Quoting Monique Y. Mudama (spam@bounceswoosh.org): > Mostly, I feel sorry for the guy who posted this joke, because I don't > think it was meant to be offensive -- it seems more likely to me that > the developer is perhaps a little socially inept and misguaged his > audience. Of course, something can be offensive even when the author > has no such intent. Joss is not socially inept. He very clearly has a sense of humor which he believes can be the same in written and persistent material such as the "offending" article and more volatile material like spoken language or IRC, or even blog posts. I think that the most important here is seeing the difference between the original intent of someone and the effect of the publication, including the effect on the public image of the Debian project (just read the comments in the article pointed by Elizabeth). I do not minimize the effect on specific persons (as pointed in the article) and I agree that the action would have warranted a short note by the DPL (as some people pointed in the huge thread that followed up, d-d-a is part of the outside image of Debian....whether it's meant to be "developer oriented" doesn't really mater: it has a much wider audience). The current hype and noise in -devel and other lists affects the relations between contributors of the project, that's a fact. This is however not the first time most of us have arguments and I'm somewhat confident that we can survive this (as Joss himself pointed later, we don't have to be friends to be able to work together in a softare project). I'm less sure about the effect on the public image of Debian. I would really hate us to be seen as the NetBSD of the Linux-based distros, in short....:)... Again, read the comments at the end of the article. As misinformed they are (I very much laugh at those who end up technically comparing Debian an other distros....forgetting that the most popular one currently is 95% based on Debian).....they bear a general feeling about the project which is not particularly positive. When this has to do with gender-related topics where a big initial movement was in Debian about 5 years ago, that makes me really sad.
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