@louis point taken.
> "Let's resist the urge to condemn entire projects based on the actions or decisions of individual contributors. It's counterproductive. The beauty of this space is that we have the opportunity to engage in factual, nuanced, and compassionate discussions about these challenges. There's room for diverse perspectives and healthy debate here."
@louis I appreciate and sympathsize what you are saying here, so I wanted to give you the thoughtful reply that you deserve.
I see this as a "paradox of tolerance" issue, maybe not for the whole fediverse but for up-and-coming projects like Ladybird.
What angers me about the lead developer of Ladybird is that he has been seen closing issues on GitHub by people attempting to fix documentation or comments in the code and make the language more gender neutral. Andreas Kling believes (at best) "gender netural" is a derisive political concept and does not tolerate it anywhere in his project. He does not tolerate gender neutrality.
What is worse, it seems that he is claiming his project to be "apolitical" as an excuse to censor contributors who disagree with his politics, shooting them down as if their contrary opinions are "too political" and have no place in a purely technical endeavor. Hiding one's own politics and silencing dissent behind a facade of "we are technical, not political" is incredibly cynical, and in my experience, this is a common tactic of people with very authoritarian and racist views. If I were a contributor to his project, I would have been very angry if he had closed my issue for that reason, so much so that I probably would have forked the whole code base and deleted my contributions on the original project.
Then this quickly can lead to bigger problems. People who don't like to be silenced (e.g. women, transgendered people, gay, or ethnic African or Arabs, etc.) will all begin to feel censored and leave the project as well, which will create a monoculture within the project development team, and further embolden them against anyone who expresses "political views" different from their monoculture. It is a vicious cycle.
And it makes me very sad that many people who contribute to Ladybird may not yet realize what kind of project leadership to which they are devoting their free labor, precisely because of that cynicism by the project lead. It is likely an incident similar to that which occurred with NixOS may again occur with SerenityOS or Ladybird. When that happens, just like what happened with NixOS, everyone will be shocked to find that their technical contributions have been enriching someone with authoritarian and (perhaps also) racist views, even though the red flags were there from a much earlier time.
Finally, a venture capitalistand co-founder of GitHub Chris Wanstrath has started backing the Ladybird project, which means yet again, someone with authoritarian and (probably) racist views is being enriched by capital, and this problem grows beyond a simple project like Ladybird, and it becomes truly a systemic.
So back to the paradox: should we tolerate people who refuse to tolerate gender neutrality? Or should we protest and walk away to prevent others from falling into that trap? In my experience, it is counterproductive to tolerate the intolerant, it always leads to problems in the end.
@ramin_hal9001 I'm curios.
Our language is imperfect. You can change/improve it, but it requires time. During the transition, it is also a matter of personal style.
Accusing someone to be "probably" racist, only because he does not agree with some new form of written style, is rather extreme. I'm scared more from you than Andreas Kling, because you are giving me vibes of the "Reign of Terror" during the French Revolution.
This is one of the refused pull-requests https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814/files
The "they" makes the sentence more ambiguous because without technical knowledge it can be interpreted as "the `wheel` group will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.
So using "they" everywhere is not always a good solution, and after you accept one modification, you had to change documentation in all places, if you want to be coherent. So, it is not a single fix, but a "political decision".
Changing the language is a political action, but also refusing to adopt the new style is a political decision. But, it is more normal sticking to actual conventions, than adopting new ones. The usual solution is creating a new fashion, and waiting that the people following old fashions will naturally change or die. But not "killing" them!
You can fork the project, and use your conventions in your new community, but accusing the other to be a "racist" and to not deserve money for a project he created, only because he sticks to old and usual conventions, is too much extreme.
@louis@emacs.ch
@ramin_hal9001 thanks for the polite answer!
Regarding the grammar, that obviously is not the main point of the discussion, I disagree.
If you are correct, it should be something like
"Note that the `anon` users are able to become `root` without password by default, as a development convenience.
To prevent this, remove `anon` users from the `wheel group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su".
But from a technical point of view `anon` is a user in Linux, not a group of objects. So probably I would use "it", instead of "he/they", because it can be seen as a "role", and not as a person:
"To prevent this, remove `anon` user from the `wheel group` and it will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.
@louis@emacs.ch
> "`anon` is a user in Linux, not a group of objects"
@mzan @louis I feel like you missed the important point that I was making:
A linux "user" is a role, not a person or an individual. A role may be multiple real-life people. At any time, more than one real person might be logged in with that same singled "user" account.
Therefore "they" is the correct term here.
So it must be read as:
"Note that the `anon` (Linux) user is able to become `root` (Linux user) without password by default, as a development convenience.
To prevent this, remove `anon` (Linux user) from the `wheel` (Linux) group and they (who!? ah the real-life users logged as the `anon` Linux user) will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`."
I'm not convinced. It is against Occam's Razor. It is simpler to read as "... and it (the `anon` Linux user) will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`".
But it is not really important. Only for sake of discussion.
@louis@emacs.ch
> "Accusing someone to be "probably" racist, only because he does not agree with some new form of written style, is rather extreme."
@mzan I admit your point, that I might be unfairly assuming racism where there is none. In my defense, this is why I was careful to always write "probably" first. But Kling's behavior is highly suspicious and I no longer trust his judgement until he makes some public statement clarifying his actual political views — I am not demanding an apology, just a statement clarifying his views. I have a lot of prior experience with people who complain to much about "politics," it is almost never good a sign.
> "To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`."
> "The "they" makes the sentence more ambiguous because without technical knowledge it can be interpreted as "the `wheel` group will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`."On this point I completely disagree with you, you are very wrong. The "they" is grammatically more correct in this case because the "anon" user is not necessarily an individual user, it is a role which may be inhabited my any number of users (multiple people logged in as "anon" at one time), therefore "they" is the more correct word to use. Too bad correct grammar is too "political" for Mr. Kling.
@louis