Saturday, July 11, 2009

Let's All Say It Together.


STOP sexism by Casey West. License:


"I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer."

(And thanks to Luis Villa for the pointer...)

14 comments:

Franzi Huber said...

Du bisch au' so ein Bachel!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your earlier posts, I enjoyed reading some of the comments and emails.

It's always nice if Open Source had a more interesting, open-minded, and likeable people as their it's face.

I remember seeing RMS in a college and was rather turned off by an utter hatred to everything that he didn't believe in. The world isn't black and white as we'd like it to be and everyone has their own hopes, dreams and stories to tell - regardless of what side they're on.

Sometimes we judge people so much by their views and ideas that we forget they are real people, and seldom judge or decide based on their human qualities.

While I don't consider RMS's comments extremely sexist or overtly offensive, I feel that we should start taking down the halo that we've crowned upon him and start thinking clearly for a change.

I admire your work, and hope to meet you in person sometime.

Thanks,
A vi user.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for exposing the true nature of those sexist emacs biggots!!! I also think that RMS is a sexist. EMACS is offensive and a huge shame for OSS community. Emacs should be purged from linux distros!

Best regards,
A vim user

Anonymous said...

Suck my cock Lefty

Anonymous said...

+1

and I am a vim user

Lefty said...

Suck my cock Lefty

I can see that you put a lot of thought into this response.

Did it hurt?

Anonymous said...

That's better. This should have been your first post. Nothing wrong with rallying people to support a positive idea.

However. Once you've made it clear in the previous post that this is all about personally attacking RMS and trying to smear his reputation, this post does look like a pathetic attempt at rationalising your earlier actions.

You can have your "campaign", but after all this I think you should publicly apologise to him.

pridkett said...

Hi Dave,

I just want to say that it's good that someone is standing up and it's good that the community is finally discussing some of these issues. I applaud that you're finally at least getting people to discuss the issues of sexism and insensitivity in the Open Source community.

I also applaud you for leaving the wonderfully intelligent comments where people call you an idiot in German and tell you suck their cock. It's great to see that everyone can keep the discussion at such a mature level.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Just wow:

http://boycottnovell.com/2009/07/10/revisionism-with-stereotypes

Lefty,

I'm very sorry that you are subjected to this level of libel. Roy says:

"From what I can gather, you’re trying to set up and trip up people whom you don’t like (such as RMS) and you might be using fake names to pretext."

and proceeds to append an irc log which basically glues together the stupidest things I've ever heard to draw the conclusion that you are Mark Fink, the Devil, a Microsoft employee, hater of freedom and RMS all at once.

Keep in mind, I am not afraid of people who write code. Those of us who matter are not fooled by these games.

Unknown said...

Hey, Anon; how hard is it to create a nom de net? It doesn't have to point to you in particular, but persistence is a good thing.

One of the things I saw in the last post is, in a system like this one, which doesn't require any identifiable information, the huge number of people unwilling to stand up and be counted. It's really brave to accuse someone of an agenda (and I am curious as to what it was you saw as, you've made it clear in the previous post that this is all about personally attacking RMS and trying to smear his reputation, ."

Show you work. What I saw (as someone who isn't part of the community, but rather an observer of the interaction) was someone (Lefty) with a concern. When he took that concern to the source, he was blown off.

Which raised a different concern (does the community want to allow, through the assent of silence) that behavior to continue.

Those are reasonable concerns, and he handled it in a reasonable manner. That so many people seemed to think their oxen were being gored by calling out one man's apparent insensitivity to his behaviors effect.

Which tells me, there is a lot of latent sexism, and misogyny, in the OS culture.

That's not going away without a public exxpression that it's not accpetable. Making a pledge is one thing, living it is another.

And you are giving with one hand, "Nothing wrong with rallying people to support a positive idea," you are taking away when you continue to berate Lefty for doing that thing he says needs to be done (and you say you agree with).

Anonymous said...

I guess that's not as important what one said but when and who said it. If it was on humor page next to strip exposing for example man (as male) stupidity and strip about atheist who disbelive some obvious evidence (bush in fire in front of him which speaks) - well I may dislike all of those jokes but they are probably in spirite of page making fun from everything.

However the same does not holds for everyone. So-called commuity leaders - whenever oficially elected or not - have much narrow possibilities of speaking without someone felling being ofended. In other words - what is perfectly ok in comedy may be offensive when spoken by president.

On the other hand if it was Gran Canaria Church of Emacs and Other FLOSS Jokes Conference that would be more ok (but probably not entirly ok) - however it is still not my joke of my choise.

Anonymous said...

Lefty,

Make sure you take a look at the real irc log, not roy's edited version:

http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/irc-log-11072009.html

Choice libelous quotes he removed like:

schestowitz twitter: I don't want to carry on discussion with this scummy man. it's him who keeps trolling BN for attention.
schestowitz No-one paid attention to him, so he started provoking those who brought him attention

Lefty said...

Du bisch au' so ein Bachel!

馬鹿につける薬はない。

Anonymous said...

thank you.