On 2023-06-02T09:30:29, Peter Czanik <peter@czanik.hu> wrote:
I want our moderators to be neutral. However, as the openSUSE community was never even given the opportunity to choose our moderators, I guess neither opinion counts for much. Yeah, I agree. Full neutrality is important.
There's three ways for moderation to be fully neutral: - Reject everything. - Accept everything. - Randomly do one of the two with a 50:50 distribution. That's obviously non-sense. The whole point of "moderation" is not to be neutral, but to enforce the rules to the best of their ability (and that will always be imperfectly, because social interactions are complex - just like gender, if I may make that pun).
Once upon a time in the 90`s I joined the technology world, because real-world problems, politics, whatever did not exist within technology projects. No matter of the background (far left, far right, etc.), you could work together on wonderful projects.
Look, I've been ignorant in the past as well; how could I not have been, having grown up in small-town Germany? There were a few things I could deduce, but for many others, I simply lacked the input. That's not an excuse. In fact, it is the opposite: it's the active rejection of growth and learning. If anything, I don't want to go back to that time, I want to write my past self a (rather long) booklet of how to be more aware - since that's impossible, the best thing one can do is do better, starting now. Those problems already existed. The whole _point_ of Free Software was a heavily political stance. Copyright and licenses are legalese, and you know who makes laws? The politicians. The very fact that you did not see significantly different voices back then was because capitalism had exploited large parts of the world while denying them access, colonialism, and because LGBT rights were so much worse than today that they - we - just didn't speak up as much. Free, Libre, Open Source software - heck, even those three terms have different socio-economic, financial, and political implications. Apoliticality is just as impossible as not communicating. As the communities grew, so has our understanding and our *need* to have a somewhat fuzzy-but-largely-shared set of rules, because more people are more diverse (unless you've got rules that prevent that, such as ... a lack of rules), we want to be more inclusive actively, and honestly? Not all people have always the best of intentions. The impact and reach the community and our projects have now on literally *everything* make it *impossible* for it to be apolitical. One can't treat a community of 5 the same way you treat a community of literal millions, or even hundreds, maybe thousands (if we stick to the openSUSE community at large). The FLOSS community - and society as a whole - is *still* doing a ... not-great job of this (outside limited groups who're doing better than others). Just look at the gender balance. The geographical distribution. The privileges needed to participate, financially. Etc. That some countries, some states, are actively unsafe for members of our community travel to. (How does this relate to the CoC and values? Well, for example, not hosting in-person events in legislations or areas that contradict our CoCs. Having them provides a compatibility matrix, for everything from venue selection to membership. And helping people overcome an absence of privileges, and being open to accommodate different needs and abilities.) Growing a community requires people to know they're safe, and what that means. The only people who (fell they) don't need that are those with the privileges to be certain (rightly or wrongly) that they'll be safe anyway, or because they, themselves, are the bullies and don't want the community to have the tools to take a stance against them. Would that be the best community? I very much don't think so. Isn't one of the key points here a complaint about how conflicts are handled? How moderation is handled? Does anyone else see the irony? The absence of a CoC doesn't mean those decisions won't happen - they're just even more ad hoc.
And that is how SUSE / openSUSE worked for at least two decades (I started using it in 1996 with S.u.S.E. Linux 4.3). Just think of ReiserFS: we kept using it for a long time, as the focus was technology, not how people behaved outside the technology world. I'd prefer to see this level of neutrality again.
Yes, but Hans was excluded from the communities and no longer employed and for some reason hasn't sent a patch in quite awhile. Because, you know, he violated the societal "code of conduct" rather severely. That we did not rename the file system was not one of the greatest moments; having something named after a murderer is not something to be proud of, I think. A murderer - a toxic masculinity femicide, no less! - as a reason not to need a CoC - and, ultimately, in a discussion about coming out in support of threatened groups? I'm uncertain you've picked a great example. Regards, Lars -- SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Boudien Moerman (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)