honest, I don’t quite remember the book or quite what I thought of it, but I know it had a profound influence on me at the time.

Then I see Eric write this:

> Usually (and in this case) accompanied by a lot of bafflegab about “inclusion” and “diversity” so thay anyone who isn't a fan of the new, censorious rules can be cast as some sort of bigot.

:/ Eric, we can have it both ways. I hammer it home into the engineers I’ve lead that code is the ultimate source of truth. I‘ll guide them from, for example, “do we need a mutex here” through to object code to generated assembly through to an intel reference manual, because I want to demonstrate that as engineers, we are in full control of our creations. The engineers I work with all challenge each other, and ask difficult questions, and put ideas through difficult tests. Because we’re mature adults, we can do so with language more advanced than “this is shit” (an open source favorite). It’s real easy. How about, “what happens when <state concern>” or “have you considered <alternate approach>”.

In fact, by soliciting more feedback and criticism, you are being more inclusive - as long as the conversations play out in a constructive way! Yes, it can be hard to teach that, but that’s why we pay people managers and technical leads to do a job.

Honestly, though, what sucks most of all is when you see that people who were so influential to you early in life would apparently look down on the person you are, just because you would ask to be respected in return.

> Then I see Eric write this

You are taking what he wrote out of context and interpreting it to mean something very different than what he intended.

Eric is not arguing that insults are preferable to dispassionate feedback. (As I noted in another comment upthread, I have worked with him on a small part of one of his coding projects, and in that context he is all dispassionate feedback and no insults whatever. So in actual work he does not exhibit the bad behavior you describe at all.) He is looking at what is being done to OSI, and what is being done to open source projects around the world, in the name of "social justice", and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose. If you don't understand that historical context, of course you're not going to understand why he is being so forceful about this. He is not trying to stop people from being constructive and non-insulting about actually writing good code. He is trying to stop people whose ultimate agenda has nothing to do with writing good code from taking over open source projects and ruining them, making us all much worse off in the process.

I'm gonna quote this part:

> and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose

"""Out of context""" that looks REAL similar to a certain other group that seems to be making a name for themselves in this thread. Glad to know he's a conspiracy theorist and so are his current followers.

> that looks REAL similar to a certain other group that seems to be making a name for themselves in this thread

Which other group are you referring to? If you're going to make charges of conspiracy theory, then you shouldn't use innuendo. Just come right out and say what you mean.

> he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose. If you don't understand that historical context, of course you're not going to understand why he is being so forceful about this.

To be clear, the historical context for this point is that this is a Nazi conspiracy theory ("cultural Marxism") that posits left-wing Jews sought (and continue to seek) to subvert academic institutions.

> the historical context for this point is that this is a Nazi conspiracy theory

Um, what? I don't know where you're getting this from. The historical pattern I refer to, as I said, goes back centuries. And the subversion of academic institutions, for example in the US during the 1960s, had nothing to do with Jews.

Or we could stop using the things made by people we cancel instead of getting rid of the people. Cancel culture is about not seeing faces anymore, not getting better or improving anything.

It's ridiculous to stand atop the work of the people you bury and call yourself holy for it.

Anyone unaffiliated with a large commercial organization is being systematically rooted out and destroyed in the free software community. I'm honestly ashamed to be a part of this community right now. ESR has done SO MUCH for us, but doesn't align with a position some wishy washy corporate PR departments have OK'd, so he's OUT. There is no "be nice" rule in life, and doubly so for corporate America. This is disgraceful bigotry in action.

Read ESRs blog.

He has gone insane after 9/11. He thinks homosexuals are pedophile. I have the cathedral and the Bazaar at home, and I live that book, but he isn't part of the healthy open source community anymore.

> He thinks homosexuals are pedophile.

Do you have a primary source for that? This sounds like a cancel-culture rumor intended to attach negative ideas to a person in order to discredit them.

Straight from the horse's mouth: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26

He's a real winner. I won't go as far as to claim he thinks all homosexuals are pedophiles because I personally can't remember the link for when I read him say that, but here's a quote that edges that line:

And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.

No, Jeffrey Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.

Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.

The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.

Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8415

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”

I'd say this might be case-in-point.

Banning ESR will, of course, only reinforce and further his fury and disdain for what he seems to believe is political correctness gone awry.

Not seeing a lot of evidence of a great mind.

The OSI was consistent with the banning, though. He broke the rules, he got banned.

Even if it drives him further into his current beliefs, it keeps him from throwing personal attacks on public mailing lists, which is what the OSI wants.

Reading the quote from Kick https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22539826 doesn't say that. It seems a bit off base to me, but so what? People aren't all good or all bad. They aren't an authority on everything they have an opinion on. That is what makes appeal to authority so dangerous. I don't think it's possible for any strong opinion to please everyone. To me the question really does boil down to whether freedom of speech is truly supported within the open source community. True freedom of speech allows all opinions, even the disgusting ones so that hair splitting censorship can't drown out dissent.

I'm not aware of any organization that promotes "true freedom of speech" to that extreme. I don't want the government shutting ESR down, but I would never hire someone who has said what he says about race, gender, or sexuality.

The OSI has their own rights as well, and part of their own freedom of speech is that they get to chose who does or doesn't use their platform for speech.

only nutters were attracted to this work in the 80s and 90s. My point stands. We're kicking out the people that thought differently enough to make the world we now live in. Honestly I refuse to blame someone for believing propaganda when it was so strongly pressed upon them. Remember, gay content only recently became acceptable to advertisers and corporate america. Anyone with the old anti-gay viewpoints will be purged by them and their cronies to make more money. This is wrong. Only actual misdeeds should be punished. It's ok to have wrong ideas. We all have them.

I'm queer, but have a LOT of empathy for the previous generation and the crap they had to put up with. Can you just imagine trying to say you were a LGTBQ ally in the 1970s when these people were in their formative years??? It was a different time. They are a product of that time. Be thankful.

It's not about him no being an ally I'm the 70. It's about him conflating homosexuality with pedophilia _today_.

I'm thankful for his work, but today people like him are driving away people from open source.

And this is not a Linus Torvalds sometimes uses rude language kind of thing. It's about a person spewing hatred and toxic lies.

Is his claims baseless or grounded in reality based on accurate historical data? https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Citation please?

His personal blog isn't relevant.

ESR has contributed remarkably little in terms of code, and a huge amount of politics of his own.

> There is no "be nice" rule in life

Golden Rule?

There can be a "be nice" rule in both life and corporate America. Lots of organisations have a "no assholes" rule and this goes double for organisations with a substantial volunteer/not-for-profit ethos as a few unpleasant people who create a lot of drama can drive away a lot of quiet contributors by making their lives unpleasant.

ESR has always been someone who has created drama. Look up the CML2 controversy on the linux kernel mailing list where ESR created so much drama that in the end the kernel devs just gave up on trying to work with him.

It's quite possible that the OSI just decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

There may not be a "be nice" rule in life, but there are such rules in communities. Especially in professional civilized ones.

You've got it backwards.

Because OSS is successful, unless you're in college, the majority of people contributing are those who are being paid to or are independent consultants, as that's possible now.

It's no longer a hobbyist interest, solely the domain of prolific idealists.

ESR has been a victim of his own success. Back when OSS was the upstart ideal, an iconoclast could herd the (small) number of cats and motivate people. The fight against Goliath made it easier to overlook/distract from one's foibles.

This is no longer the case. His fore-bearers are thankful for what he's done, but he's no longer critical. He's not a guy holding a torch in the dark anymore, for which you are grateful to stand near, whatever your personal feelings towards them.

I also suspect that because his influence has diminished as the movement has become normalized, this loss of power might be perceived "de-platforming" by more imagined forces (in his own words, feminism, SJWs, socialists, etc.), when it reality it is just him coming to terms with his no longer being a giant on whose shoulders it is necessary to stand.

That can kinda make a guy feel small, especially for someone who seems to lack humility (based on his own writings)

There is a "be nice" rule in life, insofar as people care to enforce it. It's being enforced. Be nice.

> ESR has done SO MUCH for us,

I think I used fetchmail once. Did you have something else in mind?

How is this reply from Josh Berkus NOT doing exactly what he accuses ESR of doing?? A directed attack on a person's character riddled with accusations and assumptions about their motive but entirely void of response to any of the points or topics the person brought up, and a dismissive, alienating assertion that the person makes no contribution or adds any value, and their absence will not be felt?

Seems like an attempt to intimidate an opponent and win an argument by making the opponent afraid (or banned) to participate

>>> ESR's “sharp language” is not an attempt to persuade. It is an attempt to intimidate opponents; to “win” an argument by making others afraid to participate. Indeed, even today OSI mailing list composition is entirely folks with enough privilege to be resistant to personal attacks. That's a sad, terrible thing. It's not “free speech” when it's an attempt to shout others down so that they have no voice. It's something else entirely. Further, not one of ESR's points is original or even original to this list. In his absence, not one of the ideas he so “colorfully” expressed will be lost. In the meantime, we're missing the input of so many people who will not participate in OSI because of our tolerance for wholly uncivilized behavior like his posts.

Not every contribution, even if useful, is worth the price the contributor demands.

The way to stop this is to just disregard the contributions of those who’s asking price is everyone else’s slavish obedience to their standards of conduct.

When I was 16 or so I made my very first patch to the KDE project. It was really awful code - and I was told to kill myself due to its quality. There are absolutely bullies in FOSS - but I swapped to Gnome and called it a day. I was pretty upset, but a few months later Postfix accepted a patch so I spent 3 years as a mail administrator. My issue here is the lack of transparency - just tell us why he was banned. His essay on social politics seems non-Germaine - it wasn’t aimed at anyone. If he directly insulted harassed or threatened a contributor - absolutely kick him out - but just copy paste the text! It’s a fairly low bar to hit for those given the authority to ban someone from their own creation.

He writes about the reasons behind his expulsion on a post named "The right to be rude" [1] on his blog. This was written before he was banned.

[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8609

Only 2 months after Perens left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21958105

So, does anyone know what exactly he was banned for?

Here's a previous thread on the topic [1]. From what I can gather, Eric was arguing against allowing "ethical source" licenses from being designated as "Open Source" by the institute.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518370

Here's Coraline Ada Ehmke's response [1].

IMO the "Persona Non Grata" clause is a mistake and ESR is right to oppose it. I don't agree with ESR on a lot of things but we should all agree that licenses that support/permit/include these clauses are not "Open Source". This endorsement from OSI is important and I don't think it should apply.

[1] https://threader.app/thread/1233089062430478336

That thread is wrong. Unfortunately, for a stupid reason. The OSI removed the messages from their archive after he got banned. Because removing all evidence is totally the correct thing to do.

I support getting rid of Raymond, but they couldn't have made themselves come off worse to your average internet commentator.

The OSI removed the messages from their archive after he got banned.

Until demonstrated how it might be otherwise, I contend that to be lunacy. Without a dog in the fight, or frankly much interest, I looked at the thread to make my own conclusions. I found nothing from ESR that I consider offensive, and I have much less tolerance for ass-clown behavior than I used to (coincidentally about the time I started working on becoming less of an ass-clown myself).

So I walk away thinking, yup, some special dandruff flake got their panties in a bunch over something silly. Because the message that might have changed my mind on that, well, it's not visible anymore.

From reading the comment thread on ESR's blog, it seems that he went as far as referring to a prominent candidate to the upcoming OSI board elections as a toxic loony nutcase, and that this message was subsequently scrubbed from the email archive. Either way, this puts OSI in a bit of a bind, for obvious reasons.

The crucial question is whether anyone would be banned for calling ESR a toxic lunatic, and I think the answer clearly is no. There are no bad tactics, only bad targets, and the only thing that matters is, as Lenin said, who will overtake whom.

> The crucial question is whether anyone would be banned for calling ESR a toxic lunatic

Well, assume that ESR was running for a board seat at OSI, and that the person did so shortly before the board elections. Maybe they wouldn't be banned for it, but one could argue whether that would be the right call. It's an interesting analogy, because the "folk" perception of both E. S. Raymond and C. A. Ehmke is quite similar, in a way.

Most likely referring to someone as a "toxic loonytoon". Full quote here:

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....

In my experience, decisions like this don't usually turn on one specific incident, but rather a long-running pattern of behavior.

Perceived Wrongthink, or perhaps for the unforgivable crime of accidentally activating the overpowered ego defense reflex of a person or set of persons without good regulation of their amygdala.

"It's not “free speech” when it's an attempt to shout others down so that they have no voice. It's something else entirely."

Indeed.

Many people seem to believe that name calling in the form of "toxic loonytoon" was key to this decision.

Toxic people exist. We must be able to discuss our opinion that someone is toxic.

"Loonytoon" is indeed a gratuitous insult, but a very mild one. Silly, even.

It doesn't make sense to me that OSI would react so strongly and dramatically to such a mild insult. I suspect there is another element to this which no one is discussing.

> Eric S Raymond: The fetishization of ‘nice’ behavior, where ‘nice’ ends up defined as being any behavior some self-appointed censor doesn't like. Usually (and in this case) accompanied by a lot of bafflegab about “inclusion” and “diversity” so thay anyone who isn't a fan of the new, censorious rules can be cast as some sort of bigot.

Pretty much represents HN community too.

If you want to understand ESR, you should read this that he wrote back in 1995: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html

> Rituals are programs written in the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. Religions are program libraries that share critical subroutines. And the Gods represent subystems in the wetware being programmed. All humans have potential access to pretty much the same major gods because our wetware design is 99% shared.

> Only...that cold and mechanistic a way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one. For full understanding, the Apollonian/scientific mode is essential; for direct experience, the Dionysian/ecstatic mode is the only way to go.

That resonated surprisingly strongly with me.

I do wish that the author had pushed back on ESR's claim that removing CoC is the correct solution, particularly given the author's claim that nothing he found in ESRs posts to the list came even close to violating the CoC.

CoCs are an elaborate legalistic version of a conch shell. ESR wasn't holding the shell when he spoke.

ESR discusses this on his blog:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8609

It's pretty pathetic that Chestek wasn't able (or allowed) to even mention who was the "subscriber" that was banned in that email.

Mind you, I disagree with Raymond on quite a few things, but he's clearly far worthier of being read (at least on OSS matters) than these Chestek and Berkus persons.

I thought about it and its actually funny!

Founding shit like this took a special kind of dinosaur, the kind who criticizes everything. The self critique being the most important kind. In an ideal world you can never have enough of that. Sadly for other people, if you have a lot of it, it is hard not to project it outwards as well. It takes a great struggle to not subject others to the same standard one holds himself to. It can be done... until codez of conduct are coined then such person just explodes - which is funny. Fuzzy little creatures then make a home in the hard shell they leave behind.

"The worse, the better." -Nikolay Chernyshevsky

And that's why political activist infestations should be dealt with quickly and forcefully, before they get a chance to fester and take over the host.

ESR: "The effect – the intended effect – is to diminish the prestige and autonomy of people who do the work – write the code – in favor of self-appointed tone-policers. In the process, the freedom to speak necessary truths even when the manner in which they are expressed is unpleasant is being gradually strangled."

Which is what happened in the end.

The OSI is a political activist organization.

Only if you equate open source advocacy with political activism. In fact their "about" page states: "Much of OSI’s advocacy takes the form of quiet persuasion rather than public activism", and the whole thing was founded in part because the term "free software" seemed too politically charged to the founders, both of which, BTW, have been ejected.

Cancer can get cancer; parasites can get parasites.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, on Voltaire's principles

This is a well-written article on many levels.

Unfortunately, my respect for OSI has bottomed out after reading it.

How ironic: A person railing against cancel culture gets cancelled by cancel culture.

Simply disagreeing with politically charged topics gets you a boot from many open source projects.

Many people that claim to want tolerance, actually want nothing less than exuberance for their own causes and have no problem painting people they disagree with as non-human, so they can harass, get them fired from their jobs or positions (canceling), and then finally silence.

This comes right out of the 'rules for radicals' playbook.

If you can't respect my freedom of speech, why should I protect yours?

> How ironic: A person railing against cancel culture gets cancelled by cancel culture.

That’s not ironic. It would be ironic if a supporter of cancel culture got canceled.

Like rain, on your wedding day, ...

>Many people that claim to want tolerance, actually want nothing less than exuberance for their own causes

This is absolutely brilliant

I'm just going to leave this here. https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bru...

More sources: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

You don't even need rationalwiki, wikipedia itself has some choice comments-

> In 2015 Raymond accused the Ada Initiative and other women in tech groups of attempting to entrap male open source leaders and accuse them of rape, saying "Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp."

> Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."

What about context?

What'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 able to inject dubious changes into code that are against the interests of the public. Crypto Backdoors, DRM, vendor-specific crap, subversions of open standards, you name it.

ESR is not only an ultra-libertarian, he’s also a vile scumbag with a considerably inflated ego.

>ESR is not only an ultra-libertarian

You say that like it's a bad thing...

I don’t really care either way TBH. Anarchocapitalism is not my cup of tea but there are definitely libertarians that I enjoy listening to. My point was that ESR’s biggest problem area isn’t his ideology of choice but rather his long list of other undesirable character traits.

I found one of the emails (https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists..., at the bottom)

I would ban someone for that. "Toxic loonytoon" is not a productive way to have a discussion.

(Originally quoted it here but getting formatting right here is terrible).

Does someone have a list of common, non-OSI approved software licenses for FOSS software?

I might want to relicense some projects I have...

Eventually darwinism will win out.

If the correct way is to censor certain opinions, then naturally organizations that tend to do that will outcompete organizations that don’t.

And if not, then not.

It took quite a long time for Central and Eastern European countries to escape the obviously dysfunctional socialist regime. Many people perished waiting for the collapse.

I'm too not hopeful this time.

To paraphrase, "revolutionaries" can remain irrational longer than the you can remain alive and willing to contribute.

That might be true (although it might not; evolution infamously doesn't exactly optimize for "best", just "survived"), but even if it is it would be nice to minimize the collateral damage.

The correct axis to consider this question along is "hostile work environment".

Because coding is a job, and open source coding is a job these days. And you are expected to behave in a somewhat professional manner.

ESR's email in any reasonable workplace would lead to a disciplinary hearing. It was a bad email that should not have been sent.

An open source maintainer is not your boss. If your work on an open source project is not being accepted, you can just fork the project and effortlessly escape any "hostility", while still taking full credit for your coding. The proposed Persona Non Grata clause actively creates a full-blown "hostile work environment" problem where none existed before (by purposely obstructing the "freedom to fork" aspect of FLOSS development), so if you're right it's Ehmke who is doing what you describe, not ESR.

Let them have it. All. Wait until they fall. Because bikeshedding Gerrit is not fit for merit. Bitrotten incest is their best. Fork in silent stealth, away from the screaming masses. Enjoy the silence, and clear air. No obnoxious gases anymore, just code and score. While THEY have nothing to show, except screaming fits. Dumb shits!

"I haven't been here for 20 years but I've come to fix all your problems. I will not be nice while I do that."

In what possible world do you expect such a story to end any other way, regardless of the forum and people involved?

He’s obviously a great when it comes to his contributions over the years. And he may have a point in his criticisms. But he doesn’t seem in a healthy state of mind. He seems paranoid - “make no mistake we are under attack” - angry - “loonytoon”, “ratfucking” - and the victim of a cultural attack - “journalistically-protected class“. The linked article on here about homosexual priests seems to suggest it’s been a theme for a while.

Yeah it’s pretty obvious that he has issues.

Given that the free software world struggles to resolve the relatively simple moral conundrum of whether or not licenses should require people to share, adding another layer of moral and ethical concerns on top - around the idea of trying to define good and bad uses for software - is a heck of an ambitious problem; as such there's a lot of good arguments for and against a candidate who wants the OSI to pick up that work.

It's unfortunately that the esr clown show has derailed that with the ravings of a man who, quite to the contrary of one of his sayings, doesn't contribute much code and won't shut up; and the rather than introducing any cogent or interesting thoughts on the topic, has simply sprayed abuse around like an out-of-control honeywagon. The OSI will be a great deal better off for his absence.

Oh, lots of ESR fanboys here today! Can someone of you please explain exactly what it is that makes ESR a great hacker/programmer?

Nothing, imho. He maintained the jargon file and some irrelevant old unix utilities for a while. His primary achievement was non-technical: taking the radical philosophy of free software and neutering it be acceptable to corporations. He also wrote a book[0] with a catchy title that many people referenced and few people read.

I think ESR is a dabbler and popularizer who has built his personal brand around being a Man-in-Tech rather than a person who actually produces significant technical contributions. RMS or Torvalds he ain't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

IMO you summed it up very well there.

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