I'm actually pretty bored by the completely futile rehashing of the same ground on this matter, over and over, to no resolution. Clearly, RMS will never feel anything other than "proud" about his ridicule of religion and women. Clearly, Patryk and like-minded others, will never change their minds about the "humor" of this. Further discussion really _is_ pointless.
At GUADEC 2008, in Istanbul, I got into a conversation with Behdad about my impressions of the conference and the city. He liked what I said, and asked me to repeat it, on stage, at the closing of the conference. I spoke about how, in my various travels, I'd never made it to Istanbul before, and how thoroughly different it was from anyplace I'd been previously. I talked about how terrific our hosts had been. Mostly, I talked about how the GNOME community seemed to be a sort of little "United Nations", bringing people from vastly different cultures, with very different outlooks, together in love of some common goals. I talked about what a wonderful and amazing thing I thought that was. I would not have been able, in any honesty, to make the same statements last year. I could not, I think, make them this year. The community I see today is not the community I saw then. If anything, the situation for women (and minorities in general) seems to have worsened; there's more discord over silly issues, more hatred, more intransigence, less willingness to live-and-let-live, and vastly greater polarization. There's sprung up a whole contingent of apparently-otherwise-non-participating monomaniacal "free software advocates" harassing and defaming others over differences of opinion on _software_. I cannot express just how much that saddens me. However, communities get what they ask for. This is what we've asked for, people. == 30 == _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
