Re: removal of svenl from the project
>>>>> "Jonas" == Jonas Meurer <jonas@freesources.org> writes:
>> With the understanding that we're now not talking about Sven Luther but
>> a hypothetical highly abusive person, I wish to ask Brian the following
>> question: do you think there are any circumstances under which Debian
>> should be able to ban people from participating in our public mailing
>> lists?
It needs to be a case by case situation - I don't think you can use
expulsion to censor an individual though - in fact it won't censor the
person - they are free to create websites write posts to other forums
describing why Debian is awful because they were forced to leave
Debian.
If a person has never contributed anything good to Debian, probably
never will contribute anything good to Debian, and creates flame wars
with every single post, then maybe thats a good reason for expelling
the person. Then again, maybe good things can arise even from flame
wars...
Jonas> even though i'm not asked here, my opinion is that this
Jonas> shouldn't be possible. there are killfiles and other great
Jonas> ways to ignore individuals that you don't want to know
Jonas> anything about.
There might be situations were you do have to expel from mailing
lists. e.g. if somebody makes illegal posts, and Debian (as opposed to
the poster) gets into legal trouble. Or if somebody describes how to
do illegal activities (even then exceptions might exist, e.g. if
discussing certain games...).
Fortunately there has never been such a case that I know about.
Jonas> but when you start to expel, ban or otherwise censor people
Jonas> in an open project, where would you draw the border?
I prefer a more positive approach of encouraging (and rewarding)
people for learning better social skills instead of punishing those
that don't.
Unfortunately, it today's world you only notice the idiots. When
people do the right thing and resolve conflicts quickly and
appropriately it barely rates a mention.
Perhaps Debian (if we don't already) needs to have a procedure to
follow if you feel somebody is being abusive or otherwise not
listening to your (obviously sound) reasoning.
I also like the idea of having some system where each party can choose
an independent arbitrator, however, this should be towards the bottom
of the list.
Even lower would be options like forward the request to the technical
committee.
At the bottom of the list, if nothing else works, then yes, Kill files
are an option; I am not convinced this is a solution though. If it
gets to this stage you effectively admitting you can't communicate
with each other - and having developers that can't/won't communicate
doesn't seem good, and we could end up with multiple developers
working on the same problem at the same time.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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