On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Paul Hedderly <paul@xxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> It is clear that you can't tollerate LT because he has a different
>> opinion of what is appropriate in regards to how others should be
>> treated.
>
> I'm not fond of that characterization of my opinion. I think it misses a
> key distinction.
>
> I do not care what Linus's personal opinion about what is appropriate is.
> He's free to hold whatever opinion he wishes; that does not affect me, and
> it only has a secondary effect on the community. What I cannot tolerate
> is his *behavior*, which is aggressively nasty, hostile, and destructive
> to the community, and which can cause real damage by demoralizing and
> driving away people who otherwise could be part of our community. And
> which is, beyond that, just unacceptable treatment of other human beings.
>
> By this, I do *not* mean his behavior at DebConf, which I thought was
> blunt but which didn't cross where I would put that line. I mean his
> behavior within the Linux kernel community, as has been well-documented
> and discussed elsewhere, and which he chose to actively defend at DebConf.
>
> This has nothing to do with a difference of opinions. It has to do with
> specific public behavior that hurts other people.
>
>> Two phrases in that startled me:
>
>> "Linus does not treat people with respect by _my_ definition of the word."
>> "he is not meeting that standard, and that's unacceptable."
>
>> I'll tread carefully here - I really do not want to offend.
>> I feel the above statements could be argued to fit this definition:
>
>> http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/bigot
>> NOUN : A person who is intolerant towards those holding different
>> opinions
>
>> And I think bigotry is sometimes a good thing. I am intollerant towards
>> people who think its ok to murder or rape, or perform FGM etc etc. So I
>> am a bigot, and I would hope most people are bigotted towards such
>> things.
>
> This is an old argument in this space. There's lots and lots of
> discussion of the problems with this argument on-line. The summary is
> that, while you can technically define intolerance of bigotry as bigotry
> using a fine parsing of the dictionary, this is not a useful definition
> and it's not what people intend by the term. It only leads to digressing
> into pointless meta-arguments, which interferes with addressing the actual
> problem.
>
>> The problem I have with the quotes above in this case is that - "not
>> meeting that standard, and that's unacceptable." depends on an absolute
>> - that some standard or other is an absolute that all people must abide
>> by.
>
>> Where do absolutes come from? Well, not from concensus. This thread has
>> demonstrated that.
>
> They come from ethics, wherever one might want to derive ethics from,
> which is a much larger conversation. However, communities can agree on
> what ethics that they insist upon, and part of that discussion is to argue
> for ethical limits that may not yet be common in the community, but which
> one believes should be adopted by the community.
>
> That's what's happening here. When I first started in Debian, I don't
> think the position that people should be treated with a basic level of
> respect was widely supported. I'm seeing this change; now it is widely
> supported but there's still significant resistence. I hope that process
> continues, and in time it becomes widely supported without significant
> resistence. I am advocating for and supporting that change.
>
> When I say this behavior is unacceptable, I mean it is unacceptable to me
> personally, which in turn means that I will limit my support for and work
> with a person who violates that standard of ethics. I also believe that
> Debian as a project should take a similar stance, declare such behavior
> unacceptable, and at least act against it in the spaces that we control.
>
>> Meh. I'm probably going to get banned for life now for having
>> opinions. I'd better just go crawl under my rock again.
>
> People don't get banned from Debian for having opinions. Nor does anyone
> want that to happen, so far as I can see. I certainly don't.
>
> People might get banned from Debian for their *behavior* towards other
> people. I haven't seen anything in your behavior that I find the
> slightest bit objectionable. Certainly disagreeing with me is fine! I
> hope to convince you, and I also support the project deciding to enforce
> certain standards of behavior even if some members of the project
> disagree. But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them stating
> their disagreement.
>
> And you'll note that we're not exactly fast to ban people anyway.
>
> Even with Linus, I'm sure that the call for deciding not to invite him to
> further Debian events is based on the long-term pattern of behavior, not
> this one incident. And even among people who find his position generally
> unacceptable, you'll notice that there isn't widespread support for that
> action here. (I don't agree with it in this case, for instance.)
Russ,
Thanks for this, I concur that there are two meanings of Respect,
basically for lack of better words I call them Empathy vs Admiration.
The majority of Debian community members seem to be striving for a
state where we treat others with empathy-respect, even if we don't
necessarily admire-respect them.
I also agree, that while I found the tension in the room during parts
of Linus' Q&A discomforting/awkward, that the CoC was not violated.
That said, if we want to strive towards being a more family-friendly
event, we need to do more to clearly discourage the use of course/foul
language by speakers.
I'd like to raise one point from Linus' talk that I don't want to see
dropped due to the CoC discussion, and wonder where the appropriate
place to discuss it would be? (I don't think it should be in private,
but I personally feel that it's a major issue that we are not
addressing.)
Linus made a point about how application developers find it really
difficult to target "Linux", which obviously includes Debian. I agree
and feel the pace of modern application development requires that
useful and actively developed software needs a way to be updated much
more frequently outside of the constraints of a typical Linux distro
release cadence. Telling users to run unstable or testing isn't really
a solution either. (They are called testing and unstable for a
reason).
I don't think -project is the place for this? Perhaps d-d?
Thanks,
Brian
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