I'm a little disappointed to see the original PR locked due to lphilips54's inconsistent statements.
While I think the OSS community should be polite and inclusive, I also think that we are all poorer if we ignore contributions due to author behavior. I'm confident that many authors have abhorrent political views and actions. While we should not elevate them as role models, there are times it's reasonable to just use the code.
My issue is that software projects are highly political.
When you are a regular contributer, someone may not accept the request because they just don't like you.. and gender may not matter.
Anonymous contributions being accepted at a higher rate proves my point.
If I was well-known in a community to be against gay marriage, I can almost guarantee that my pull requests would be accepted at a lower rate in most OSS projects.
But it seems as if the politics being discussed here apply to the project and its contributors, it's not as if a Code of Conduct is being applied to you, the end user. Unless they add something political to the license itself, I don't see why it would matter.
I'm interested in an academic sense, what's the accusation here?
Regardless of the person's views though I think if their code is clean and they're not actively applying said views to harm other contributors, live and let live...
While Foss should be to some degree apolitical, individual contributors should be allowed to express their political views. The politics and the software itself should be treated differently.
1 point by sbr464 3 minutes ago | parent | edit | delete [-] | on: Lerna adds clause to MIT license blocking certain ...
I respect their decision and rights, but I don't really understand this move. I also believe this sets a dangerous potential pattern within the developer community.
I personally don't agree with certain statements/immigration/ICE etc. but I'm more put back by this.
Coding is becoming easier and will increasingly include more of the general population (which is a good thing). This means it's about to become much more diverse in regards to religion, political beliefs, personal morals, citizenship, etc.
I don't mean this in the political/philosophical sense. I mean soon people will start showing up in Github/twitter comments, contributing pull requests, with a genuine interest about coding, who look like people you personally dislike. Maybe they are wearing a Trump t-shirt in their profile photo, but their code is great. Are you going to reject their pull request or ignore their comments?
Governments & company policies change frequently. There's also an unlimited combination of potential beliefs, moral stances, crimes by an unlimited number of people and companies. At what point would you decide to add or remove amendments to your license?
I also feel it's hypocritical to use a product owned by Microsoft (github), while calling them out in your license by name. I mean, are you protesting Microsoft or aren't you?
How do you know that an upstream dependency you are benefitting from wasn't created by one of these companies?
To highlight the humor of this line of thinking, why not block oppressive regimes, serial killers (>= 6 people, <6 are ok), certain religious groups with worse principals than ICE?
As visible upthread, I think starting w/ the block in code is a bad move, and am sad that reaching out to the maintainer of alpine-glibc seems like an afterthought.
That said, there is not a universal mandate for how an open source project “must behave”, other than that the terms of the license (which the authors of the code are able to choose). There isn’t a single cohesive “entire fucking point” of open source. The things proposed in the blog post are permissible under the license, are able to be bypassed by the user, and are not some earthshattering affront to human decency.
We should be able to disagree about the best course of action without falling into incendiary accusations.
As someone who contributes to BSD licensed code, please don’t tell me my users are “appropriating” my work. I’m happy my code is being used, and the more the merrier.
If as you say, somebody released code saying that it was something they were willing to support, it’s reasonable to expect said author to stand by their statements.
That said, this seems like it would be a more implicit expectation than an explicit agreement in many cases. How could a community enforce good behavior in this regard?
Going by your previous example, would it be reasonable for the recommended list of libraries to be more carefully curated for people on such a way that only stable _and_ well supported libraries are put forward? Putting hard requirements on official recommendations seems like it’s be a fairly simple way to avoid such situations.
This is a pretty hard stance to take when creating an OSS project. The author made an open source, MIT-licensed repo. Right now, the statement reads "I wrote this all myself". Does that mean the author is not willing to accept PRs?
Or will we see something like a DCO that developers make an attestation that AI was not used in creating the change?
How is it unreasonable to want you to not host someone's code on one explicit other platform?
We already established no one is forcing you and if you don't respect the author you don't get to be respected for your decision to ignore them and will earn snarky remarks. (and rightfully so, in my opinion)
Politics of software authors are usually irrelevant. I disagree with Eric S. Raymond on a bunch of things, but that doesn't mean his software should be boycotted by association. I draw the line at the author being a literal murderer, which is why I don't use ReiserFS.
The issue hinges on the meaning of "represent". Merely mentioning in the bio of a personal account that I work on a certain open source project is not the same as asserting that this personal account represents the project. Reasonable people do not confuse these concepts.
SJWs willfully conflate these ideas, though, and that's because they're not working in good faith. In reality, they're trying to blacklist people whose political views they find abhorrent, and one weapon in their extensive arsenal is the unreasonable interpretation of reasonable-sounding policy.
I really don't like the sentiment of "We shouldn't change it unless the man page says we can". That's exactly the kind of senseless bureaucracy that the open source community should be avoiding.
Avoiding things like this is the reason I don't have any Code of Conduct for my public FOSS projects. [1]
The flip side of that is that people need to trust my vision for culture [2] and trust me to do the right thing to build that culture. And of course, I need to vindicate that trust.
There will be plenty of people who don't trust the vision or me, and that's fine. In fact, that's an expression of a free market for ideas, so I want people to be able to choose.
There’s that libertarian streak of “his project, his rules” in this thread. He can include or exclude anyone he wants because it’s his project.
Well, I read the very first line and see that he doesn’t want me, or people like me to be a contributor to this project. And that’s fine. His project, so I hear. But personally, I’ve felt welcome to contribute to every other open source project out there. I’ve felt welcome to apply to any job out there. It feels jarring to be excluded like this. I feel hurt. I shouldn’t be made to feel like this, just because of my religious views.
And no, please don’t split any hairs like “no, he’s not excluding, he’s actually describing…”. You wouldn’t be supporting him if the first line changed to be based on race instead of religion. Then why are you supporting him now?
Are you going to accept cold hard code contributions from someone who regularly writes excellent code and engages in political fingerpointing?
Are you going to accept cold hard code contributions from someone who regularly writes excellent code and has the technical sense of the community about 80% of the time, and is at odds with the technical sense of the community 20% of the time, and regularly tells everyone involved in the 20% case that they're idiots and the project will fail if they don't merge the remaining 20% of their code (which is technically excellent too, just not implementing the design people want)?
Are you going to accept cold hard code contributions from someone who generally writes good code that works on the first try but refuses to listen to code reviews?
Are you going to accept cold hard code contributions under the wrong license? (Licenses are politics, not code!)
I prefer that the tool I use to be the middleman between me and the creator I support to not decide for ME who is acceptable or not for ME to support. But I understand your point, this discussion would have no end here in Hackernews. Let's agree to disagree :-)
1. Yes, this is certainly an assumption I think everyone makes, though I wouldn't entangle my personal opinions on non-software things with my open source projects
2. Not quite; the community is closed to people who have a different opinion from them. As a software project they're publicly going on record stating that they think their opinion makes them better people, and they don't accept contributions from people outside that community (lesser people). I think in the context of religious beliefs it's a discriminatory stance. If they were an employer in Canada, they would be fined or possibly shut down.
While I think the OSS community should be polite and inclusive, I also think that we are all poorer if we ignore contributions due to author behavior. I'm confident that many authors have abhorrent political views and actions. While we should not elevate them as role models, there are times it's reasonable to just use the code.
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