Re: Tone policing by a member of the community team [Was, Re: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board]
On 2021/04/12 17:30, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 02:56:34PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
>> Not true, if someone identifies with fascist doctrine, even if they keep
>> those views off of the project channels, then they are not welcome here,
>> no matter where they engaged in those kind of activities.
>
> Would you care to put that to a vote? I think you'll lose -- and if
> you win, you'll fracture the Project.
Whether I'd like to put that to a vote? Good question! I'll have to come
back to you on that. At the very least, I hope that we get to the point
where we can have better information gathering and decision making
within the project, and that if we do need to make a formal,
project-wide poll, that we have something better than a GR as our only
blunt instrument for that.
> I say it with all respect, Jonathan, as someone who admires you and
> judges you to have been a tactful, prudent, competent, energetic,
> effective Leader; but politicization of Debian has gone far enough. We
> are not going to bar persons who identify with fascist doctrine or any
> other doctrine from the Project if I have anything to say about it.
*blush* uhm, that's a lot of nice words from someone I haven't even met
yet, so thanks for cushioning the blow.
I'm pretty sure that you're familiar with the paradox of tolerance, so
I'm not going to bore or patronize you by explaining it, but at some
point we have to draw a line at what kind of people we allow inside our
community. Thankfully, to the best of my knowledge, we have no neo-nazis
or similar extremists within our community. I'd like to keep it that
way. Sometimes people with opposing views are valuable, but other times
they are just destructive. Bigots in all shapes and form will ultimately
only hurt the project if we allow them in. And ultimately, I guide my
decisions on what's best for the project, not by the feelings of those
who don't care about the feelings of others.
> Someone might reply by citing the Code of Conduct
> and Diversity Statement, but such citations do not impress me. The Code
> and Statement were adopted to smooth the Project's work, not to menace
> political undesirables, nor to empower the easily offended. In my
> strong opinion, Diversity includes everyone, even, especially fascists.
> And do you know what? The text of the Diversity Statement agrees with
> me, unless one were determined to twist its adverb "constructively" to
> authorize mischievous *deconstruction* of the Project along
> ideological lines.
It's true that the CoC does indeed state that everyone is welcome,
without mentioning exceptions, but the only kind of people I would
exclude are the people who by their very beliefs and way of living,
already violate the CoC. I don't think that's very controversial,
> For all I know, a handful of Members might be determined to do just
> that. I hope not. If so, though, then I'll warrant that the
> deconstructors are in the minority, and a small minority at that. Given
> an up-or-down vote, they would lose.
Those of us who are working to fix the problems in our community are
doing so because we want to grow our community, not because we want to
deconstruct anything. We're tired of seeing people leave because of
mysogyny or similar offenses, we want to build Debian into something
much bigger and be inclusive of all walks of like while doing so.
> Meanwhile, regarding the GR, I have no comment except that I have cast
> my vote, same as everyone else. However, your statement as quoted above
> cannot be supported.
Well, I suppose we fundamentally disagree then. Thanks for voting, though.
> The time for the tail to wag the dog is over. It's time to get back to
> the open source.
Despite the turmoil in the organisation we so deeply care about (and we
do care about the FSF), Debian has been making good strides. There's the
FTP team that did stellar work ahead of freeze which helped smooth out
our initial freeze stages. I've made some gentle pushes in a few areas
and our community has responded so well that it even seems likely that
we may have the release for bullseye by the end of May[1], which is
quite good if you consider that buster was released in July with similar
freeze dates preseeding that. There's been great work all around the
project over the last here. The mentors site has had a big overhaul,
fixing many of its issues and modernising the stack, that site is
crucial for helping new contributors with getting their packages in to
Debian. Debian Trends have been updated, the Debian Screenshots site has
a completely revamped look and feel, our front page on our website has
had a re-design (with further changes planned to make it look really
snazzy), we gained preseed.debian.net, a new service to list all preseed
options, we've done experiments to re-build the archive with clang,
worked on machine learning policy, deprecated debhelper 5+6, we've even
gotten computers to handle more of our packaging work with the help of
the Debian Janitor, we now have archive rebuilds as a service, an
architecture crossgrader packaged within the Debian archive, we host a
fresh new debuginfod service (possibly the largest one that exists, we
gained Fabre - a very user-friendly web front end to the BTS. We worked
on our relationships with external entities, strenghening our
relationship with companies like Lenovo, Hetzner, OVH, rsync.net and
more (details to follow in our usual channels, but I love that more and
more organisations actively want to work with us), we hosted our first
ever online minidebconf, which taught us a lot in the build-up to DC20,
our first ever completely online DebConf that went really well and was
followed by more great online events that followed it. Our NM process
continued to become even easier, resulting in 26 new DDs and a nice big
swell of 46 new DMs, of which hopefully a good amount will become DDs in
the future.
The list above is non-exhaustive it's really just what I could come up
with while writing this mail, we've had a year with lots of progress in
important areas, and I'm confident this year will end up even better.
And sure, there are some regressions, some packages that I would've
really liked to have seen make it into testing before the hard freeze,
but my point is that we've really been /open-sourcing/ *hard*. There are
many of us working nearly every single day (I've had 6 days over the
last year that I didn't work on Debian) who work hard to make Debian
better. People who only participate on mailing lists have a very
different view of Debian than those who spend more time providing
improvements to the project and our releases. I think a comment like
you've made above says more about you than it does about the project,
and I suggest that you consider following your own advice.
-Jonathan
[1]
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