> "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