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When people feel underrepresented to the point of being bullied they turn to any voice which seems to reflect even a tiny fraction of their frustrations.

There's a real mean spirit in open source lately and a lot of it seems to revolve around political views. There's become this idea that if you and I disagree on politics then it would be impossible for us to write quality software together. It's damaged a lot of good will and cohesion that used to exist within the open source software community.

This used to be about making free software to people so that they weren't abused by corporations. Now it's about pushing agendas and creating exclusion criteria. There's only one group in this scenario that benefits from this outcome.

If you don't like Lunduke then you should recognize the factors that give rise to people like him. Unless your solution is to completely eliminate anyone who disagrees with you then your apparent mindset only furthers the problem.

I wish we could put all this aside and just enjoy open source again.





My existence is not political. If someone doesn't think I should have rights and/or exist and/or thinks I am inferior because of who I am, then no, we cannot write quality software together.

If someone disagrees with me on tax, foreign relations, government services, defense, etc policy, sure, we can disagree and still work together.

What gives rise to people like Lunduke is not a simple thing, and something I don't think society fully understands.


Not agreeing with a particular description or categorization of you is not the same as thinking that you don't exist and not agreeing that you should have certain non-universal rights based on that categorization or that you should be able to force others in agreeing with your views isn't the same as thinking that you shouldn't have rights period.

In a way, "someone doesn't think I should have rights and/or exist and/or thinks I am inferior because of who I am" is pretty much the definition of (some kind of) politics. All sides play this game, e.g. many extremists these days argue that the "intolerant" shouldn't have rights or even exist by definition, but then the political football becomes who gets labeled as "intolerant" to begin with.

(And maybe it's true that those on opposite sides cannot work together on good software, but that's easily addressed since all FLOSS licenses include the right to fork and merge changes.)




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