spacecadet <spaceca...@purge.sh> writes: > On 7/31/25 11:09 PM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote: >> But here we are talking about maintainers specifically discriminating >> people in very violent ways, during their role as a maintainer, so we >> probably all agree that this is way too dangerous, and that this is >> bad, and that it needs to be avoided. > > Are you still talking about xlibre? I haven't seen any violence from > the maintainers. The most violence I felt was towards the lead dev > for force-pushing master every day, but thankfully he's stopped doing > that. > > Most of what you wrote boils down to "what if" the maintainers make > some bad decision or yell at a packager. It's still a new project, so > there's a lot of uncertainty (which is why I haven't tried to upstream > the package yet), but you're making a lot of assumptions.
This is not a matter of "what if". The people behind in xlibre have made it quite clear what their ideas and goals are, and those views are inherently bigoted. This is actively harmful, because it excludes people, even if you haven't personally seen them yelling at anyone. If someone says they're a nazi, treat them as such, even if they say it (relatively) politely, even if they say it with dog whistles. They are still harmful, and they should not be platformed. The reason you don't see any direct, openly hostile confrontation is because their dog whistles worked: they chased away the subjects of their bigotry, and are now working on making their opinions more palatable. This is somewhat similar to apartheid: a whites-only village with a couple of smiling non-white servants might /seem/ peaceful and happy, but this appearance is created through the underlying violence. As I said before: The xlibre project pretends to work against "politics in software", while they are actually working against policies of acceptance and equity in particular. They pretend to want that everyone is accepted, while (based on a manifold of public utterances) it is obvious that their real goal is ensuring that racists, sexists, bigots, etc are accepted. This would ensure that racism, sexism, bigotry, etc is present in the free software community, and endanger others. >> And personally what matters to me is not necessary the outcome of >> Xlibre or even the specifics on how to deal with software that has >> extremely toxic maintainership but rather that we have each other's back >> and not engage in direct or indirect discrimination or attacks of each >> other when we are in the same boat. > > I'm on board with this, we're all for free software and need to have > the backs of other free software projects. It almost seems like you're saying that we need to have the back of the xlibre project - if so: I strongly disagree. They should be treated as pariahs in the community. We should support others *against* xlibre folks, against their attacks, against their discrimination. Kind regards, pinoaffe
