Re: Josselin Mouette and Planet Debian
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 09:12:46AM +0100, Thomas Weber wrote:
> > > Or do you need to let of some steam here, because such behaviour is
> > > unacceptable on Ubuntu lists?
> > There's no ubuntu-legal list infested with leeches who think it's their
> > business to tell Ubuntu how to interpret its own license requirements
> > without ever having contributed a line of code to Ubuntu, so I don't think
> > the analogy holds.
> Sorry, but I don't think the idea of 'politeness' differs so much over
> different mailing lists. Either you don't insult people or you do. And
> my point wasn't about debian-legal, obviously. But rather about people
> insulting people one day and then finger-pointing at other people
> insulting other people the next day.
There are a couple of differences here that I think are material (or else I
wouldn't be behaving in a way that you think is hypocritical).
First, I haven't objected that Joss is "insulting" anyone. I object that he
publically mocks many of his peers in the Debian project (sometimes singly,
sometimes as a class), and he and his apologists insist that this is
justified because it's "fun" or "funny", and that people who are offended
should all just lighten up instead of taking offense at this lowering of the
level of discourse. These people have so little respect for their peers in
Debian that they won't even bother with an attempt at civil discussion.
They seem to think that putting the "fun" back in Debian means making crass,
schoolyard jokes about other people in the project, not about having fun
*working on Debian*.
While I admit I suffer from the same self-righteousness by deciding who it's
ok to insult on the lists, I'm certainly not doing this to amuse myself or
others. I do it because I think hangers-on who contribute nothing to Debian
but their opinions are a real and serious problem on a number of our lists,
and debian-legal in particular where they account for a majority of replies
over the past couple of years; and our mailing list policies, conditioned as
they are by the knee-jerk "censorship is bad" crowd, don't offer any other
way to deal with such problems *except* vigilantism. I don't /enjoy/
sending mails like that. I just believe that they're the lesser evil.
I hope a system such as the one being proposed on -project might eventually
provide us with a working feedback mechanism to check people's urges to
contribute nothing but cheap talk, one that doesn't involve self-appointed
enforcers.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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