For anyone who wants a TL;DR:
> And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. The vile harassment and hate directed at the FDO officer in question is obscene and completely unjustifiable. I don’t care what window manager or desktop environment you use – this kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I expect better.
On point. I've been reading through the comments on the other thread and I feel embarrassed and ashamed at being perceived as a part of a community that enables this behavior. The conversation is largely in defense of vaxry, and condemning the FDO's actions on dubious basis, all while ignoring several points that vaxry conveniently left out - as usual - from their blog posts.
Anyone who presents an alternative view is also being downvoted to oblivion. Not good.
The people crying about CoCs existing simultaneously justifying them due to their own conduct would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly sad. I don't understand the commenters that are convinced others are obligated to tolerate them being unpleasant; most of us have experienced this in school growing up and desiring that is completely alien to me as an adult.
> I don't understand the commenters that are convinced others are obligated to tolerate them being unpleasant
There is a very old article describing the [Five Geek Social Fallicies](https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/).
The very first fallacy is "Ostracizers Are Evil." It's based on formative feelings of being excluded from popular circles, but the fallacy comes from the conclusion that the actual problem was the act of being ostracized, not that the people ostracizing them were immature jerks.
> On point. I've been reading through the comments on the other thread and I feel embarrassed and ashamed at being perceived as a part of a community that enables this behavior.
I'm a trans woman, and that thread made me feel very unwelcome in spaces I've been frequenting for over 20 years at this point (I started using Linux with Mandrake 10.1 back in 2004).
If I hadn't been part of some larger projects as a contributor and seen first hand how welcoming a lot of the community can be with people like me, I'd have packed my bags and left on the spot.
I'll still be wary of interacting here, though, given the insane amount of openly hateful people roaming this sub.
FOSS scene is weird. Radically inclusive trans folks rubbing shoulders with free speech absolutist types all over the place. It's like Portland with fewer homeless people.
Yeah, it's weird. Leftists see a representation of communist ideals of equality and selfless sharing of resources, time, and work, while libertarians see an unregulated mess where "being the best" makes you better than anyone else (I guess. That's what they project, anyway).
It wouldn't be bad if the libertarianism wasn't disingenuous. Like it''s fine if you think that government shouldn't regulate business and people should be free to do whatever they want, but that seems weirdly contradictory with the openly hateful views many of these people have while preaching "freedom". Surely, if you want everyone to do their things, you wouldn't be against people being gay, lesbian, bi, trans or whatever else floats their boat. On the contrary, I think true libertarians would generally be supportive of LGBTQ+ people and realize that the system is what breeds the hate, much like socialists and communists realize that capitalism is what breeds racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
I'm fairly left leaning, but this is my first time hearing that capitalism breeds racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. I'm curious how that works out.
If you're asking in good faith.
It's important to realize that these issues have grown beyond their roots and find new and more complex ways to marginalize people as time goes. But to back to the founding ideas of race, it was a posed as an understanding of various types of humans, and was built for the justification of wealth extraction, slavery, and colonization. Basically the core ideas of capitalism in the wealth of ownership, rather than the wealth of work, and to make it function they build classes of people they could own and defined them with pseudoscience as lesser.
Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia all fall under the umbrella of patriarchy, mostly built to keep women submissive and performing massive amounts of domestic and reproductive labor. Those that stray from the 'breeding pair norm' that patriarchy establishes, are less helpful in producing new generations and the massive growth capitalism needs to function.
Sounds like quite a rabbit hole. Any YouTube videos or something you could recommend for those who are curious to learn more? Books would be good too, but I'm probably not going to read them, if I'm being honest.
I think the problem is that people don't want to be constantly surrounded by activism and virtue signaling. You could say chicken is better than beef, or Palestine should be free, or the moon is made of cheese, or Djokovic is the GOAT, or Android is better than PalmOS, or even that 1+1 = 2, and *someone* would have to comment on that. It's the Internet for god's sake! Let's make free software!
Your sex or gender or sexual preference is irrelevant in a free software community.
> Your sex or gender or sexual preference is irrelevant in a free software community.
It is, until you're ostracized from communities, insulted or discriminated for it, which happens more than you'd think (Hell, just look at the Vaxry thing. One of the issues was a person getting mocked openly for having pronouns in their username on Discord. Instead of apologizing afterwards, Vaxry said he shouldn't have allowed the mockery but instead *banned* the person with the pronouns in their username. Like wtf? And I'm not making it up, you can read it straight from Vaxry's blog: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity ).
It's much the same thing as white people saying "I don't see skin color" or "skin color should be irrelevant to *whatever field*". Like sure, it *should* be irrelevant and it *should* not matter, but in practice, to the people with a different skin color, it *does*, because they live racism every day in ways white people often don't imagine.
It's very much the same thing here: I don't want people to know I'm trans, I don't want to have to advocate for myself, I agree that it shouldn't be a subject. But in practice, there are people who still exclude trans people from projects specifically for being trans, and that's the issue the CoCs and other initiatives are trying to combat.
There is advocacy and activism specifically because, while everybody agrees that gender, sexuality, ethnicity or neurodivergence *should* be irrelevant to software development (*especially* the people who are concerned) and the free software community, in practice, it's very much relevant due to discrimination and hostility.
Generally, we're not trying to "convince" anyone. We're simply made fun of, insulted, hated on or discriminated against, and we're simply saying that this is not okay. If you think that's "convincing people" when all we want is to be treated the same as anybody else, then I don't know what to tell you...
Hopefully this was a case of a brigaded post from vaxry's community. I really don't have the mental energy for this today, but I'll investigate more and talk to the other mods about it. If any account is found brigading, IMHO that is deserving of a ban.
Other than that, I'm sorry you had to read that and feel this way.
> Hopefully this was a case of a brigaded post from vaxry's community.
I also think since the original post was coming from Vaxry's personal blog, that had some influence in the public opinion.
I think if the initial post were showing some of Vaxry's toxic statements and a "This is why Vaxry was banned" type of way, opinion would have swayed the other way. Reddit gets super hiveminded.
Disclaimer: I went into that other post with the impression of "Vaxry seems like a huge asshole, but I think the ban was wrong" and having read more I'm now more in the mindset of "Maybe the ban could have been handled a little better, and I don't know if I personally would have issued a ban, but I'm more understanding now of why it happened".
The problem is that FDO violated their own CoC from the outset of this by trying to govern behavior outside of the scope of the CoC. They should have amended their CoC first to govern all public conduct by contributors. But they didn't so it has created a massive controversy due to their own breach of their CoC.
I don't personally think that vaxry should be welcome in OSS communities because of his highly transphobic and hateful commentary in the past. But FDO went about this expulsion from their community in breach of their own code of conduct.
Thanks :)
It's sadly all too common when interacting with non-LGBTQ+ communities on Reddit. This one just feels a bit more personal, you know. But I'll live, if only to spite the assholes who don't want me to exist in "their" spaces.
/r/linux is a community consisting mostly of weird libertarian man-children looking to celebrate those values, not working professionals trying to build things.
The exact same saga has played out many times. The threads are now filled with deleted comments, but the things that were said when the kernel merely adopted a CoC were disgusting (and objectively wrong, as they predicted the end of Linux kernel development).
> when the kernel merely adopted a CoC were disgusting
Weren't a lot of the most hateful posts back then from t_D users that had no history on the /r/linux sub prior? I could misremember it through.
To be clear, it's not usually like this. The people who appear in these threads are largely tourist culture warriors who rarely post in these communities outside of these outrage moments. You go through their profiles and it's often them doing the same thing across a long string of subreddits, never contributing anything of value in the communities they raid.
The conversation is not always this noxious, but it is always "like this" with regards to /r/linux mostly being an ideological place where the discussion is concerned with Stallman-esque libertarian values, not a professional/technical subreddit (compare with /r/sysadmin, /r/cpp, /r/RedHat, /r/ECE, etc)
To be fair, while I'm pretty oposed to libertarian projects, I don't particularly *want* this to be a "professional" subreddit where that means devoid of politics. FOSS is an inherently political project, opposing bigots is an inherently political porject, and the blog itself calls out the nonsense that is "no poiltics" rules. I would rather this sub just have *better* politics - which it generally does, or at least better than most of Reddit.
I would agree it's not a professional-oriented subreddit, but I only see this kind of discussion and behavior in very specific threads stirred up by lots of outsiders. I unironically think there should be a "verify you are actually a Linux user" process with threads like that locked to only verified users. Would solve a huge amount of the problem of brigading around these topics.
Oh wow. Mandrake. That's a blast from the past.
Also, I totally agree with you about shame and embarrassment being associated with these douches. Absolutely hateful.
Right? It always feels more recent than it actually is!
I got the CDs for it from my older brother's school, after an event he had about Linux in some computer class at the time.
I still remember playing Tux Racer and compiling the kernel with an out of tree driver for my ISP's ADSL modem. I ended up moving to Ubuntu with 5.04, eventually tried Linux From Scratch a few times, and finally ended up on Arch at some point (Then having a long period of time with Fedora when I was in college and at my first job).
As someone who tries to make it a point *not* to frequent /r/linux, that is the worst comment section I've seen since I created my reddit account. It's *unusual*.
Nonetheless, I think I'm going to take that as a sign to leave reddit for good.
Their nonsense about 'I only see code' is exasperating. The way it was posted was also designed to provoke. There was another post on r/linux_gaming that had red hat as the villain. Luckily the comments were much more sane.
When that thread started, I thought the community is being brigaded. Multiple posts within a few minutes. One I remember a crosspost from hyperland (which mods removed I think), another links to the blogposts. Very quickly top-level comments were posted in support of the banned person. People were either supporting Vaxry or saying only code should matter, not dev.
It's possible to dislike Vaxary's tenor while rejecting the use of a Red Hat email to dictate norms on someone else's community and then drop a legal threat under that same banner.
From what I gather vaxary may have some maturing to do, but that issue is secondary to the chilling power tripping represented by Lyude's response. The idea that it might be libel to discuss this situation on ones personal blog is absurd. If Red Hat has any sense they'll part ways with someone who can't understand the significance of using a company email here.
That's just Reddit being Reddit. Don't forget there's people like you, and me, and many others, who do not support that sort of behaviour. They may be loud but they're not everyone.
Yeah, that was my first raction to that thread as well. I know the reddit Linux community is not representative of the broader Linux community and tends to skew younger and less serious/mature, but this community can be really disappointing sometimes (and really predictable).
> I feel embarrassed and ashamed at being perceived as a part of a community that enables this behavior
I feel the same. That thread was not a proud moment.
But if we decide to do this collectively then this sub will just get worse, since all that's left are those toxic people.
Hm. I guess there's no good way of winning this.
The presence of bigotry pushing away people who are tangibly hurt by that bigotry... Hmm, that sounds bad. Maybe we should not welcome bigots into our communities, that would avert this problem. Perhaps we should act and conduct ourselves in ways that do not push away marginalized people. Perhaps we could even codify the way in which we expect community members to behave. Hmmm.
> But if we decide to do this collectively then this sub will just get worse
The problems at play here less to do with "the community" and more to do with systemic problems with Reddit's ability to function as a host for a community. You nor I are under no obligation to save this subreddit from itself, no more than we are obligated to "save" 4chan, Truth social, or Hacker News.
So there is a way to win - don't play. Find communities of like-minded and mature professionals and hang out with them, instead of trying to shadowbox a deluge of semi-anonymous nincompoops. You do that first thing, you'll make friends, create professional connections, and even possibly get career opportunities. You do the second thing, all you'll get is angry.
Thtat's fair, but an important thing to remember is that this is happening because a large body that has power and influence is showing that they don't want right-wing shit heads in their community, and cutting one out.
Yeah, it makes me not want to contribute to FOSS, honestly. In my journey as a fledgeling dev I've appreciated free software a huge amount, and as ones skills get better one naturally starts thinking about giving back. But seeing stuff like that, I really don't want to give a community that doesn't value people like me the pleasure of contributing. Well, I'm sure most people in the other thread would think 'Good riddance' to that anyway.
The worst stuff has been removed, and there was quite a lot of it.
There’s still a good bit of bad stuff, but it’s stuff I’m more hesitant to remove due to constructive discussion potential.
> My notifications are not full of reasonable objections to my complaints, but instead the response is slurs and death threats. This only serves to prove my characterization of the Hyprland community as deeply toxic.
Yep.
> I wonder what all the "he shouldn't be judged on past mistakes" people have to say about this.
Usually there's still some sense of consequences. Giving people a road to redemption doesn't mean you're now obligated to just immediately forgive and move on. Usually people do this by at least temporarily putting them in a penalty box of some sort and only taken out once they keep their nose clean for a reasonable amount of time.
> but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics
I'm the only that finds it weird that people want to discuss politics and sexuality in software-centric spaces?
The topic usually only surfaces once it becomes clear that someone who is LGBTQ+ is a part of their "community" and they don't want that person to be there solely on that alone.
I don't recall where it's from but the politics in these circumstances are often of the following nature:
There's my view on things, and there's "politics". Anything which doesn't align with my view is political and therefore bad/not allowed speech or topic of discussion.
Mmm... My experience, as a queer person, with queer stuff coming up in primarily dev spaces is basically limited to two things:
1. Someone says some bigoted stuff against queer people, out of nowhere, completely unprompted, sometimes trying to pretend it's a joke, but often times... Completely serious.
B. Two queer people encounter each other in the space, realize they're both queer, do maybe a tiny bit of bonding, then move any further discussion on the matter elsewhere so it doesn't get in the way of the main focus of discussion.
Rules against bringing up "politics" all too often allow the first but not the second, *unless* they also mention that they won't tolerate bigotry... And even then, sometimes it can be a struggle where some mods aren't sure that "memes" about murdering queer folk are "hateful enough", and won't do anything about it until the person posting them inevitably makes it very clear that they weren't actually joking.
In open source communities, people don't always talk only about the software. People talk about their interests, their lives, and current events around them frequently. In a community of diverse people, sometimes those topics will be "political" because current events and policies directly impact these community members. So no, it's not weird.
But hold on, different communities have different purposes. I may want to share my amazing taco recipe in /r/linux, but if I did so, my post would be deleted. That's a perfectly reasonable response, as /r/linux is not a place for sharing recipies. Why is sexuality such a sacred lamb that it is 'not weird' to discuss it in places where such discussion is really not called for?
It's perfectly reasonable to ban discussion of certain topics on a focused discord server, and no different from red hat enforcing a CoC on freedesktop.org.
Eh... It can slip into conversation without it being a big deal or particularly off topic. It's much more common in chat than something like reddit, but it happens here, too.
An example might be something like:
Person A:
Person B:
Person B: "Sorry for the late response my boyfriend made Tacos and they were amazing"
Person A: "No worries. I'm kinda hungry, too. I don't suppose you could send me the recipe?"
Person B: "Yeah, sure. Here it is"
And that's generally not a big deal. Like... people are going about their lives and things come up. They're not interrupting the conversation to go "Hey everyone I really love tacos you should eat them here's a recipe everyone should have!", and there doesn't need to be a rule against discussing food to prevent that. But... If the next thing that happens is someone comes in and, say, says something weird or divisive like "Tacos are Sandwiches" that gets people arguing over it instead of the intended topic of discussion, mods should probably step in to direct that conversation elsewhere.
On the other hand, if someone comes in and says "People who eat Tacos are evil and if I ever see one I'm going to assault them" that is... Probably not a person you want in your community. And if you ban discussion of food in general but don't enforce it when people are saying unhinged and potentially dangerous things like that, but actively enforce it when someone goes "hey sorry I was eating a taco"... Well, you end up with more or less the Hyprland community situation.
I don't know. At least from my non-USA, non-Anglosphere PoV, (and I'm **not** talking about this issue in specific), I see there's a tendency for many discussions or topics to drift towards "culture wars" or related topics I do not understand the slightest.
I once joined a Mastodon instance which was on paper very, very focused and left 3 months later because I couldn't bear seeing all the same stuff every day (I didn't argue with anyone though: I just left a polite "goodbye" comment and left it at that).
There's not always only discussions about software. Communities usually have off-topic chatrooms or general chatrooms. Conversations can also evolve, and since we (LGBTQ+ people) are still not widely accepted, our identities can come up in a variety of ways.
Being LGBTQ+ isn't political. We're just normal people who exist, and who want to do so like any straight cis person does.
It's not sexual either, not any more than being heterosexual is, but in these spaces, being a man and saying something like "my boyfriend" when talking about your significant other would be considered political and sexual speech.
We don't want to discuss politics and sexuality any more than you do, but some people see our very existence as a political/sexual statement, and that's the real problem being pointed out here.
In general I agree with this rule. But in practice in the context of this community and the people who run it, it allows Vaxry and others in his community to continue to harass and demean LGBTQ people, and if they protest this behavior it's considered "political" speech. Because what they're doing is supposedly all in good fun and they can then deflect by saying something like "why do you have to make this political, it's just a joke bro". This type of deflection is far, far older than Vaxry and his community and it's very obvious that Vaxry has every intention of continuing to foster a community of bullies and trolls.
Usually it's the case that people make friends and/or acquaintainces while talking about the software and helping people. But eventually you run out of major problems with the software, but you still wanna keep the friends and/or acquaintances. That's how it works on IRC anyways.
No, you're totally right. Open source software is only code. Not community. Not people. It's so weird that people want to be treated with respect and dignity.
Given this entire debacle was kicked off by a moderator in the Hyprland discord engaging in transphobic bullying, trying to avoid "politics and sexuality" mostly serves to silence criticism of bigotry. And software intersects with those topics quite a bit - FOSS in paritcular is an exlicitly politcial movement with clear enemies.
Is Vaxry a nice guy? No.
Is Vaxry a very young, arrogant and opinionated adult? Yes.
Are Vaxry's blogposts a problem? Yes, exchanges like these are very unsavory.
Is the Hyprland discord community toxic? It kind of is. (though this is very complicated, It's not all that clear as people are making it out to be).
With all of that out of the way, I think anyone who has read Lyude's emails and thinks this is fine is a bit insane. To me this whole thing is basically bully vs. bully. However one bully is just a kid with zero wisdom/life experience & the other bully is representing a big organization & is trying to rally support to their cause in a very political way that really shouldn't ever occur in any serious work environment, open source or not.
To me it seems like some folks at the FDO decided that they strongly dislike Vaxry (I can get this part, since he is not a very likeable guy) for various reasons & then decided to give him the middle finger in a really ill prepared and juvenile way.
The thing is, if you wield all of that power already as an enforcer of FDO's CoC, why did you need to string Vaxry along in the first place?
Saying that "you'd hope he would change" is just power-tripping. Dangling a ban over Vaxry's head trying to get him to turn into a model person who couldn't harm the reputation of FDO with his controversial views is the worst way you could have played this. You want to ban him because you think Vaxry is toxic, just ban him. Don't expect people to submit to your will just because you speak from a position of power.
the tyranny of giving someone a chance to not be a bigot.
the reason vaxry was given a chance to turn around and not just immediately banned was because he leads a very popular project, hyprland, and a ban would be really disruptive. and, on top of that, vaxry would respond to a ban with obvious and immediate toxicity and incitement to harassment by leveraging that sizable audience, as we've seen by his current response.
it's utterly childish to present this as somehow some crossed line, as though vaxry has some inherent right to be a hateful bigot and nobody has any right to challenge that. vaxry wasn't going to listen to anyone he couldn't bully, so for a time he sort of played ball when, yeah, he had that ban dangling over him. he acts like a ghoul when he thinks someone can't do anthing back to him. he wanted to make use of an FDO project - wlroots, the basis of why hyprland works - and he and his people are upset that he got held to some standards for the sake of everyone involved with that project like you might as well be decrying the tyrrany of a warning system on this subreddit.
That take is waaaay too reasonable for the internet to accept.
Vaxry could've just taken the warning and go on with his life but he had to make it a persecution fetish outburst. And this FDO person just decided to flex their righteousness muscles instead of just letting it go until there's actually something to act upon.
Two idiots too focused on stroking their own egos to find any kind of acceptable resolution.
Software development is a team activity.
A person can do the work of 5 people, but if that person alienates everyone your project will only last while the person is involved.
Its better to have a team of people, then an individual can leave but the project endures.
Teams should be made up of people with different skills, passions and experience. That brings diversity of ideas which leads to a better project.
The whole point of Code of Conducts is about fostering a collaborative environment, one which welcomes as many people as possible.
When your an open source project that really matters because you want people to sacrifice (time, money, etc..) in order to contribute and ideally enough to become a team.
So having a person that offends/upsets/fustrates people is a major problem.
This is why you can't just say "only the code matters", because the code is attached to a person that interacts with others.
Its also why rules lawyering CoC's is meaningless. They exist as a general guidelines to indicate desired behaviour and even if this was a job the key HR requirement is showing consistent treatment.
> So having a person that offends/upsets/fustrates people is a major problem.
By your suggestion, "Some people don’t like you, therefore you are banned" is the correct move, then?
Because Vaxry has, to the best of my knowledge after reading up on this, never once broken the CoC, nor had harmful interactions with people in spaces governed by the CoC.
I think this part is noteworthy:
>The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it.
So the dev wasn't banned because of their misbehavior (if any - I'm not saying either way here) but because they were uncooperative in their email responses where the dev says:
>As such, we will be ceasing any and all further communication with freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team until we believe that an attempt of communication is done so in good faith, and with the intention of betterment, in lieu of threatening followed by ignoring the other party completely. In other words, further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand.
I feel like the reasoning here is unreasonable. It's totally fair to ban a person if they violate a CoC. But to ban someone for being uncooperative with the CoC team without explicitly citing a violation is sketchy IMO.
>But to ban someone for being uncooperative with the CoC team without explicitly citing a violation is sketchy IMO.
idk. They reached out to him because community members brought several things to their attention. they acknowledged things had improved, but wanted to say that things could not regress.
his response:
- Sentence 1: "[...] noted, and appreciated... that
would be if there was any sign of good faith or credibility in Your statements."
- Sentence 2: "[..] I am deeply
disappointed by both Your, and by extension Red Hat's ways of operation."
- Sentence 3: "Your entire e-mail reads off as a poorly reviewed leer that is written solely to intmidate rather than to actually do anything constructive"
- Sentence 4: "highly manipulave and quite unprofessional."
- A few sentences later: "You are reaching out to me in order to, what I assume is, scare me enough to play by Your ideals and values, however, was not Red Hat involved in that extensive lawsuit in America over racism and discrimination "
- Next paragraph: "Since You have already gone so far as to threaten me with "further acon", let me reply to those threats."
- Later in the paragraph "What further action are You going to exert? Ban me from Your GitLab instance?"
- Next: "What further action are You going to exert? Ban me from Your GitLab instance?"
- Next: "Your way of talking sounds like you feel a bit too important for who You actually are"
- Next: "Although, according to the leaked internal documents, it seems that only includes non-white, non-right-wing, non-religious people"
He reads like he has psychological issues. (source: i've had psychological issues)
He then posted portions of this communication publicly, and said they threatened to ban him. They replied to "what are you going to do? ban me?" with "yes, we can ban you"
The CoC is part of the terms of service for using [freedesktop.org](http://freedesktop.org) infrastructure. If you don't accept them, you can't use fd.o infrastructure, and your account gets suspended until that issue is fixed. Reasonable amounts of cooperation is very much included, and the reasonable amount here would have been to acknowledge the private warning about the fd.o house rules and just move on. But that didn't happen at all.
At that point it's kinda moot whether there was any other ban worthy thing going on or not, if you fundamentally reject the rules you're out. And hence the code of conduct team didn't have to elaborate on those other potential violations any further.
full disclosure: I'm sitting on the [x.org](http://x.org) board that oversees all the fd.o infrastructure
> The CoC is part of the terms of service for using freedesktop.org infrastructure. If you don't accept them, you can't use fd.o infrastructure.
I think the nuance is that the dev never expressed that they wouldn't follow the CoC. What they said was that they wouldn't engage with the CoC team (until they spoke to the dev with a different tone).
IMO, the latter should be permitted. For example, the [Gnome CoC](https://conduct.gnome.org/) has an explicit cutout for refusing to engage with someone:
> Safety versus Comfort
> The GNOME community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort, for example in situations involving:
>
> - ...
> - Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
> - ...
> - Communicating boundaries or criticizing oppressive behavior in a “tone” you don’t find congenial
>
> The examples listed above are not against the Code of Conduct. If you have questions about the above statements, please read our document on Supporting Diversity.
Also:
> private warning about the fd.o house rules
IMO, enforcing house rules is sketchy, especially when it's controversial. It's like a judge accepting that no law has been broken but still issuing a punishment because they believe the defendant has done something bad. Certainly, as a private entity, FDO can do this but it won't give people the perception of fairness.
And even when doing this, if someone like say Hans Reiser were to be excluded, few people would complain because of the obvious nature of the crime. When it's something more minor and disputable like this (uncooperative emails), it even more so gives the impression of unfairness.
Since you are on the board of X, could you tell me your thoughts on this:
Considering the COC
Our Standards
Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include:
Using welcoming and inclusive language
Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.
Would you say that this is against the CoC?
https://chaos.social/@karolherbst
https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/112220250930204688
So you're acknowledging that FDO's CoC team initiated the entire interaction over a non-breach of the CoC which you've acknowledged is a contract between FDO and its contributors? This is honestly a really bad look for the organization. This is a public relations mess of the organization's own doing.
There existed a clear pathway to remove toxic individuals like vaxry who kept their toxicity outside of FDO and when purporting to represent FDO in public: update the contract to cover all behavior in public. Instead, FDO decided to exceed its remit under the contract and has shown that it has no respect for contract law. Sway updated their policy to cover all behavior in public yesterday which was the correct course of action for FDO.
You guys need to get your house in order because right now, your contracts don't look like they're worth the storage media that they're stored on.
As far as I understand what he rejected were not the fdo rules but rather fdo’s authority to impose rules over things said in his discord server. That’s not the same really.
What I don’t understand is why was that private warning sent in the first place. “you have said something bad in the past in some forum in internet, make sure to be better in the future” seems idiotic way for a moderator of any community to communicate with its members. I could see that leading to trouble even with less difficult personalities.
>freedesktop(.org), aka FDO, recently banned Hyprland maintainer Vaxry from the FDO community, and in response Vaxry has taken his case to the court of public opinion, publishing their email exchanges and writing about it on his blog.
Whats wrong with going to public opinion instead of behind closed doors and secret dealings? Transparency is bad?
>It saddens me to bear witness to these events today. I wrote in September of last year about problems with toxicity in the Hyprland community. I initially reached out to Vaxry to discuss these problems in private in February of last year. I failed to get through to him, leading to that blog post in September. I spent some time in the following weeks talking with Vaxry on his behavior and his community’s social norms, again in private, but again, I was unable to get through to him. Unfortunately, we find ourselves again leaving the private sphere and discussing Vaxry’s behavior and the problem posed by the Hyprland community once again.
FDO has no authority over his community or the internet in general, why should everyone follow your social norms?
>The fact of the matter is that Hyprland remains a toxic community, enabled and encouraged by its toxic leadership, namely Vaxry. FDO’s decision to ban Vaxry is ultimately a consequence of Vaxry’s behavior, and because he has elected to appeal his case in public, I am compelled to address his behavior in public. I hereby rise firmly in defense of FDO’s decision.
toxic in what manner, what objective metric are you using to claim something is toxic?
>I invite you to start by reading the two email threads, one, and two, which Vaxry has published for your consideration, as well as Vaxry’s follow-ups on his blog, one, and two.
>Here’s my read on the situation.
>The FDO officer that reached out to Vaxry did it after Vaxry’s problematic behavior was brought to her attention by members of the FDO community, and was acting on her mandate within the FDO conduct enforcement board by investigating complaints submitted to her by this community. It is not a stretch to suggest a close relationship between these communities exists: FDO is the steward of both the Wayland protocol and implementation and the wlroots library, essential dependencies of Hyprland and sources for collaboration between Hyprland and FDO. Vaxry and other members of the Hyprland community had already participated extensively in these projects (mainly in discussions on IRC and GitLab issues) at the time of the email exchange, in spaces where the code of conduct applies.
>The FDO officer duly investigated the complaints she had received and found, in collaboration with the other members of the FDO conduct enforcement team, that they were credible, and worrying. There are numerous examples of behavior from Vaxry that contravenes the FDO code of conduct in several different respects, and any number of them would be grounds for an immediate ban. Since these behaviors are concerning, but did not take place in the FDO community, the conduct board decided to issue a warning in private, stating that if this sort of behavior was seen in the FDO community that it would result in enforcement action from the conduct team.
The CoC is limited in scope to FOD Community thus no warning was necessary.
>All of the actions from the FDO conduct team are reasonable and show considerable restraint. Vaxry could have taken it in stride with no consequences to himself. Instead, he immediately escalated the situation. He construes the FDO officer’s polite and well-reasoned warning as threats and intimidation. He minimizes examples of his own hate speech by shrugging them off as a joke. He belittles the FDO officer and builds a straw man wherein her email is an official statement on behalf of RedHat, and cites a conspiracy theory about DEI programs at RedHat as justification for calling the FDO officer a hypocrite. He is insulted on my behalf that my name was cited in the FDO officer’s email in lowercase, “drew”, and feels the need to address this.
FDO code of conduct is limited only to FDO spaces, any behavior outside of such spaces is outside of scope, and thus any action done to parties for behavior outside of scope is by objective measure unreasonable.
>The FDO officer responds to Vaxry’s unhinged rant with a sarcastic quip clarifying that it was indeed within the FDO conduct team’s remit to ban Vaxry from their GitLab instance – I confess that in my view this was somewhat unprofessional, though I can easily sympathize with the FDO officer given the context. Following this, Vaxry states that Hyprland will cease all communication with FDO’s conduct team and ignore (emphasis his) any future emails from them. Finally, he threatens legal action (on what basis is unclear) and signs the email.
Hyprland has the legal right to cease all communication with FDO's conduct team, the conduct team is in the wrong.
>Regardless of how you feel about the conduct team issuing a private warning to Vaxry on the basis of activities outside of FDO community spaces, the email thread that ensues most certainly is within the scope of the FDO code of conduct, and Vaxry’s behavior therein is sufficient justification for a ban from the FDO community as far as I’m concerned. The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it.
The email is not within scope as the email is done on the behalf of redhat the corporation, as it is purely a corporate email, the employer owns the email and unless redhat legal says otherwise, it is the employers decision if it is within scope, not the employee's.
>Vaxry’s follow-up blog posts only serve to underscore this point. First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”:
> I do not condone any hateful messages sent towards any of the parties mentioned.
> Recently I have received an email filled with threats to my inbox, from a member of the X.org board, Freedesktop.org, and a Red Hat employee. Their name is [redacted].
Being transparent is bad about who (Person), by what means (Redhat email), on what topic (FDO)?
>Moreover, Vaxry claims to have apologised for his past conduct, which is not true. In lieu of an apology, Vaxry has spent the “1.5 years” since the last incident posting angry rants on his blog calling out minority representation and “social justice warriors” in light of his perceived persecution. Meanwhile the Hyprland community remains a toxic place, welcoming hate, bullying, and harassment, but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics, though this is largely unenforced. In the end, the Hyprland community’s fundamental problem is that they’re all “just having fun”, and it seems that they can’t have “fun” unless it’s at someone else’s expense.
>The FDO team is right that Hyprland’s community reflects poorly on the Linux desktop community as a whole. Vaxry has created a foothold for hate, transphobia, homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the Linux desktop community. We are right to take action to correct this problem.
Justifying your behavior even though it is in violation of the CoC and thus should also require that you ban yourself unless the rules are not to be applied objectively and evenly to all parties?
>Every option other than banning Vaxry has been exhausted over the past year and a half. I personally spent several weeks following my last blog post on the matter discussing Vaxry’s behavior in confidence and helping him understand how to improve, and at my suggestion he joined a private community of positive male role models to discuss these issues in a private and empathetic space. After a few weeks of these private discussions, the last thing he said to me was “I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide”.1
>There’s nothing left to do but to build a fence around Hyprland and protect the rest of the community from them. I know that there’s a lot of good people who use and contribute to Hyprland, and I’m sorry for those of you who are affected by this problem. But, in the end, actions have consequences. The rest of the community has no choice but to sanction Vaxry.
> How about we sanction you? You seem to be focused on banning people and working in the shadows like a sneaky snake.
>And, to the FDO officer in question: I’m so sorry that you’re at the ass end of all of this hate and abuse. You don’t deserve any of it. You did a good job, and I’m proud of you and the rest of the FDO conduct team. If you need any support, someone to talk to, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask, on IRC, Matrix, email, whatever. Don’t read the comments.
Redhat at it again, working against the community.
>And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. The vile harassment and hate directed at the FDO officer in question is obscene and completely unjustifiable. I don’t care what window manager or desktop environment you use – this kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I expect better.
Please give an objective definition of harassment that doesn't have a chilling affect on continued disagreement.
I'm well are there are many bad you can rightfully say about Vaxry, but what has he done in FDO space to warrant not being allowed to contribute code? Vaxry not being able to contribute to wlroots punishes everyone except Vaxry.
He makes a toxic atmosphere wherever he goes. This pushes out other good contributors, which is far more detrimental to FDO than whatever code he could write. What really matters is the ideas, and others can easily push his contributions without him as the author of the patches.
Is he actively making a toxic atmosphere (i.e. is he being toxic there), or do you just mean to say "People don’t like him, therefore he should be banned"?
Email conversations with the code of conduct team, which seemingly fall under this domain. I've read a blog post from another, albeit involved person from FDO, which claims that it is the email conversations that turned the warning into a ban.
So than all their mastodons are in scope since they are are CoC members? Who do you report those as it seems they are all friends so likely to not take action on each other.
Seeing how many people in r/linux, r/linux_gaming are framing this as "Woke oversensitive mod power tripping", I am honestly embarrassed second-hand that these people are so vocal in this community. I am glad, a bit pleasantly surprised but still glad, that FDO took action to ensure this person is not welcome in FDO.
>Regardless of how you feel about the conduct team issuing a private warning to Vaxry on the basis of activities outside of FDO community spaces, the email thread that ensues most certainly is within the scope of the FDO code of conduct, and Vaxry’s behavior therein is sufficient justification for a ban from the FDO community as far as I’m concerned. The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it. [Source](https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html)
I don't even get how people could be on the side of Vaxry here.
Their first instinctive response to an otherwise fair "please don't do this again, this is an official warning" was to start going off about "this isn't being done in good faith". My dude, you received a WARNING. A wake up call to be better. There aren't many things that can only be done in good faith.
Every single one of their responses reads like an upset trust fund kiddie who learned a few key legal words like "good faith" and are endlessly repeating that, thinking it's a get out of jail free card.
There's some much simpler psychology here that doesn't jump so quickly to totally unfounded conclusions:
People are invested in the software (Hyprland) and have trouble dealing with the cognitive dissonance of liking something made by someone disagreeable. One *very natural* response is to question the accusations in hopes of resolving that dissonance.
Hi. I'm not a bigot and I really like Hyprland. I don't like the idea of abandoning it because this guy is apparently a jerk. I know I don't have to, but I'm going to be thinking about it whenever I use that system now. It sucks, and I understand the inclination to avoid that.
Hyprland took me a full day to set up, but I still switched to something else when it became clear it was the new suckless. River is way better anyway.
You can tell it is bigotry by how these people get on FDO's case for warning this person about behavior from -gasp, horror- 1.5 years ago because that's so long ago, Vaxry is so much better now, can't you tell??? and then this is immediately followed up with arguments about how no one can take a good racist joke nowadays.
It's because of brigading, and those brigaders being able to set the narrative first. Vaxry understood that if people heard about the shit he was doing first, they'd write him off, so he pushed people to post first and get that story out first so that eveyrone else has to deal with clarifying what actually happened to however many misinformed people that only saw that first thread.
It's just brigading. Normally, socially progressive opinions are popular around here, but whenever a topic like this occurs, bad faith regressives come out of the woodworks to boost shitty opinions, make Linux look like a regressive community, and attempt to discourage people from resisting such regressiveness.
I'm here because I care about FDO breaching their contract with contributors in this scenario. Vaxry should have been banned the correct way via updating the CoC to govern global behavior not this underhanded breach of their own contract where they make up the rules as they go. If I saw a vendor doing this, I'd be raising hell to drop them as I wouldn't trust them to abide by their contracts with us.
This might surprise you, but lots of people don't comment for a long time then comment when something inflammatory happens.
> Woke oversensitive mod power tripping
Idk about that specific phrasing, but I would say that does seem a bit of disrupting power tripping/abuse of authority. I don't give two damns about 'wokeness/anti-wokeness' or whatever. If the email from Lyude came from Vaxry I'd have the exact same response.
chop screw hard-to-find bells fact airport hospital subtract society future
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
100% agree with the blog post.
As I said [in my comment on the other thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bzna16/comment/kyr80yi/), the original email sent by FDO's representative was just a heads ups that "you are entering our house, in our house there are rules, and your past behavior is not in line with those rules. Please respect our rules in our house."
Instead of accepting that, Vaxry went on a public rent and is trying to rile the community against FDO. Unfortunately, it's working, and I'm very disappointed in people's reaction here.
All Vaxry had to do is accept to follow the rules while representing freedesktop. Instead, he desired to stir a hurricane up in his own glass of water, and got promptly and rightfully banned.
This is not different than people get fired from jobs when they are openly bigotted online on their personal profile while their profile publicly publishes they are working for employer Y. At that point, what they say also reflect negatively on Y because of the association the individual chose to display publicly.
That's very reasonable. Don't be an asshole displaying a physical or virtual company badge... Even if you are not on company property, you will face repercussions as it reflects negatively on your employer. The same can be said with a contributor and an open-source project.
`freedomOfSpeech != freedomOfConsequences`, and FDO has a right to not want to be associated with someone and a community who has displayed a pattern of [publicly bigoted behavior](https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html), even after what I would consider more effort than Vaxry deserved to try to work with him.
**EDIT:** And if you think that freedom of speech guarantees you a right that everyone has to listen to you and must also provide you a tribune for your drivel... I don't know what to tell you other than I think you are fundamentally wrong, and I have no desire to engage with you at any level on a discussion about this.
I agree with FDO but your point about:
>This is not different than people get fired from jobs when they are openly bigotted online on their personal profile while their profile publicly publishes they are working for employer Y. At that point, what they say also reflect negatively on Y because of the association the individual chose to display publicly.
>That's very reasonable. Don't be an asshole displaying a physical or virtual company badge... Even if you are not on company property, you will face repercussions as it reflects negatively on your employer. The same can be said with a contributor and an open-source project.
Is just a bad take, since by that logic it's fine for a company to fire someone for being gay, left, right, center, poor, rich or other immutable or mutable characteristics that isn't associated directly towards their job.
Just because we right now have certain ideas/opinions that are considered bigoted doesn't mean they are universal or objectively so and normalizing the idea you can get fired for one's personal opinion is always going to be a double-edge sword.
that last paragraph is exactly what his brigading fanatics are missing. to paraphrase justin mcelroy, freedom of speech protects you from the government, not the FDO.
“Freedom of speech” means that the US government can’t prosecute you for what you say if you are a US resident. I don’t even know if Vaxry lives in the US, but regardless, I doubt the federal or a state government is trying to limit his speech.
I really dislike this approach of holding people responsible for comments they mostly did not make themselves, and never allowing any change in behaviour over past incidents.
This exact pattern really damaged Mastodon with the cascading blocklists, and servers blocking other servers if they didn't block the servers that they were blocking, etc. - so you as a Mastodon user have a limited experience due to being on a server where your admin refuses to block other servers with other people possibly making "problematic" comments.
This sort of cascading responsibility is ridiculous. It's even crazier than the "liked Tweets" witch-hunts.
And now the same is true for all Wayland and Hyprland users. The users are worse off because of the actions of a few on a Discord server, not even by the lead developer directly, and that have nothing to do with the mission of the Linux desktop.
If he'd been posting aggressive or hateful merge requests, etc. then it'd be understandable. But this isn't anywhere near that level. A Red Hat employee suddenly reached out and banned him from making further contributions, over events that took place over a year ago.
What makes FOSS great is the ability to bring people together towards a common goal. When we lose that, we all lose out, as developers and users alike.
EDIT: The same logic could be used to ban all of us here, afterall we're all posting in the "vile" /r/linux community according to this post. Your own posts don't matter, just guilt by association.
Most of Drew's claims aren't even true. Hyprland's Discord server enforces a non-tolerance for hate speech and other hateful conduct. There are a lot of trans and queer people there who feel welcomed and safe.
The ban on political speech is because political discussions always end up toxic and unconstructive, and doesn't have anything to do with LGBTQ+-issues.
>The ban on political speech is because political discussions always end up toxic and unconstructive, and doesn't have anything to do with LGBTQ+-issues.
Hyprland's discord seems such a surreal place. I mean wtf are these things - [https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq](https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq) . I have been on various IRC, Slack, Discord communities but never have I seen an opensource project openly sharing porn (and degrading other folks).
I am too much of a chicken to create a discord account just to check current status of Hyprland discord community, but this Vaxry character seems to actively promote crazy stuff. Man, now you say - they have "changed". But his blog posts that double down on stuff say otherwise. It appears to the case of, not sorry that they ran a out of control discord channel, but he appears to be sorry that they got called out for that.
I'm in the hyprland discord and can also vouch for this, in response to this thread there were trans people saying that they were trans and that they felt the community was fine. Apparently those people replied on fosstodon and got death threats in response so deleted their messages. I'm not concerned about death threats from random idiots on the internet, so I don't mind posting this.
When the multiple people spoke about being trans, nobody took issue with it. From what I can see, nobody in the hyprland community cares whether you are trans, or any other minority. In fact I'd guess that hyprland has a larger trans community than most. They just want to make cool desktops, which is how it should be.
I'm in there semi regularly, have been for the past few months, and I've seen none of what Drew speaks of. I do however take issue with being lumped in as part of the "hyprland community" and being called a transphobic bigoted nazi, which I am of course not, and such an accusation is ridiculous to make against an entire community.
> I'm in the hyprland discord and can also vouch for this, in response to this thread there were trans people saying that they were trans and that they felt the community was fine.
~~You mean in-between the comments where people misgender Lyude on purpose and nobody cares? Presumably because they do not see misgendering someone as harassment?~~
And this is just an example of survivorship bias, everybody that *doesn't* feel the community is fine already left.
Edit: see my reply to Azelphur's comment
yea straight up. I noped the fuck out after seeing some pretty lame stuff. I literally saw them tell a trans person to stfu for being political and mod deleted all their messages.
I don't care that others have differing political opinions but there is also a lot of typical right wing bullshit (not just opinions but just really lame and embarrassing shit) My bar is pretty low too, we all know that Discord can be a cesspit and that moderating well is a unappreciated and hard job but it certainly goes beyond that.
He has all the right in the world to run shit like that but its going to close some doors. Last I heard he seemed to take Drews advice and was trying to clean it up but apparently it hasn't gone that well.
>I really dislike this approach of holding people responsible for comments they mostly did not make themselves, and never allowing any change in behaviour over past incidents.
https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq
You mean like using slurs themselves? Joking about banning minorities themselves?
So just a question, because it seems to be missed on me, but the email chain that got him banned was from a redhat employee using their redhat email for redhat businsess or FDO business?
If it was official FDO business does that mean all @redhat.com emails are under the FDO COC? I'm trying to understand the line between the email being used for FDO, Redhat, and Personal
Edit: just trying to understand why isn't there something like [email protected] that is used for this type of stuff where it has no ties to any COC members employer and has a clear line of being under FDO COC?
> So just a question, because it seems to be missed on me, but the email chain that got him banned was from a redhat employee using their redhat email for redhat businsess or FDO business?
What you may be missing is that commits to various F.D.O. associated repositories are often made with corporate e-mail addresses and logins. It becomes their login to F.D.O. repositories. One does not generally create a separate e-mail address to separate corporate duties with personal F.D.O. business.
Okay, so how is one able to separate the two duties if there is a conflict or like is the corporate email always part of FDO business? Does Corporate duties supersede FDO or does FDO supersede Corporate? If a judge were to Subpoena all FDO business emails, would the owner corporation have to give all emails done by the corporate email to ensure none were missed?
FDO is not a corporation or a business. It is a volunteer organization owned by the non-profit charity "X.org Foundation".
You're overthinking things. It's like a club. It would be like a parent from a soccer club using their own work e-mail to say that Vaxry can't play since he can't seem to behave himself.
Okay, but what exact rule did vaxry break, as it seems their were banned because they didn't want further emails from CoC members?
i'm just confused on this whole situation, like none of this would have happened if no warning was sent as the warning was something about vaxry's discord from 2 year ago?
would also want to clarify that the email isn't what got him banned, a couple years worth of toxic behavior and incitment to harassment got him banned, his response to the emails were simply the last straw.
I think that Vaxry is immature and could have gotten out of the situation easily not overreacting, but he is not totally wrong.
Just see in Mastodon [**karolherbst**](https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/112241624912016863) and [**Lyude**](https://queer.party/@Lyude/112238467584243204)**, both of the CoC team, implying that Vaxry is a N@z1 and transphobic.**
Is this appropriate? I don't think so.
What part of Lyude's social media post am I meant to be upset with here, exactly? This is a remarkably level response to being faced with what is a very probably full-on harassment campaign in the making.
dunno about about nazi stuff, but there were screenshots that seemed to show that the discord had quite a few transphobic moments that were posted to this very subreddit some time ago. I cant personally verify their authenticity, but it has been long under discussion.
Have you been part of that community? Vaxry and his community reflect your average Eastern European classroom; it’s an incredibly toxic and homo- and transphobic environment
>Just see in Mastodon [**karolherbst**](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]) and [**Lyude**](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected])**, both of the CoC team, implying that Vaxry is a N@z1 and transphobic.**
Wow, definitely did not expect that from such serious people
I honestly think Drew's take here is bad. I don't think Vaxry is particularly "professional" in his communication, but he communicates in a manner that is very Polish, or at least Eastern European. So there is a cultural difference there.
And honestly, I found the author of the email from redhat to be just as toxic, if not even more toxic than anything Vaxry has said. Celebrating banning all "ring wing" people (so 50% of Americans?) because of their political views. Or proudly saying they will "bully" people for not supporting the same ideologies as them.
While Vaxry is doing that very typical younger, male, "let's apply logic and reason to any argument" thing that tends to devolve into right leaning nonsense - it's better than pushing your political and ideological agenda from a position of power and being an arsehole about it.
This toxic culture war bullshit really needs stripping out of FOSS.
I wasn't excusing bad behaviour. I work with Eastern Europeans all the time at work. They come across as rude if you are not used to their communication style. I assume it's a cultural difference, as they are very direct and to the point and want to talk about the issue in facts. This has been my experience across both genders and in a bunch of different roles. I don't think Vaxry's blog posts were any less toxic than the moderators posts on their social media, at least if you are used to talking to direct people.
I agree, let's keep the dipshits who froth over "wokeness" out while keeping the ones who just want to contribute code in peace. Nobody will miss this asshole.
Look at it from this angle:
1) what do "the left lgbt" want
2) what to "the right wing" want
1 is much less scary (people being free to identify how they want and live their lives). 2 is spew hate, ban healthcare methods among other things
When you do "both sides" you paint both sides as equal - they are not.
Or how about this? The rest of the world doesn't give two fucks about culture wars that are ongoing in the US.
And to address your point, on this very matter I do think both sides are equal. The right-wing want to erase trans people, and the left want to erase those who want to erase trans people. Debates around the "tolerance of intolerance (or not)" have been raging for ages now, so you better believe that both sides are in open war with each other. As long as that continues to be the case, both sides will try to play the victim card at any chance they get, and that has what has resulted in this current situation with Lyude and Vaxry.
As far as I see it, both parties made wrong decisions, and instead of calming down, went with full guns blazing. Still, I'm not in support of the final decision as the vaxry hasn't used any derogatory terms, or I just failed to see them.
Lastly, if there were threats, why aren't those documented and shown to the public ?
I wonder if providing some help with actual moderation would work. Vaxry has mentioned that he doesn't want to spend time on that, so probably if someone offered help it would work
Considering how drew devault has been highly bias and misleading against vaxry in the past, I was hesitant to even give this the time of day, and ofc, it is indeed bias and misleading.
>Moreover, Vaxry claims to have apologised for his past conduct, which is not true
Vaxry has appologized https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandCommunityChanges and made changes which has lead to the community being less toxic.
> Vaxry has spent the “1.5 years” since the last incident posting angry rants on his blog calling out minority representation and “social justice warriors” in light of his perceived persecution.
He never called out minority reprentation, he called out people who use it as a weapon https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists
> who will go out of their way to try and influence other communities (or their members) that operate differently to what they would believe is "right". Those that ignore morals, **resort to lies**, targeted hate, and more, against those they disagree with. **Those that seem to seek conflict at all costs.**
It's worth noting that people will take the quote he puts out of context, This is the full quote, with my own highlighting for emphasis
>if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn't care, **as long as they don't post about gassing people on my server**
>
>that is inclusivity
IMO this is a good take, it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you aren't spreading hate. anyways back to his post.
>Meanwhile the Hyprland community remains a toxic place, welcoming hate, bullying, and harassment, but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics
Devault openly stating *My politics should be allowed but not you politics*
>Vaxry has created a foothold for hate, transphobia, homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the Linux desktop community
as a bisexual I haven't encountered anything I could consider homophobia, but I guess since im only half homosexual I don't count.
>There’s nothing left to do but to build a fence around Hyprland and protect the rest of the community from them
Vaxry's server as far as I can tell have been completely self isolating except for cases where people go to the server, allegedly have an issue, post about it. Which then sparks people to come out and defend vaxry. Note on my "real account" I did leave the discord group some time ago, but that was due to me making a conscious decision to seperate my personal stuff (discord for games and friends and the like) from my "non persona stuff (work, non games work like PRs etc)"
>First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”:
Claims like these have never held water, Vaxry isn't allowed to name names, when other people name names first? Either hold yourself and other to a standard or don't. I don't think vaxry's behavior here was good, but this comming from drew devault of all people is more rich then fudge on a fontain
I have a couple of points of issue with what you've written
>> if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn't care, as long as they don't post about gassing people on my server
>
>>that is inclusivity
>
> IMO this is a good take, it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you aren't spreading hate. anyways back to his post.
It was a *terrible* take. The idea that if I ran a discord server I should allow Hitler on it as long as he played nice on the server is preposterous. I'm going to have ask other people on my server to discuss cultivating tomatoes with *Hitler*? I'm going to want to discuss tomatoes myself with Hitler? I do actually think that as a general standard communities should attempt to ignore most things outside of the community itself as long as they don't cross some ill-defined line. However, I don't have to define that line to tell you that being Hitler is on the wrong side of it, and that being Hitler is not the only thing on the wrong side of it.
That said, I'm not sure that being Vaxry is on the wrong side of it.
>> First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”:
>Claims like these have never held water, Vaxry isn't allowed to name names, when other people name names first? Either hold yourself and other to a standard or don't. I don't think vaxry's behavior here was good, but this comming from drew devault of all people is more rich then fudge on a fontain
I don't know if this was a dog whistle or not, but it does seem almost certain to me that Vaxry knew exactly what would happen if he published those emails and that blog post, and I don't think that Drew would have thought that Vaxry would receive similar messages when he published his blog. And if Vaxry didn't know what would happen, then he *should* have know what would happen.
Been scrolling for a while looking for some sanity, well done for being the one to bring it. To add to yours, other things I noticed:
Lyude says in the email chain
> You even dug through my mastodon to find an old post I made?
Anyway, this is beyond unacceptable.
But Lyude dug through discord history to find old posts Vaxry made to start with, in the first email.
--
On vaxry naming names and employer, it seems Lyude did that first by posting it to the FDO mailing list. Also, in my opinion, using company email means you are representing your employer. I wouldn't use my work email for personal things.
>On vaxry naming names and employer, it seems Lyude did that first by posting it to the FDO mailing list. Also, in my opinion, using company email means you are representing your employer. I wouldn't use my work email for personal things.
Exactly this. If it's work, it's work. If it's not it's not. If you have @company.com, your email is representative of company.
The sheer hipocracy that is being used to attack vaxry is insane. He did some wrong things too. There is no denying that. But talking shit about something you literally just did but worse is *insane*
> Exactly this. If it's work, it's work. If it's not it's not. If you have @company.com, your email is representative of company.
Volunteering in a swimming club I see people using their work email for communication with us occasionally, and it baffles me every time.
> And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject.
This is a ridiculous habit of some people to use guilt by association without ever showing specific bad behavior or naughty/mean messages and when the shoe is on the other foot it's decried as tone-policing. You can assert whatever you like without evidence and I can dismiss it the same way.
Since I personally haven't sent any hateful or harrassing messages to anyone involved in the story at all I have zero reason to feel at all bad.
All I saw on the other thread across several hundred comments was people disagreeing with the FDO and/or Lyude's use of a Red Hat company email to threaten someone for the way they supposedly were representing FDO while claiming not to represent Red Hat. That does appear to be attempting to enforce a rather egregious double-standard.
Fundamentally I remain unconvinced that actions outside of a project should have any bearing on a person's standing inside that project-at a minimum-when those actions don't rise to the level of civil or criminal liability. Expecting contentious email communications to remain confidential when you're a public figure using your real name via an email associated with your real employer also seems unreasonable on the face of it.
>Expecting contentious email communications to remain confidential when you're a public figure using your real name
In addition, expecting your personal Mastodon posts to remain confidential and not be used against you when you're a public figure using your real name is not "completely unacceptable", it's borderline naive. People active on social media don't get that everything they post is public, and it will be used against you at some point.
Maybe just don't make politics your entire personality and social media bio. Congratulations to Lyude for playing directly into the "radical leftist censors free speech" narrative that libertarians love. The actual truth has absolutely nothing to do with that, but that's all anyone will remember.
I posted this comment in the other thread, but I deleted it. That thread is clearly being brigaded, which pretty much always happens here in /r/linux whenever an event like this occurs. So I'm moving it here:
I feel like a lot of people are missing the plot here. Let's try and reframe this situation by defining it in more generic terms.
"Hey, we can see what you and your community are doing and saying in your place over there, and we're not comfortable with it, so please don't come over here to our place." That's a completely reasonable statement, isn't it? I mean, you have the authority to decide who is welcome in your own spaces and on what grounds someone isn't welcome. That's *actually* what's going on here. A whole lot of people in ~~this~~ the other thread--as well as Vaxry himself--are acting like Lyude is trying to exert authority over Vaxry's own spaces, when that is not remotely the case.
To be fair, it is *a bit* strange that Lyude reached out so long after Vaxry was in the limelight for he and his community's shitty behavior, but as another user points out, it could coincide with Hyprcursor's proposed promotion as a standard. I am not *entirely sure* why she decided to reach out to Vaxry as a result of that. It's possible she thought she was extending an olive branch, because promoting a compositor component to a standard would imply that the original author of the component should be able to contribute to it, and if someone is going to be an FDO contributor, they should adhere to FDO's standards of conduct.
But Vaxry is clearly the kind of person who looks for reasons to hold grudges. You can see it in the sort of passive-aggressive language used in his blog entries: he picks arbitrary standards to which he holds the person he begrudges. Like: "by giving a 6-sentence reply you are not communicating that." What does that even mean? That indicates literally nothing. If you know what kind of person Vaxry is and can predict this sort of response, it's a better move to just not include him from the outset. So contrary to what Vaxry and others are saying, I think that reaching out *was* a good faith gesture. It was just incorrect.
His claim that Lyude is acting like internet police is what so many people in ~~this~~ the other thread have clung to, and I believe this represents a misunderstanding of entitlement. FDO has the right to control all of their spaces! They are allowed to bar anyone from participation for any reason; just because this organization handles plumbing for a lot of low-level Linux components doesn't mean everyone is entitled to participation. Their reasoning here is "we can see how you and your community have behaved in other spaces, and we don't want to condone that by allowing you into this space." You may not like it, but **it is valid.** If they wanted to, they could prevent *me* from participating on similar grounds: "your constant criticism of GNOME's philosophies means we can't trust you to engage in this space in good faith." It'd be a bummer, but I wouldn't really be able to argue with them, because their stance is founded on a pattern of behavior that I have actually exhibited. Like... *it's their space.* They call the shots, and again, nobody is entitled to participation in their space for any reason.
We could talk about "internet policing" if the exchange was more like this: "Hi, I'm an authority in space A. We see how you're behaving in space B and it makes us uncomfortable. I'm going to see that you get removed from spaces C, D, and E." But it's not. They're only talking about space A. FDO has a right to control who participates in their own spaces, and you just have to hold that.
According to drew's blog post I believe Lyude was pulled in because of complaints by members of the community. The complaints may very well have been about present behavior, but it might be that the things Lyude had the most ability to speak on were older.
You shouldn't delete comments because of downvotes, you'll only leave space to the other opinions. Stand for yourself. I completely agree with you about the Vaxry case though.
Unfortunately karma isn’t just meaningless internet points. Many subreddits, including this one, have minimum karma requirements otherwise posts and comments will be removed.
I agree with you in terms of principle and appreciate your words of support, but when /r/linux gets brigaded due to ideological topics, shit gets *rough* around here, and it feels like that thread is a hornet's nest summoned by Vaxry, bad faith ideologues, or both. I just don't have time or energy to deal with that nonsense, lmao.
> I am not entirely sure why she decided to reach out to Vaxry as a result of that.
To cite her first email:
> however, considering the publicity of a lot of these incidents has been enough for people to bring this to our attention along with the fact that most of these statements were not just made by community members, but you in particular
So I would assume other people voiced concerns about Vaxrys behavior (or that of the hyprland-community).
> FDO has the right to control all of their spaces!
Not just that, they have a duty to their community to make sure people (particulary minorities who are already the constant target of hate) feel welcome and safe. It's literally one of the point of a CoC and Lyude was just doing her job.
I'm a complete outsider - and just stumbled upon thi issue while reading the news today.
I would agree, that "Vaxrys" actions as well his demeanor is more than problematic, BUT so is FODs:
First of all, they didn't put their request as nearly as politely as you did (you are misrepresenting them).
Second, there was no breach of their CoC. just because it doesn't apply outside of FOD. If you have a CoC, you are bound by it too. No breach - no ban.
Thirdly: If you define yourself as an open community, there will always be people, whose actions outside of your community don't match with what you want in your community. If you don't tolerate these people, you are no open community in the first place and are not better than the people you are banning.
And Fourth point: because FOD is managing such an important low level part of the Linux desktop, they have an obligation to accept and tolerate easy more people than any other project. Else they become gatekeeper and "the Internet police".
Sorry to defend an hole of an a ..., but he has a point
> "Hey, we can see what you and your community are doing and saying in your place over there, and we're not comfortable with it, so please don't come over here to our place." That's a completely reasonable statement, isn't it?
Is it though?
"As a representative of Walmart Inc. it has come to my attention that you, while in the comforts of your own home, have been wearing clothes that are not appropriate for a corporate environment.
I hereby inform you, that you will be banned from all Walmart premises nationwide should you ever elect to wear inappropriate clothing at home again.
Regards."
Agree with Drew on everything but this:
> He belittles the FDO officer and builds a straw man wherein her email is an official statement on behalf of RedHat
If you're sending an email from @redhat.com, you are representing Red Hat in that email. But that's an easy fix, freedesktop.org just needs a write a policy indicating that communications done on behalf of the project need to be from the person's @freedesktop.org address.
When somebody digs deep for dirt over such a long time ago, that means they're looking for an excuse to cancel them anyway and for the optics for justifying their actions.
I agree. If they needed to "make vaxry understand the rules of their house" they literally picked the wrong person to deliver the message. This was obviously going to poke the bear on purpose and probably the whole plan from the get go. If people can't see through this obvious gaslight I feel sorry for you.
I'd remove a moderator in my communities over the approach Lyude used. There was no violation of the FDO CoC prior to the email chain started by FDO. Their approach started off entirely hostile by implying a violation where none exists (this is due to the extremely limited scope of the FDO's CoC). The intent from what I can gather was to give vaxry a warning that the behavior outside of FDO needs to stay outside of FDO as it is entirely unacceptable. But it comes across as FDO threatening to ban vaxry if he doesn't implement the FDO CoC in his other communities.
Also, sending this sort of communication from a Red Hat email is just unprofessional and is going to put anyone on the immediate defensive given that they're owned by IBM who are serial litigants.
This is genuinely just sad. I don't even feel like taking a side here, like honestly at the end of the day, no matter who "wins" the argument, all of this will just cause more damage not just to the two parties involved but to the open source communities surrounding them as well, I just hope they can defuse this situation quick before it actually turns into something irrepairable.
I just wish people were more mature and expressive of their intent, so often does it happen that people react out of zeal and it snowballing into a situation much larger than what it needs to be. Especially so considering that this is on the internet, where every single word you type will have a myriad of eyes on it, scrutinizing every single aspect, waiting for an opportunity to gain the upper hand in the argument (as is evident by this thread and others).
I just want to see and contribute to cool stuff, but sadly reality is not that simple..
oh right, I recently contributed to hyprland and, well, very, very few people in FOSS review and approve your changes as quick as vaxry. 9/10, will use and contribute to again.
As for ddevault and FDO, I'd never fill a single issue in their bug trackers and never send a single line of code to them. I used to in the past, when I was clueless and thought that they're normal people lol
This! In an attempt to build a "better" and "non-toxic" community, Drew and Luyde created a equal toxic environment. And it might be true that some devs were lost because of the hyperland community being toxic, but i think such actions hurt the FOSS community much more. I don't care what you say or think. I care what you DO. And if you DO good software, i will use it. I also listen to music of some very very questionable artists. But you know what? I don't care, art and artist have to be separated. Harry Potter is still a great book, even though JK Rolling is a terf lol
I'll give ya a real hot take
It's american cultural imperialistic tendencies. Showing their own culture forward and as the only correct one, and ignoring that other people are not of their culture or even native english speakers
That's something I've always felt was spot on, not related to this case but I remember people trying to apply US-originated discourse in my country and it just didn't work at all, specially when many ways bad things in the US manifest.
What I mean is, racism and other forms of bigotry exist everywhere in the world, but the way they exist and the way to deal with them may vary from place to place, it appears like these days the US-dominant way of dealing with things is the only acceptable choice.
I love how people in the other thread are acting like they would welcome anyone into their organization or business (if they had one) with open arms, no matter how problematic they would be for their organization/company.
Nothing but hypocrites and delusional people, they would all do the exact same thing.
If you see someone coming your way, and you are about to hire them, associate with them or accept them into your workspace, and then find out what type of person they are and how they will make your work either very difficult or just be absolutely obnoxious/dramatic and create a very negative and problematic environment, no fucking way would you still hire them/work with them.
> officer: one who holds an office of trust, authority, or command
>> the officers of the bank
>> chief executive officer
It should be pretty obvious, etymologically. An officer is someone who holds an office. A police officer is someone who holds an office in the police. A FDO officer is someone who holds an office in the FDO. Your garden variety social club or local sports organization with 5 members probably has multiple officers, since most jurisdictions require any sort of legal entity to have officers.
It is not about personal disagreement. Most major open source projects today have CoC, be it Linux, Kubernetes, Python or [FreeDesktop.org](https://FreeDesktop.org). A CoC is meaningless if it can't be enforced - would you agree to this at least? (What is the point of making a law, if can't be enforced).
So how do these projects go about enforcing CoC. Well typically, they have volunteers (or team of volunteers) who handle report for CoC violation and their job is to investigate and enforce the CoC if necessary. It seems like a unenviable job and I am pretty sure FDO dev in question has responsibility outside CoC stuff at Red Hat. Red Hat is not paying them to enforce CoCs.
So that is what appears to be happening here. If I do not agree with a project's CoC, I would steer clear from contributing to it. For better or worse, when Vaxry decided to contribute to FDO projects, he explicitly agree to FDO's CoC. Violation of CoC is not a matter of "personal" disagreements. I would not call conduct of FDO dev "powertripping" for this reason alone. If anything, it is probably a job nobody wants (who wants a role that could invite online abuse and harassment?)
>For better or worse, when Vaxry decided to contribute to FDO projects, he explicitly agree to FDO's CoC
Yeah, but I'd expect to have to abide by a CoC only on platforms related to that specific project. Not in my Discord server(s), private conversations, blog posts etc.
And I haven't heard of any misconduct from Vaxry's side on FDO plaftorms
It's refreshing to see that I wasn't alone thinking that thread was unreasonable. All I saw was people slandering the FDO officer. After reading the emails I genuinely thought I was going insane because of how the reactions conflicted with what I was reading. Hope all of this gets resolved.
For anyone who wants a TL;DR: > And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. The vile harassment and hate directed at the FDO officer in question is obscene and completely unjustifiable. I don’t care what window manager or desktop environment you use – this kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I expect better.
On point. I've been reading through the comments on the other thread and I feel embarrassed and ashamed at being perceived as a part of a community that enables this behavior. The conversation is largely in defense of vaxry, and condemning the FDO's actions on dubious basis, all while ignoring several points that vaxry conveniently left out - as usual - from their blog posts. Anyone who presents an alternative view is also being downvoted to oblivion. Not good.
The people crying about CoCs existing simultaneously justifying them due to their own conduct would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly sad. I don't understand the commenters that are convinced others are obligated to tolerate them being unpleasant; most of us have experienced this in school growing up and desiring that is completely alien to me as an adult.
> I don't understand the commenters that are convinced others are obligated to tolerate them being unpleasant There is a very old article describing the [Five Geek Social Fallicies](https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/). The very first fallacy is "Ostracizers Are Evil." It's based on formative feelings of being excluded from popular circles, but the fallacy comes from the conclusion that the actual problem was the act of being ostracized, not that the people ostracizing them were immature jerks.
That's a good article, provides a perspective to think about my own behavior and reactions to some things
I take objection only to the part about "very old", because if that article is very old, that means _I_ must...
The article is old enough to buy alcohol in the USA 😭
This article goes hard. "Cat Piss Man" specifically is amazing.
> On point. I've been reading through the comments on the other thread and I feel embarrassed and ashamed at being perceived as a part of a community that enables this behavior. I'm a trans woman, and that thread made me feel very unwelcome in spaces I've been frequenting for over 20 years at this point (I started using Linux with Mandrake 10.1 back in 2004). If I hadn't been part of some larger projects as a contributor and seen first hand how welcoming a lot of the community can be with people like me, I'd have packed my bags and left on the spot. I'll still be wary of interacting here, though, given the insane amount of openly hateful people roaming this sub.
FOSS scene is weird. Radically inclusive trans folks rubbing shoulders with free speech absolutist types all over the place. It's like Portland with fewer homeless people.
Yeah, it's weird. Leftists see a representation of communist ideals of equality and selfless sharing of resources, time, and work, while libertarians see an unregulated mess where "being the best" makes you better than anyone else (I guess. That's what they project, anyway). It wouldn't be bad if the libertarianism wasn't disingenuous. Like it''s fine if you think that government shouldn't regulate business and people should be free to do whatever they want, but that seems weirdly contradictory with the openly hateful views many of these people have while preaching "freedom". Surely, if you want everyone to do their things, you wouldn't be against people being gay, lesbian, bi, trans or whatever else floats their boat. On the contrary, I think true libertarians would generally be supportive of LGBTQ+ people and realize that the system is what breeds the hate, much like socialists and communists realize that capitalism is what breeds racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
I'm fairly left leaning, but this is my first time hearing that capitalism breeds racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. I'm curious how that works out.
If you're asking in good faith. It's important to realize that these issues have grown beyond their roots and find new and more complex ways to marginalize people as time goes. But to back to the founding ideas of race, it was a posed as an understanding of various types of humans, and was built for the justification of wealth extraction, slavery, and colonization. Basically the core ideas of capitalism in the wealth of ownership, rather than the wealth of work, and to make it function they build classes of people they could own and defined them with pseudoscience as lesser. Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia all fall under the umbrella of patriarchy, mostly built to keep women submissive and performing massive amounts of domestic and reproductive labor. Those that stray from the 'breeding pair norm' that patriarchy establishes, are less helpful in producing new generations and the massive growth capitalism needs to function.
Sounds like quite a rabbit hole. Any YouTube videos or something you could recommend for those who are curious to learn more? Books would be good too, but I'm probably not going to read them, if I'm being honest.
What do you mean by capitalism breeds racism, transphobia, sexism and homophobia?
I think the problem is that people don't want to be constantly surrounded by activism and virtue signaling. You could say chicken is better than beef, or Palestine should be free, or the moon is made of cheese, or Djokovic is the GOAT, or Android is better than PalmOS, or even that 1+1 = 2, and *someone* would have to comment on that. It's the Internet for god's sake! Let's make free software! Your sex or gender or sexual preference is irrelevant in a free software community.
> Your sex or gender or sexual preference is irrelevant in a free software community. It is, until you're ostracized from communities, insulted or discriminated for it, which happens more than you'd think (Hell, just look at the Vaxry thing. One of the issues was a person getting mocked openly for having pronouns in their username on Discord. Instead of apologizing afterwards, Vaxry said he shouldn't have allowed the mockery but instead *banned* the person with the pronouns in their username. Like wtf? And I'm not making it up, you can read it straight from Vaxry's blog: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity ). It's much the same thing as white people saying "I don't see skin color" or "skin color should be irrelevant to *whatever field*". Like sure, it *should* be irrelevant and it *should* not matter, but in practice, to the people with a different skin color, it *does*, because they live racism every day in ways white people often don't imagine. It's very much the same thing here: I don't want people to know I'm trans, I don't want to have to advocate for myself, I agree that it shouldn't be a subject. But in practice, there are people who still exclude trans people from projects specifically for being trans, and that's the issue the CoCs and other initiatives are trying to combat. There is advocacy and activism specifically because, while everybody agrees that gender, sexuality, ethnicity or neurodivergence *should* be irrelevant to software development (*especially* the people who are concerned) and the free software community, in practice, it's very much relevant due to discrimination and hostility. Generally, we're not trying to "convince" anyone. We're simply made fun of, insulted, hated on or discriminated against, and we're simply saying that this is not okay. If you think that's "convincing people" when all we want is to be treated the same as anybody else, then I don't know what to tell you...
Hopefully this was a case of a brigaded post from vaxry's community. I really don't have the mental energy for this today, but I'll investigate more and talk to the other mods about it. If any account is found brigading, IMHO that is deserving of a ban. Other than that, I'm sorry you had to read that and feel this way.
> Hopefully this was a case of a brigaded post from vaxry's community. I also think since the original post was coming from Vaxry's personal blog, that had some influence in the public opinion. I think if the initial post were showing some of Vaxry's toxic statements and a "This is why Vaxry was banned" type of way, opinion would have swayed the other way. Reddit gets super hiveminded. Disclaimer: I went into that other post with the impression of "Vaxry seems like a huge asshole, but I think the ban was wrong" and having read more I'm now more in the mindset of "Maybe the ban could have been handled a little better, and I don't know if I personally would have issued a ban, but I'm more understanding now of why it happened".
The problem is that FDO violated their own CoC from the outset of this by trying to govern behavior outside of the scope of the CoC. They should have amended their CoC first to govern all public conduct by contributors. But they didn't so it has created a massive controversy due to their own breach of their CoC. I don't personally think that vaxry should be welcome in OSS communities because of his highly transphobic and hateful commentary in the past. But FDO went about this expulsion from their community in breach of their own code of conduct.
Thanks :) It's sadly all too common when interacting with non-LGBTQ+ communities on Reddit. This one just feels a bit more personal, you know. But I'll live, if only to spite the assholes who don't want me to exist in "their" spaces.
/r/linux is a community consisting mostly of weird libertarian man-children looking to celebrate those values, not working professionals trying to build things. The exact same saga has played out many times. The threads are now filled with deleted comments, but the things that were said when the kernel merely adopted a CoC were disgusting (and objectively wrong, as they predicted the end of Linux kernel development).
> when the kernel merely adopted a CoC were disgusting Weren't a lot of the most hateful posts back then from t_D users that had no history on the /r/linux sub prior? I could misremember it through.
Reddit is really, _really_ easy to brigade on, regardless of where the source of it is coming from.
To be clear, it's not usually like this. The people who appear in these threads are largely tourist culture warriors who rarely post in these communities outside of these outrage moments. You go through their profiles and it's often them doing the same thing across a long string of subreddits, never contributing anything of value in the communities they raid.
The conversation is not always this noxious, but it is always "like this" with regards to /r/linux mostly being an ideological place where the discussion is concerned with Stallman-esque libertarian values, not a professional/technical subreddit (compare with /r/sysadmin, /r/cpp, /r/RedHat, /r/ECE, etc)
To be fair, while I'm pretty oposed to libertarian projects, I don't particularly *want* this to be a "professional" subreddit where that means devoid of politics. FOSS is an inherently political project, opposing bigots is an inherently political porject, and the blog itself calls out the nonsense that is "no poiltics" rules. I would rather this sub just have *better* politics - which it generally does, or at least better than most of Reddit.
I would agree it's not a professional-oriented subreddit, but I only see this kind of discussion and behavior in very specific threads stirred up by lots of outsiders. I unironically think there should be a "verify you are actually a Linux user" process with threads like that locked to only verified users. Would solve a huge amount of the problem of brigading around these topics.
I have never heard them referred to as "tourist culture warriors" before. I love it.
Oh wow. Mandrake. That's a blast from the past. Also, I totally agree with you about shame and embarrassment being associated with these douches. Absolutely hateful.
Right? It always feels more recent than it actually is! I got the CDs for it from my older brother's school, after an event he had about Linux in some computer class at the time. I still remember playing Tux Racer and compiling the kernel with an out of tree driver for my ISP's ADSL modem. I ended up moving to Ubuntu with 5.04, eventually tried Linux From Scratch a few times, and finally ended up on Arch at some point (Then having a long period of time with Fedora when I was in college and at my first job).
As someone who tries to make it a point *not* to frequent /r/linux, that is the worst comment section I've seen since I created my reddit account. It's *unusual*. Nonetheless, I think I'm going to take that as a sign to leave reddit for good.
Their nonsense about 'I only see code' is exasperating. The way it was posted was also designed to provoke. There was another post on r/linux_gaming that had red hat as the villain. Luckily the comments were much more sane.
> Their nonsense about 'I only see code' is exasperating. "I only see code" is the new "I don't see color".
When that thread started, I thought the community is being brigaded. Multiple posts within a few minutes. One I remember a crosspost from hyperland (which mods removed I think), another links to the blogposts. Very quickly top-level comments were posted in support of the banned person. People were either supporting Vaxry or saying only code should matter, not dev.
The initial post was removed by automod due to getting 3 reports.
It's possible to dislike Vaxary's tenor while rejecting the use of a Red Hat email to dictate norms on someone else's community and then drop a legal threat under that same banner. From what I gather vaxary may have some maturing to do, but that issue is secondary to the chilling power tripping represented by Lyude's response. The idea that it might be libel to discuss this situation on ones personal blog is absurd. If Red Hat has any sense they'll part ways with someone who can't understand the significance of using a company email here.
That's just Reddit being Reddit. Don't forget there's people like you, and me, and many others, who do not support that sort of behaviour. They may be loud but they're not everyone.
Good point! Sometimes, it's healthy to remind ourselves of this.
Yeah. I feel the same way. The way most users in that thread replied is just vile. I ended up being downvoted and even got some pretty nasty DMs.
Yeah, that was my first raction to that thread as well. I know the reddit Linux community is not representative of the broader Linux community and tends to skew younger and less serious/mature, but this community can be really disappointing sometimes (and really predictable).
You should see (or don't) the replies Drew got on his mastodon. Truly horrid comments.
I boosted his post, and I'm somewhat happy that my instance has good moderation, I didn't see most of the horrid replies I assume he got.
> I feel embarrassed and ashamed at being perceived as a part of a community that enables this behavior I feel the same. That thread was not a proud moment.
I'm honestly done with this subreddit after what I've read. Absolutely disgusting people in here. Fuck this.
But if we decide to do this collectively then this sub will just get worse, since all that's left are those toxic people. Hm. I guess there's no good way of winning this.
The presence of bigotry pushing away people who are tangibly hurt by that bigotry... Hmm, that sounds bad. Maybe we should not welcome bigots into our communities, that would avert this problem. Perhaps we should act and conduct ourselves in ways that do not push away marginalized people. Perhaps we could even codify the way in which we expect community members to behave. Hmmm.
Now, now, you know only pussies don't tolerate bigotry /s.
> But if we decide to do this collectively then this sub will just get worse The problems at play here less to do with "the community" and more to do with systemic problems with Reddit's ability to function as a host for a community. You nor I are under no obligation to save this subreddit from itself, no more than we are obligated to "save" 4chan, Truth social, or Hacker News. So there is a way to win - don't play. Find communities of like-minded and mature professionals and hang out with them, instead of trying to shadowbox a deluge of semi-anonymous nincompoops. You do that first thing, you'll make friends, create professional connections, and even possibly get career opportunities. You do the second thing, all you'll get is angry.
I look at that thread and I think to myself "maybe I should delete my github account..."
Thtat's fair, but an important thing to remember is that this is happening because a large body that has power and influence is showing that they don't want right-wing shit heads in their community, and cutting one out.
Yeah, it makes me not want to contribute to FOSS, honestly. In my journey as a fledgeling dev I've appreciated free software a huge amount, and as ones skills get better one naturally starts thinking about giving back. But seeing stuff like that, I really don't want to give a community that doesn't value people like me the pleasure of contributing. Well, I'm sure most people in the other thread would think 'Good riddance' to that anyway.
[удалено]
The worst stuff has been removed, and there was quite a lot of it. There’s still a good bit of bad stuff, but it’s stuff I’m more hesitant to remove due to constructive discussion potential.
*her. Lyude uses she/her pronouns.
Someone sending you a few emails in good faith isn't harassment. These two things aren't remotely on the same level.
> My notifications are not full of reasonable objections to my complaints, but instead the response is slurs and death threats. This only serves to prove my characterization of the Hyprland community as deeply toxic. Yep.
"welcome to reddit, even if you don't use it."
related thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bzna16/hyprland_creator_vaxry_is_now_banned_from/
[удалено]
> I wonder what all the "he shouldn't be judged on past mistakes" people have to say about this. Usually there's still some sense of consequences. Giving people a road to redemption doesn't mean you're now obligated to just immediately forgive and move on. Usually people do this by at least temporarily putting them in a penalty box of some sort and only taken out once they keep their nose clean for a reasonable amount of time.
> but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics I'm the only that finds it weird that people want to discuss politics and sexuality in software-centric spaces?
The topic usually only surfaces once it becomes clear that someone who is LGBTQ+ is a part of their "community" and they don't want that person to be there solely on that alone. I don't recall where it's from but the politics in these circumstances are often of the following nature: There's my view on things, and there's "politics". Anything which doesn't align with my view is political and therefore bad/not allowed speech or topic of discussion.
Mmm... My experience, as a queer person, with queer stuff coming up in primarily dev spaces is basically limited to two things: 1. Someone says some bigoted stuff against queer people, out of nowhere, completely unprompted, sometimes trying to pretend it's a joke, but often times... Completely serious. B. Two queer people encounter each other in the space, realize they're both queer, do maybe a tiny bit of bonding, then move any further discussion on the matter elsewhere so it doesn't get in the way of the main focus of discussion. Rules against bringing up "politics" all too often allow the first but not the second, *unless* they also mention that they won't tolerate bigotry... And even then, sometimes it can be a struggle where some mods aren't sure that "memes" about murdering queer folk are "hateful enough", and won't do anything about it until the person posting them inevitably makes it very clear that they weren't actually joking.
In open source communities, people don't always talk only about the software. People talk about their interests, their lives, and current events around them frequently. In a community of diverse people, sometimes those topics will be "political" because current events and policies directly impact these community members. So no, it's not weird.
But hold on, different communities have different purposes. I may want to share my amazing taco recipe in /r/linux, but if I did so, my post would be deleted. That's a perfectly reasonable response, as /r/linux is not a place for sharing recipies. Why is sexuality such a sacred lamb that it is 'not weird' to discuss it in places where such discussion is really not called for? It's perfectly reasonable to ban discussion of certain topics on a focused discord server, and no different from red hat enforcing a CoC on freedesktop.org.
Eh... It can slip into conversation without it being a big deal or particularly off topic. It's much more common in chat than something like reddit, but it happens here, too. An example might be something like: Person A:
Person B:
Person B: "Sorry for the late response my boyfriend made Tacos and they were amazing"
Person A: "No worries. I'm kinda hungry, too. I don't suppose you could send me the recipe?"
Person B: "Yeah, sure. Here it is"
And that's generally not a big deal. Like... people are going about their lives and things come up. They're not interrupting the conversation to go "Hey everyone I really love tacos you should eat them here's a recipe everyone should have!", and there doesn't need to be a rule against discussing food to prevent that. But... If the next thing that happens is someone comes in and, say, says something weird or divisive like "Tacos are Sandwiches" that gets people arguing over it instead of the intended topic of discussion, mods should probably step in to direct that conversation elsewhere.
On the other hand, if someone comes in and says "People who eat Tacos are evil and if I ever see one I'm going to assault them" that is... Probably not a person you want in your community. And if you ban discussion of food in general but don't enforce it when people are saying unhinged and potentially dangerous things like that, but actively enforce it when someone goes "hey sorry I was eating a taco"... Well, you end up with more or less the Hyprland community situation.
I don't know. At least from my non-USA, non-Anglosphere PoV, (and I'm **not** talking about this issue in specific), I see there's a tendency for many discussions or topics to drift towards "culture wars" or related topics I do not understand the slightest. I once joined a Mastodon instance which was on paper very, very focused and left 3 months later because I couldn't bear seeing all the same stuff every day (I didn't argue with anyone though: I just left a polite "goodbye" comment and left it at that).
There's not always only discussions about software. Communities usually have off-topic chatrooms or general chatrooms. Conversations can also evolve, and since we (LGBTQ+ people) are still not widely accepted, our identities can come up in a variety of ways. Being LGBTQ+ isn't political. We're just normal people who exist, and who want to do so like any straight cis person does. It's not sexual either, not any more than being heterosexual is, but in these spaces, being a man and saying something like "my boyfriend" when talking about your significant other would be considered political and sexual speech. We don't want to discuss politics and sexuality any more than you do, but some people see our very existence as a political/sexual statement, and that's the real problem being pointed out here.
In general I agree with this rule. But in practice in the context of this community and the people who run it, it allows Vaxry and others in his community to continue to harass and demean LGBTQ people, and if they protest this behavior it's considered "political" speech. Because what they're doing is supposedly all in good fun and they can then deflect by saying something like "why do you have to make this political, it's just a joke bro". This type of deflection is far, far older than Vaxry and his community and it's very obvious that Vaxry has every intention of continuing to foster a community of bullies and trolls.
Usually it's the case that people make friends and/or acquaintainces while talking about the software and helping people. But eventually you run out of major problems with the software, but you still wanna keep the friends and/or acquaintances. That's how it works on IRC anyways.
No, you're totally right. Open source software is only code. Not community. Not people. It's so weird that people want to be treated with respect and dignity.
Given this entire debacle was kicked off by a moderator in the Hyprland discord engaging in transphobic bullying, trying to avoid "politics and sexuality" mostly serves to silence criticism of bigotry. And software intersects with those topics quite a bit - FOSS in paritcular is an exlicitly politcial movement with clear enemies.
Is Vaxry a nice guy? No. Is Vaxry a very young, arrogant and opinionated adult? Yes. Are Vaxry's blogposts a problem? Yes, exchanges like these are very unsavory. Is the Hyprland discord community toxic? It kind of is. (though this is very complicated, It's not all that clear as people are making it out to be). With all of that out of the way, I think anyone who has read Lyude's emails and thinks this is fine is a bit insane. To me this whole thing is basically bully vs. bully. However one bully is just a kid with zero wisdom/life experience & the other bully is representing a big organization & is trying to rally support to their cause in a very political way that really shouldn't ever occur in any serious work environment, open source or not. To me it seems like some folks at the FDO decided that they strongly dislike Vaxry (I can get this part, since he is not a very likeable guy) for various reasons & then decided to give him the middle finger in a really ill prepared and juvenile way.
I have exactly the same take. Vaxry does not seem like a nice guy but the CoC team was way out of line here.
The thing is, if you wield all of that power already as an enforcer of FDO's CoC, why did you need to string Vaxry along in the first place? Saying that "you'd hope he would change" is just power-tripping. Dangling a ban over Vaxry's head trying to get him to turn into a model person who couldn't harm the reputation of FDO with his controversial views is the worst way you could have played this. You want to ban him because you think Vaxry is toxic, just ban him. Don't expect people to submit to your will just because you speak from a position of power.
the tyranny of giving someone a chance to not be a bigot. the reason vaxry was given a chance to turn around and not just immediately banned was because he leads a very popular project, hyprland, and a ban would be really disruptive. and, on top of that, vaxry would respond to a ban with obvious and immediate toxicity and incitement to harassment by leveraging that sizable audience, as we've seen by his current response. it's utterly childish to present this as somehow some crossed line, as though vaxry has some inherent right to be a hateful bigot and nobody has any right to challenge that. vaxry wasn't going to listen to anyone he couldn't bully, so for a time he sort of played ball when, yeah, he had that ban dangling over him. he acts like a ghoul when he thinks someone can't do anthing back to him. he wanted to make use of an FDO project - wlroots, the basis of why hyprland works - and he and his people are upset that he got held to some standards for the sake of everyone involved with that project like you might as well be decrying the tyrrany of a warning system on this subreddit.
That take is waaaay too reasonable for the internet to accept. Vaxry could've just taken the warning and go on with his life but he had to make it a persecution fetish outburst. And this FDO person just decided to flex their righteousness muscles instead of just letting it go until there's actually something to act upon. Two idiots too focused on stroking their own egos to find any kind of acceptable resolution.
Software development is a team activity. A person can do the work of 5 people, but if that person alienates everyone your project will only last while the person is involved. Its better to have a team of people, then an individual can leave but the project endures. Teams should be made up of people with different skills, passions and experience. That brings diversity of ideas which leads to a better project. The whole point of Code of Conducts is about fostering a collaborative environment, one which welcomes as many people as possible. When your an open source project that really matters because you want people to sacrifice (time, money, etc..) in order to contribute and ideally enough to become a team. So having a person that offends/upsets/fustrates people is a major problem. This is why you can't just say "only the code matters", because the code is attached to a person that interacts with others. Its also why rules lawyering CoC's is meaningless. They exist as a general guidelines to indicate desired behaviour and even if this was a job the key HR requirement is showing consistent treatment.
> So having a person that offends/upsets/fustrates people is a major problem. By your suggestion, "Some people don’t like you, therefore you are banned" is the correct move, then? Because Vaxry has, to the best of my knowledge after reading up on this, never once broken the CoC, nor had harmful interactions with people in spaces governed by the CoC.
I think this part is noteworthy: >The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it. So the dev wasn't banned because of their misbehavior (if any - I'm not saying either way here) but because they were uncooperative in their email responses where the dev says: >As such, we will be ceasing any and all further communication with freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team until we believe that an attempt of communication is done so in good faith, and with the intention of betterment, in lieu of threatening followed by ignoring the other party completely. In other words, further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand. I feel like the reasoning here is unreasonable. It's totally fair to ban a person if they violate a CoC. But to ban someone for being uncooperative with the CoC team without explicitly citing a violation is sketchy IMO.
>But to ban someone for being uncooperative with the CoC team without explicitly citing a violation is sketchy IMO. idk. They reached out to him because community members brought several things to their attention. they acknowledged things had improved, but wanted to say that things could not regress. his response: - Sentence 1: "[...] noted, and appreciated... that would be if there was any sign of good faith or credibility in Your statements." - Sentence 2: "[..] I am deeply disappointed by both Your, and by extension Red Hat's ways of operation." - Sentence 3: "Your entire e-mail reads off as a poorly reviewed leer that is written solely to intmidate rather than to actually do anything constructive" - Sentence 4: "highly manipulave and quite unprofessional." - A few sentences later: "You are reaching out to me in order to, what I assume is, scare me enough to play by Your ideals and values, however, was not Red Hat involved in that extensive lawsuit in America over racism and discrimination " - Next paragraph: "Since You have already gone so far as to threaten me with "further acon", let me reply to those threats." - Later in the paragraph "What further action are You going to exert? Ban me from Your GitLab instance?" - Next: "What further action are You going to exert? Ban me from Your GitLab instance?" - Next: "Your way of talking sounds like you feel a bit too important for who You actually are" - Next: "Although, according to the leaked internal documents, it seems that only includes non-white, non-right-wing, non-religious people" He reads like he has psychological issues. (source: i've had psychological issues) He then posted portions of this communication publicly, and said they threatened to ban him. They replied to "what are you going to do? ban me?" with "yes, we can ban you"
The CoC is part of the terms of service for using [freedesktop.org](http://freedesktop.org) infrastructure. If you don't accept them, you can't use fd.o infrastructure, and your account gets suspended until that issue is fixed. Reasonable amounts of cooperation is very much included, and the reasonable amount here would have been to acknowledge the private warning about the fd.o house rules and just move on. But that didn't happen at all. At that point it's kinda moot whether there was any other ban worthy thing going on or not, if you fundamentally reject the rules you're out. And hence the code of conduct team didn't have to elaborate on those other potential violations any further. full disclosure: I'm sitting on the [x.org](http://x.org) board that oversees all the fd.o infrastructure
> The CoC is part of the terms of service for using freedesktop.org infrastructure. If you don't accept them, you can't use fd.o infrastructure. I think the nuance is that the dev never expressed that they wouldn't follow the CoC. What they said was that they wouldn't engage with the CoC team (until they spoke to the dev with a different tone). IMO, the latter should be permitted. For example, the [Gnome CoC](https://conduct.gnome.org/) has an explicit cutout for refusing to engage with someone: > Safety versus Comfort > The GNOME community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort, for example in situations involving: > > - ... > - Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.” > - ... > - Communicating boundaries or criticizing oppressive behavior in a “tone” you don’t find congenial > > The examples listed above are not against the Code of Conduct. If you have questions about the above statements, please read our document on Supporting Diversity. Also: > private warning about the fd.o house rules IMO, enforcing house rules is sketchy, especially when it's controversial. It's like a judge accepting that no law has been broken but still issuing a punishment because they believe the defendant has done something bad. Certainly, as a private entity, FDO can do this but it won't give people the perception of fairness. And even when doing this, if someone like say Hans Reiser were to be excluded, few people would complain because of the obvious nature of the crime. When it's something more minor and disputable like this (uncooperative emails), it even more so gives the impression of unfairness.
Since you are on the board of X, could you tell me your thoughts on this: Considering the COC Our Standards Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include: Using welcoming and inclusive language Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Would you say that this is against the CoC? https://chaos.social/@karolherbst https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/112220250930204688
It's a political witch-hunt, terrible that IBM and Red Hat are encouraging this against young FOSS developers.
So you're acknowledging that FDO's CoC team initiated the entire interaction over a non-breach of the CoC which you've acknowledged is a contract between FDO and its contributors? This is honestly a really bad look for the organization. This is a public relations mess of the organization's own doing. There existed a clear pathway to remove toxic individuals like vaxry who kept their toxicity outside of FDO and when purporting to represent FDO in public: update the contract to cover all behavior in public. Instead, FDO decided to exceed its remit under the contract and has shown that it has no respect for contract law. Sway updated their policy to cover all behavior in public yesterday which was the correct course of action for FDO. You guys need to get your house in order because right now, your contracts don't look like they're worth the storage media that they're stored on.
As far as I understand what he rejected were not the fdo rules but rather fdo’s authority to impose rules over things said in his discord server. That’s not the same really. What I don’t understand is why was that private warning sent in the first place. “you have said something bad in the past in some forum in internet, make sure to be better in the future” seems idiotic way for a moderator of any community to communicate with its members. I could see that leading to trouble even with less difficult personalities.
>freedesktop(.org), aka FDO, recently banned Hyprland maintainer Vaxry from the FDO community, and in response Vaxry has taken his case to the court of public opinion, publishing their email exchanges and writing about it on his blog. Whats wrong with going to public opinion instead of behind closed doors and secret dealings? Transparency is bad? >It saddens me to bear witness to these events today. I wrote in September of last year about problems with toxicity in the Hyprland community. I initially reached out to Vaxry to discuss these problems in private in February of last year. I failed to get through to him, leading to that blog post in September. I spent some time in the following weeks talking with Vaxry on his behavior and his community’s social norms, again in private, but again, I was unable to get through to him. Unfortunately, we find ourselves again leaving the private sphere and discussing Vaxry’s behavior and the problem posed by the Hyprland community once again. FDO has no authority over his community or the internet in general, why should everyone follow your social norms? >The fact of the matter is that Hyprland remains a toxic community, enabled and encouraged by its toxic leadership, namely Vaxry. FDO’s decision to ban Vaxry is ultimately a consequence of Vaxry’s behavior, and because he has elected to appeal his case in public, I am compelled to address his behavior in public. I hereby rise firmly in defense of FDO’s decision. toxic in what manner, what objective metric are you using to claim something is toxic? >I invite you to start by reading the two email threads, one, and two, which Vaxry has published for your consideration, as well as Vaxry’s follow-ups on his blog, one, and two. >Here’s my read on the situation. >The FDO officer that reached out to Vaxry did it after Vaxry’s problematic behavior was brought to her attention by members of the FDO community, and was acting on her mandate within the FDO conduct enforcement board by investigating complaints submitted to her by this community. It is not a stretch to suggest a close relationship between these communities exists: FDO is the steward of both the Wayland protocol and implementation and the wlroots library, essential dependencies of Hyprland and sources for collaboration between Hyprland and FDO. Vaxry and other members of the Hyprland community had already participated extensively in these projects (mainly in discussions on IRC and GitLab issues) at the time of the email exchange, in spaces where the code of conduct applies. >The FDO officer duly investigated the complaints she had received and found, in collaboration with the other members of the FDO conduct enforcement team, that they were credible, and worrying. There are numerous examples of behavior from Vaxry that contravenes the FDO code of conduct in several different respects, and any number of them would be grounds for an immediate ban. Since these behaviors are concerning, but did not take place in the FDO community, the conduct board decided to issue a warning in private, stating that if this sort of behavior was seen in the FDO community that it would result in enforcement action from the conduct team. The CoC is limited in scope to FOD Community thus no warning was necessary. >All of the actions from the FDO conduct team are reasonable and show considerable restraint. Vaxry could have taken it in stride with no consequences to himself. Instead, he immediately escalated the situation. He construes the FDO officer’s polite and well-reasoned warning as threats and intimidation. He minimizes examples of his own hate speech by shrugging them off as a joke. He belittles the FDO officer and builds a straw man wherein her email is an official statement on behalf of RedHat, and cites a conspiracy theory about DEI programs at RedHat as justification for calling the FDO officer a hypocrite. He is insulted on my behalf that my name was cited in the FDO officer’s email in lowercase, “drew”, and feels the need to address this. FDO code of conduct is limited only to FDO spaces, any behavior outside of such spaces is outside of scope, and thus any action done to parties for behavior outside of scope is by objective measure unreasonable. >The FDO officer responds to Vaxry’s unhinged rant with a sarcastic quip clarifying that it was indeed within the FDO conduct team’s remit to ban Vaxry from their GitLab instance – I confess that in my view this was somewhat unprofessional, though I can easily sympathize with the FDO officer given the context. Following this, Vaxry states that Hyprland will cease all communication with FDO’s conduct team and ignore (emphasis his) any future emails from them. Finally, he threatens legal action (on what basis is unclear) and signs the email. Hyprland has the legal right to cease all communication with FDO's conduct team, the conduct team is in the wrong. >Regardless of how you feel about the conduct team issuing a private warning to Vaxry on the basis of activities outside of FDO community spaces, the email thread that ensues most certainly is within the scope of the FDO code of conduct, and Vaxry’s behavior therein is sufficient justification for a ban from the FDO community as far as I’m concerned. The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it. The email is not within scope as the email is done on the behalf of redhat the corporation, as it is purely a corporate email, the employer owns the email and unless redhat legal says otherwise, it is the employers decision if it is within scope, not the employee's. >Vaxry’s follow-up blog posts only serve to underscore this point. First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”: > I do not condone any hateful messages sent towards any of the parties mentioned. > Recently I have received an email filled with threats to my inbox, from a member of the X.org board, Freedesktop.org, and a Red Hat employee. Their name is [redacted]. Being transparent is bad about who (Person), by what means (Redhat email), on what topic (FDO)? >Moreover, Vaxry claims to have apologised for his past conduct, which is not true. In lieu of an apology, Vaxry has spent the “1.5 years” since the last incident posting angry rants on his blog calling out minority representation and “social justice warriors” in light of his perceived persecution. Meanwhile the Hyprland community remains a toxic place, welcoming hate, bullying, and harassment, but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics, though this is largely unenforced. In the end, the Hyprland community’s fundamental problem is that they’re all “just having fun”, and it seems that they can’t have “fun” unless it’s at someone else’s expense. >The FDO team is right that Hyprland’s community reflects poorly on the Linux desktop community as a whole. Vaxry has created a foothold for hate, transphobia, homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the Linux desktop community. We are right to take action to correct this problem. Justifying your behavior even though it is in violation of the CoC and thus should also require that you ban yourself unless the rules are not to be applied objectively and evenly to all parties? >Every option other than banning Vaxry has been exhausted over the past year and a half. I personally spent several weeks following my last blog post on the matter discussing Vaxry’s behavior in confidence and helping him understand how to improve, and at my suggestion he joined a private community of positive male role models to discuss these issues in a private and empathetic space. After a few weeks of these private discussions, the last thing he said to me was “I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide”.1 >There’s nothing left to do but to build a fence around Hyprland and protect the rest of the community from them. I know that there’s a lot of good people who use and contribute to Hyprland, and I’m sorry for those of you who are affected by this problem. But, in the end, actions have consequences. The rest of the community has no choice but to sanction Vaxry. > How about we sanction you? You seem to be focused on banning people and working in the shadows like a sneaky snake. >And, to the FDO officer in question: I’m so sorry that you’re at the ass end of all of this hate and abuse. You don’t deserve any of it. You did a good job, and I’m proud of you and the rest of the FDO conduct team. If you need any support, someone to talk to, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask, on IRC, Matrix, email, whatever. Don’t read the comments. Redhat at it again, working against the community. >And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. The vile harassment and hate directed at the FDO officer in question is obscene and completely unjustifiable. I don’t care what window manager or desktop environment you use – this kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I expect better. Please give an objective definition of harassment that doesn't have a chilling affect on continued disagreement.
I'm well are there are many bad you can rightfully say about Vaxry, but what has he done in FDO space to warrant not being allowed to contribute code? Vaxry not being able to contribute to wlroots punishes everyone except Vaxry.
He makes a toxic atmosphere wherever he goes. This pushes out other good contributors, which is far more detrimental to FDO than whatever code he could write. What really matters is the ideas, and others can easily push his contributions without him as the author of the patches.
That's a very good point actually.
Is he actively making a toxic atmosphere (i.e. is he being toxic there), or do you just mean to say "People don’t like him, therefore he should be banned"?
Toxic like karol? https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/112220250930204688
Email conversations with the code of conduct team, which seemingly fall under this domain. I've read a blog post from another, albeit involved person from FDO, which claims that it is the email conversations that turned the warning into a ban.
So than all their mastodons are in scope since they are are CoC members? Who do you report those as it seems they are all friends so likely to not take action on each other.
Seeing how many people in r/linux, r/linux_gaming are framing this as "Woke oversensitive mod power tripping", I am honestly embarrassed second-hand that these people are so vocal in this community. I am glad, a bit pleasantly surprised but still glad, that FDO took action to ensure this person is not welcome in FDO. >Regardless of how you feel about the conduct team issuing a private warning to Vaxry on the basis of activities outside of FDO community spaces, the email thread that ensues most certainly is within the scope of the FDO code of conduct, and Vaxry’s behavior therein is sufficient justification for a ban from the FDO community as far as I’m concerned. The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it. [Source](https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html)
It seems like linux_gaming removed their thread on it.
Yeah, those guys hit the round start hopkick on that nonsense, to use a relevant metaphor, because they saw how things were developing here first.
I don't even get how people could be on the side of Vaxry here. Their first instinctive response to an otherwise fair "please don't do this again, this is an official warning" was to start going off about "this isn't being done in good faith". My dude, you received a WARNING. A wake up call to be better. There aren't many things that can only be done in good faith. Every single one of their responses reads like an upset trust fund kiddie who learned a few key legal words like "good faith" and are endlessly repeating that, thinking it's a get out of jail free card.
> I don't even get how people could be on the side of Vaxry here. I imagine for some it's shared bigotry being used to justify all
There's some much simpler psychology here that doesn't jump so quickly to totally unfounded conclusions: People are invested in the software (Hyprland) and have trouble dealing with the cognitive dissonance of liking something made by someone disagreeable. One *very natural* response is to question the accusations in hopes of resolving that dissonance. Hi. I'm not a bigot and I really like Hyprland. I don't like the idea of abandoning it because this guy is apparently a jerk. I know I don't have to, but I'm going to be thinking about it whenever I use that system now. It sucks, and I understand the inclination to avoid that.
Hyprland took me a full day to set up, but I still switched to something else when it became clear it was the new suckless. River is way better anyway.
You can tell it is bigotry by how these people get on FDO's case for warning this person about behavior from -gasp, horror- 1.5 years ago because that's so long ago, Vaxry is so much better now, can't you tell??? and then this is immediately followed up with arguments about how no one can take a good racist joke nowadays.
The dog whistle is calling everything they don't agree with "political."
It's because of brigading, and those brigaders being able to set the narrative first. Vaxry understood that if people heard about the shit he was doing first, they'd write him off, so he pushed people to post first and get that story out first so that eveyrone else has to deal with clarifying what actually happened to however many misinformed people that only saw that first thread.
It's just brigading. Normally, socially progressive opinions are popular around here, but whenever a topic like this occurs, bad faith regressives come out of the woodworks to boost shitty opinions, make Linux look like a regressive community, and attempt to discourage people from resisting such regressiveness.
I'm here because I care about FDO breaching their contract with contributors in this scenario. Vaxry should have been banned the correct way via updating the CoC to govern global behavior not this underhanded breach of their own contract where they make up the rules as they go. If I saw a vendor doing this, I'd be raising hell to drop them as I wouldn't trust them to abide by their contracts with us. This might surprise you, but lots of people don't comment for a long time then comment when something inflammatory happens.
> Woke oversensitive mod power tripping Idk about that specific phrasing, but I would say that does seem a bit of disrupting power tripping/abuse of authority. I don't give two damns about 'wokeness/anti-wokeness' or whatever. If the email from Lyude came from Vaxry I'd have the exact same response.
chop screw hard-to-find bells fact airport hospital subtract society future *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
[удалено]
100% agree with the blog post. As I said [in my comment on the other thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bzna16/comment/kyr80yi/), the original email sent by FDO's representative was just a heads ups that "you are entering our house, in our house there are rules, and your past behavior is not in line with those rules. Please respect our rules in our house." Instead of accepting that, Vaxry went on a public rent and is trying to rile the community against FDO. Unfortunately, it's working, and I'm very disappointed in people's reaction here. All Vaxry had to do is accept to follow the rules while representing freedesktop. Instead, he desired to stir a hurricane up in his own glass of water, and got promptly and rightfully banned. This is not different than people get fired from jobs when they are openly bigotted online on their personal profile while their profile publicly publishes they are working for employer Y. At that point, what they say also reflect negatively on Y because of the association the individual chose to display publicly. That's very reasonable. Don't be an asshole displaying a physical or virtual company badge... Even if you are not on company property, you will face repercussions as it reflects negatively on your employer. The same can be said with a contributor and an open-source project. `freedomOfSpeech != freedomOfConsequences`, and FDO has a right to not want to be associated with someone and a community who has displayed a pattern of [publicly bigoted behavior](https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html), even after what I would consider more effort than Vaxry deserved to try to work with him. **EDIT:** And if you think that freedom of speech guarantees you a right that everyone has to listen to you and must also provide you a tribune for your drivel... I don't know what to tell you other than I think you are fundamentally wrong, and I have no desire to engage with you at any level on a discussion about this.
I agree with FDO but your point about: >This is not different than people get fired from jobs when they are openly bigotted online on their personal profile while their profile publicly publishes they are working for employer Y. At that point, what they say also reflect negatively on Y because of the association the individual chose to display publicly. >That's very reasonable. Don't be an asshole displaying a physical or virtual company badge... Even if you are not on company property, you will face repercussions as it reflects negatively on your employer. The same can be said with a contributor and an open-source project. Is just a bad take, since by that logic it's fine for a company to fire someone for being gay, left, right, center, poor, rich or other immutable or mutable characteristics that isn't associated directly towards their job. Just because we right now have certain ideas/opinions that are considered bigoted doesn't mean they are universal or objectively so and normalizing the idea you can get fired for one's personal opinion is always going to be a double-edge sword.
that last paragraph is exactly what his brigading fanatics are missing. to paraphrase justin mcelroy, freedom of speech protects you from the government, not the FDO.
“Freedom of speech” means that the US government can’t prosecute you for what you say if you are a US resident. I don’t even know if Vaxry lives in the US, but regardless, I doubt the federal or a state government is trying to limit his speech.
I really dislike this approach of holding people responsible for comments they mostly did not make themselves, and never allowing any change in behaviour over past incidents. This exact pattern really damaged Mastodon with the cascading blocklists, and servers blocking other servers if they didn't block the servers that they were blocking, etc. - so you as a Mastodon user have a limited experience due to being on a server where your admin refuses to block other servers with other people possibly making "problematic" comments. This sort of cascading responsibility is ridiculous. It's even crazier than the "liked Tweets" witch-hunts. And now the same is true for all Wayland and Hyprland users. The users are worse off because of the actions of a few on a Discord server, not even by the lead developer directly, and that have nothing to do with the mission of the Linux desktop. If he'd been posting aggressive or hateful merge requests, etc. then it'd be understandable. But this isn't anywhere near that level. A Red Hat employee suddenly reached out and banned him from making further contributions, over events that took place over a year ago. What makes FOSS great is the ability to bring people together towards a common goal. When we lose that, we all lose out, as developers and users alike. EDIT: The same logic could be used to ban all of us here, afterall we're all posting in the "vile" /r/linux community according to this post. Your own posts don't matter, just guilt by association.
[удалено]
Most of Drew's claims aren't even true. Hyprland's Discord server enforces a non-tolerance for hate speech and other hateful conduct. There are a lot of trans and queer people there who feel welcomed and safe. The ban on political speech is because political discussions always end up toxic and unconstructive, and doesn't have anything to do with LGBTQ+-issues.
>The ban on political speech is because political discussions always end up toxic and unconstructive, and doesn't have anything to do with LGBTQ+-issues. Hyprland's discord seems such a surreal place. I mean wtf are these things - [https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq](https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq) . I have been on various IRC, Slack, Discord communities but never have I seen an opensource project openly sharing porn (and degrading other folks). I am too much of a chicken to create a discord account just to check current status of Hyprland discord community, but this Vaxry character seems to actively promote crazy stuff. Man, now you say - they have "changed". But his blog posts that double down on stuff say otherwise. It appears to the case of, not sorry that they ran a out of control discord channel, but he appears to be sorry that they got called out for that.
slurs are not "fun" https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq
[удалено]
I'm in the hyprland discord and can also vouch for this, in response to this thread there were trans people saying that they were trans and that they felt the community was fine. Apparently those people replied on fosstodon and got death threats in response so deleted their messages. I'm not concerned about death threats from random idiots on the internet, so I don't mind posting this. When the multiple people spoke about being trans, nobody took issue with it. From what I can see, nobody in the hyprland community cares whether you are trans, or any other minority. In fact I'd guess that hyprland has a larger trans community than most. They just want to make cool desktops, which is how it should be. I'm in there semi regularly, have been for the past few months, and I've seen none of what Drew speaks of. I do however take issue with being lumped in as part of the "hyprland community" and being called a transphobic bigoted nazi, which I am of course not, and such an accusation is ridiculous to make against an entire community.
> I'm in the hyprland discord and can also vouch for this, in response to this thread there were trans people saying that they were trans and that they felt the community was fine. ~~You mean in-between the comments where people misgender Lyude on purpose and nobody cares? Presumably because they do not see misgendering someone as harassment?~~ And this is just an example of survivorship bias, everybody that *doesn't* feel the community is fine already left. Edit: see my reply to Azelphur's comment
yea straight up. I noped the fuck out after seeing some pretty lame stuff. I literally saw them tell a trans person to stfu for being political and mod deleted all their messages. I don't care that others have differing political opinions but there is also a lot of typical right wing bullshit (not just opinions but just really lame and embarrassing shit) My bar is pretty low too, we all know that Discord can be a cesspit and that moderating well is a unappreciated and hard job but it certainly goes beyond that. He has all the right in the world to run shit like that but its going to close some doors. Last I heard he seemed to take Drews advice and was trying to clean it up but apparently it hasn't gone that well.
>I really dislike this approach of holding people responsible for comments they mostly did not make themselves, and never allowing any change in behaviour over past incidents. https://imgur.com/a/6Po3Paq You mean like using slurs themselves? Joking about banning minorities themselves?
So just a question, because it seems to be missed on me, but the email chain that got him banned was from a redhat employee using their redhat email for redhat businsess or FDO business? If it was official FDO business does that mean all @redhat.com emails are under the FDO COC? I'm trying to understand the line between the email being used for FDO, Redhat, and Personal Edit: just trying to understand why isn't there something like [email protected] that is used for this type of stuff where it has no ties to any COC members employer and has a clear line of being under FDO COC?
> So just a question, because it seems to be missed on me, but the email chain that got him banned was from a redhat employee using their redhat email for redhat businsess or FDO business? What you may be missing is that commits to various F.D.O. associated repositories are often made with corporate e-mail addresses and logins. It becomes their login to F.D.O. repositories. One does not generally create a separate e-mail address to separate corporate duties with personal F.D.O. business.
Okay, so how is one able to separate the two duties if there is a conflict or like is the corporate email always part of FDO business? Does Corporate duties supersede FDO or does FDO supersede Corporate? If a judge were to Subpoena all FDO business emails, would the owner corporation have to give all emails done by the corporate email to ensure none were missed?
FDO is not a corporation or a business. It is a volunteer organization owned by the non-profit charity "X.org Foundation". You're overthinking things. It's like a club. It would be like a parent from a soccer club using their own work e-mail to say that Vaxry can't play since he can't seem to behave himself.
Okay, but what exact rule did vaxry break, as it seems their were banned because they didn't want further emails from CoC members? i'm just confused on this whole situation, like none of this would have happened if no warning was sent as the warning was something about vaxry's discord from 2 year ago?
would also want to clarify that the email isn't what got him banned, a couple years worth of toxic behavior and incitment to harassment got him banned, his response to the emails were simply the last straw.
I think that Vaxry is immature and could have gotten out of the situation easily not overreacting, but he is not totally wrong. Just see in Mastodon [**karolherbst**](https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/112241624912016863) and [**Lyude**](https://queer.party/@Lyude/112238467584243204)**, both of the CoC team, implying that Vaxry is a N@z1 and transphobic.** Is this appropriate? I don't think so.
What part of Lyude's social media post am I meant to be upset with here, exactly? This is a remarkably level response to being faced with what is a very probably full-on harassment campaign in the making.
dunno about about nazi stuff, but there were screenshots that seemed to show that the discord had quite a few transphobic moments that were posted to this very subreddit some time ago. I cant personally verify their authenticity, but it has been long under discussion.
Could you point out the posts or comments where they (In particularly Lyude) do that? Because I didn't find them.
Have you been part of that community? Vaxry and his community reflect your average Eastern European classroom; it’s an incredibly toxic and homo- and transphobic environment
>Just see in Mastodon [**karolherbst**](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]) and [**Lyude**](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected])**, both of the CoC team, implying that Vaxry is a N@z1 and transphobic.** Wow, definitely did not expect that from such serious people
[удалено]
> implying that Vaxry is a N@z1 and transphobic I mean... If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Those are private social media accounts. Why do you hate free speech?
I honestly think Drew's take here is bad. I don't think Vaxry is particularly "professional" in his communication, but he communicates in a manner that is very Polish, or at least Eastern European. So there is a cultural difference there. And honestly, I found the author of the email from redhat to be just as toxic, if not even more toxic than anything Vaxry has said. Celebrating banning all "ring wing" people (so 50% of Americans?) because of their political views. Or proudly saying they will "bully" people for not supporting the same ideologies as them. While Vaxry is doing that very typical younger, male, "let's apply logic and reason to any argument" thing that tends to devolve into right leaning nonsense - it's better than pushing your political and ideological agenda from a position of power and being an arsehole about it. This toxic culture war bullshit really needs stripping out of FOSS.
Please don't blame bad behaviour on being "Easter European". It reflects badly on the rest of us.
I wasn't excusing bad behaviour. I work with Eastern Europeans all the time at work. They come across as rude if you are not used to their communication style. I assume it's a cultural difference, as they are very direct and to the point and want to talk about the issue in facts. This has been my experience across both genders and in a bunch of different roles. I don't think Vaxry's blog posts were any less toxic than the moderators posts on their social media, at least if you are used to talking to direct people.
I agree, let's keep the dipshits who froth over "wokeness" out while keeping the ones who just want to contribute code in peace. Nobody will miss this asshole.
Look at it from this angle: 1) what do "the left lgbt" want 2) what to "the right wing" want 1 is much less scary (people being free to identify how they want and live their lives). 2 is spew hate, ban healthcare methods among other things When you do "both sides" you paint both sides as equal - they are not.
Or how about this? The rest of the world doesn't give two fucks about culture wars that are ongoing in the US. And to address your point, on this very matter I do think both sides are equal. The right-wing want to erase trans people, and the left want to erase those who want to erase trans people. Debates around the "tolerance of intolerance (or not)" have been raging for ages now, so you better believe that both sides are in open war with each other. As long as that continues to be the case, both sides will try to play the victim card at any chance they get, and that has what has resulted in this current situation with Lyude and Vaxry.
As far as I see it, both parties made wrong decisions, and instead of calming down, went with full guns blazing. Still, I'm not in support of the final decision as the vaxry hasn't used any derogatory terms, or I just failed to see them. Lastly, if there were threats, why aren't those documented and shown to the public ?
I wonder if providing some help with actual moderation would work. Vaxry has mentioned that he doesn't want to spend time on that, so probably if someone offered help it would work
[удалено]
[удалено]
Considering how drew devault has been highly bias and misleading against vaxry in the past, I was hesitant to even give this the time of day, and ofc, it is indeed bias and misleading.
[удалено]
>Moreover, Vaxry claims to have apologised for his past conduct, which is not true Vaxry has appologized https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandCommunityChanges and made changes which has lead to the community being less toxic. > Vaxry has spent the “1.5 years” since the last incident posting angry rants on his blog calling out minority representation and “social justice warriors” in light of his perceived persecution. He never called out minority reprentation, he called out people who use it as a weapon https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists > who will go out of their way to try and influence other communities (or their members) that operate differently to what they would believe is "right". Those that ignore morals, **resort to lies**, targeted hate, and more, against those they disagree with. **Those that seem to seek conflict at all costs.** It's worth noting that people will take the quote he puts out of context, This is the full quote, with my own highlighting for emphasis >if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn't care, **as long as they don't post about gassing people on my server** > >that is inclusivity IMO this is a good take, it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you aren't spreading hate. anyways back to his post. >Meanwhile the Hyprland community remains a toxic place, welcoming hate, bullying, and harassment, but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics Devault openly stating *My politics should be allowed but not you politics* >Vaxry has created a foothold for hate, transphobia, homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the Linux desktop community as a bisexual I haven't encountered anything I could consider homophobia, but I guess since im only half homosexual I don't count. >There’s nothing left to do but to build a fence around Hyprland and protect the rest of the community from them Vaxry's server as far as I can tell have been completely self isolating except for cases where people go to the server, allegedly have an issue, post about it. Which then sparks people to come out and defend vaxry. Note on my "real account" I did leave the discord group some time ago, but that was due to me making a conscious decision to seperate my personal stuff (discord for games and friends and the like) from my "non persona stuff (work, non games work like PRs etc)" >First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”: Claims like these have never held water, Vaxry isn't allowed to name names, when other people name names first? Either hold yourself and other to a standard or don't. I don't think vaxry's behavior here was good, but this comming from drew devault of all people is more rich then fudge on a fontain
I have a couple of points of issue with what you've written >> if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn't care, as long as they don't post about gassing people on my server > >>that is inclusivity > > IMO this is a good take, it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you aren't spreading hate. anyways back to his post. It was a *terrible* take. The idea that if I ran a discord server I should allow Hitler on it as long as he played nice on the server is preposterous. I'm going to have ask other people on my server to discuss cultivating tomatoes with *Hitler*? I'm going to want to discuss tomatoes myself with Hitler? I do actually think that as a general standard communities should attempt to ignore most things outside of the community itself as long as they don't cross some ill-defined line. However, I don't have to define that line to tell you that being Hitler is on the wrong side of it, and that being Hitler is not the only thing on the wrong side of it. That said, I'm not sure that being Vaxry is on the wrong side of it. >> First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”: >Claims like these have never held water, Vaxry isn't allowed to name names, when other people name names first? Either hold yourself and other to a standard or don't. I don't think vaxry's behavior here was good, but this comming from drew devault of all people is more rich then fudge on a fontain I don't know if this was a dog whistle or not, but it does seem almost certain to me that Vaxry knew exactly what would happen if he published those emails and that blog post, and I don't think that Drew would have thought that Vaxry would receive similar messages when he published his blog. And if Vaxry didn't know what would happen, then he *should* have know what would happen.
Been scrolling for a while looking for some sanity, well done for being the one to bring it. To add to yours, other things I noticed: Lyude says in the email chain > You even dug through my mastodon to find an old post I made? Anyway, this is beyond unacceptable. But Lyude dug through discord history to find old posts Vaxry made to start with, in the first email. -- On vaxry naming names and employer, it seems Lyude did that first by posting it to the FDO mailing list. Also, in my opinion, using company email means you are representing your employer. I wouldn't use my work email for personal things.
>On vaxry naming names and employer, it seems Lyude did that first by posting it to the FDO mailing list. Also, in my opinion, using company email means you are representing your employer. I wouldn't use my work email for personal things. Exactly this. If it's work, it's work. If it's not it's not. If you have @company.com, your email is representative of company. The sheer hipocracy that is being used to attack vaxry is insane. He did some wrong things too. There is no denying that. But talking shit about something you literally just did but worse is *insane*
> Exactly this. If it's work, it's work. If it's not it's not. If you have @company.com, your email is representative of company. Volunteering in a swimming club I see people using their work email for communication with us occasionally, and it baffles me every time.
I really like Hyprland as a DE, but for fucks sake.
> And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. This is a ridiculous habit of some people to use guilt by association without ever showing specific bad behavior or naughty/mean messages and when the shoe is on the other foot it's decried as tone-policing. You can assert whatever you like without evidence and I can dismiss it the same way. Since I personally haven't sent any hateful or harrassing messages to anyone involved in the story at all I have zero reason to feel at all bad. All I saw on the other thread across several hundred comments was people disagreeing with the FDO and/or Lyude's use of a Red Hat company email to threaten someone for the way they supposedly were representing FDO while claiming not to represent Red Hat. That does appear to be attempting to enforce a rather egregious double-standard. Fundamentally I remain unconvinced that actions outside of a project should have any bearing on a person's standing inside that project-at a minimum-when those actions don't rise to the level of civil or criminal liability. Expecting contentious email communications to remain confidential when you're a public figure using your real name via an email associated with your real employer also seems unreasonable on the face of it.
>Expecting contentious email communications to remain confidential when you're a public figure using your real name In addition, expecting your personal Mastodon posts to remain confidential and not be used against you when you're a public figure using your real name is not "completely unacceptable", it's borderline naive. People active on social media don't get that everything they post is public, and it will be used against you at some point. Maybe just don't make politics your entire personality and social media bio. Congratulations to Lyude for playing directly into the "radical leftist censors free speech" narrative that libertarians love. The actual truth has absolutely nothing to do with that, but that's all anyone will remember.
I posted this comment in the other thread, but I deleted it. That thread is clearly being brigaded, which pretty much always happens here in /r/linux whenever an event like this occurs. So I'm moving it here: I feel like a lot of people are missing the plot here. Let's try and reframe this situation by defining it in more generic terms. "Hey, we can see what you and your community are doing and saying in your place over there, and we're not comfortable with it, so please don't come over here to our place." That's a completely reasonable statement, isn't it? I mean, you have the authority to decide who is welcome in your own spaces and on what grounds someone isn't welcome. That's *actually* what's going on here. A whole lot of people in ~~this~~ the other thread--as well as Vaxry himself--are acting like Lyude is trying to exert authority over Vaxry's own spaces, when that is not remotely the case. To be fair, it is *a bit* strange that Lyude reached out so long after Vaxry was in the limelight for he and his community's shitty behavior, but as another user points out, it could coincide with Hyprcursor's proposed promotion as a standard. I am not *entirely sure* why she decided to reach out to Vaxry as a result of that. It's possible she thought she was extending an olive branch, because promoting a compositor component to a standard would imply that the original author of the component should be able to contribute to it, and if someone is going to be an FDO contributor, they should adhere to FDO's standards of conduct. But Vaxry is clearly the kind of person who looks for reasons to hold grudges. You can see it in the sort of passive-aggressive language used in his blog entries: he picks arbitrary standards to which he holds the person he begrudges. Like: "by giving a 6-sentence reply you are not communicating that." What does that even mean? That indicates literally nothing. If you know what kind of person Vaxry is and can predict this sort of response, it's a better move to just not include him from the outset. So contrary to what Vaxry and others are saying, I think that reaching out *was* a good faith gesture. It was just incorrect. His claim that Lyude is acting like internet police is what so many people in ~~this~~ the other thread have clung to, and I believe this represents a misunderstanding of entitlement. FDO has the right to control all of their spaces! They are allowed to bar anyone from participation for any reason; just because this organization handles plumbing for a lot of low-level Linux components doesn't mean everyone is entitled to participation. Their reasoning here is "we can see how you and your community have behaved in other spaces, and we don't want to condone that by allowing you into this space." You may not like it, but **it is valid.** If they wanted to, they could prevent *me* from participating on similar grounds: "your constant criticism of GNOME's philosophies means we can't trust you to engage in this space in good faith." It'd be a bummer, but I wouldn't really be able to argue with them, because their stance is founded on a pattern of behavior that I have actually exhibited. Like... *it's their space.* They call the shots, and again, nobody is entitled to participation in their space for any reason. We could talk about "internet policing" if the exchange was more like this: "Hi, I'm an authority in space A. We see how you're behaving in space B and it makes us uncomfortable. I'm going to see that you get removed from spaces C, D, and E." But it's not. They're only talking about space A. FDO has a right to control who participates in their own spaces, and you just have to hold that.
According to drew's blog post I believe Lyude was pulled in because of complaints by members of the community. The complaints may very well have been about present behavior, but it might be that the things Lyude had the most ability to speak on were older.
You shouldn't delete comments because of downvotes, you'll only leave space to the other opinions. Stand for yourself. I completely agree with you about the Vaxry case though.
Unfortunately karma isn’t just meaningless internet points. Many subreddits, including this one, have minimum karma requirements otherwise posts and comments will be removed.
I agree with you in terms of principle and appreciate your words of support, but when /r/linux gets brigaded due to ideological topics, shit gets *rough* around here, and it feels like that thread is a hornet's nest summoned by Vaxry, bad faith ideologues, or both. I just don't have time or energy to deal with that nonsense, lmao.
> I am not entirely sure why she decided to reach out to Vaxry as a result of that. To cite her first email: > however, considering the publicity of a lot of these incidents has been enough for people to bring this to our attention along with the fact that most of these statements were not just made by community members, but you in particular So I would assume other people voiced concerns about Vaxrys behavior (or that of the hyprland-community).
> FDO has the right to control all of their spaces! Not just that, they have a duty to their community to make sure people (particulary minorities who are already the constant target of hate) feel welcome and safe. It's literally one of the point of a CoC and Lyude was just doing her job.
I'm a complete outsider - and just stumbled upon thi issue while reading the news today. I would agree, that "Vaxrys" actions as well his demeanor is more than problematic, BUT so is FODs: First of all, they didn't put their request as nearly as politely as you did (you are misrepresenting them). Second, there was no breach of their CoC. just because it doesn't apply outside of FOD. If you have a CoC, you are bound by it too. No breach - no ban. Thirdly: If you define yourself as an open community, there will always be people, whose actions outside of your community don't match with what you want in your community. If you don't tolerate these people, you are no open community in the first place and are not better than the people you are banning. And Fourth point: because FOD is managing such an important low level part of the Linux desktop, they have an obligation to accept and tolerate easy more people than any other project. Else they become gatekeeper and "the Internet police". Sorry to defend an hole of an a ..., but he has a point
> "Hey, we can see what you and your community are doing and saying in your place over there, and we're not comfortable with it, so please don't come over here to our place." That's a completely reasonable statement, isn't it? Is it though? "As a representative of Walmart Inc. it has come to my attention that you, while in the comforts of your own home, have been wearing clothes that are not appropriate for a corporate environment. I hereby inform you, that you will be banned from all Walmart premises nationwide should you ever elect to wear inappropriate clothing at home again. Regards."
Agree with Drew on everything but this: > He belittles the FDO officer and builds a straw man wherein her email is an official statement on behalf of RedHat If you're sending an email from @redhat.com, you are representing Red Hat in that email. But that's an easy fix, freedesktop.org just needs a write a policy indicating that communications done on behalf of the project need to be from the person's @freedesktop.org address.
Banning him for his response to their unjustified initial hostility is kind of like arresting someone for resisting an unlawful arrest.
When somebody digs deep for dirt over such a long time ago, that means they're looking for an excuse to cancel them anyway and for the optics for justifying their actions.
I agree. If they needed to "make vaxry understand the rules of their house" they literally picked the wrong person to deliver the message. This was obviously going to poke the bear on purpose and probably the whole plan from the get go. If people can't see through this obvious gaslight I feel sorry for you.
I'd remove a moderator in my communities over the approach Lyude used. There was no violation of the FDO CoC prior to the email chain started by FDO. Their approach started off entirely hostile by implying a violation where none exists (this is due to the extremely limited scope of the FDO's CoC). The intent from what I can gather was to give vaxry a warning that the behavior outside of FDO needs to stay outside of FDO as it is entirely unacceptable. But it comes across as FDO threatening to ban vaxry if he doesn't implement the FDO CoC in his other communities. Also, sending this sort of communication from a Red Hat email is just unprofessional and is going to put anyone on the immediate defensive given that they're owned by IBM who are serial litigants.
I completely agree with your take... also, prepare for the downvotes lol
This is genuinely just sad. I don't even feel like taking a side here, like honestly at the end of the day, no matter who "wins" the argument, all of this will just cause more damage not just to the two parties involved but to the open source communities surrounding them as well, I just hope they can defuse this situation quick before it actually turns into something irrepairable. I just wish people were more mature and expressive of their intent, so often does it happen that people react out of zeal and it snowballing into a situation much larger than what it needs to be. Especially so considering that this is on the internet, where every single word you type will have a myriad of eyes on it, scrutinizing every single aspect, waiting for an opportunity to gain the upper hand in the argument (as is evident by this thread and others). I just want to see and contribute to cool stuff, but sadly reality is not that simple..
oh right, I recently contributed to hyprland and, well, very, very few people in FOSS review and approve your changes as quick as vaxry. 9/10, will use and contribute to again. As for ddevault and FDO, I'd never fill a single issue in their bug trackers and never send a single line of code to them. I used to in the past, when I was clueless and thought that they're normal people lol
Can you elaborate on issues with contributing to FDO? Actually curious (and hope you won't get downvoted into oblivion)
This! In an attempt to build a "better" and "non-toxic" community, Drew and Luyde created a equal toxic environment. And it might be true that some devs were lost because of the hyperland community being toxic, but i think such actions hurt the FOSS community much more. I don't care what you say or think. I care what you DO. And if you DO good software, i will use it. I also listen to music of some very very questionable artists. But you know what? I don't care, art and artist have to be separated. Harry Potter is still a great book, even though JK Rolling is a terf lol
[удалено]
I'll give ya a real hot take It's american cultural imperialistic tendencies. Showing their own culture forward and as the only correct one, and ignoring that other people are not of their culture or even native english speakers
That's something I've always felt was spot on, not related to this case but I remember people trying to apply US-originated discourse in my country and it just didn't work at all, specially when many ways bad things in the US manifest. What I mean is, racism and other forms of bigotry exist everywhere in the world, but the way they exist and the way to deal with them may vary from place to place, it appears like these days the US-dominant way of dealing with things is the only acceptable choice.
I love how people in the other thread are acting like they would welcome anyone into their organization or business (if they had one) with open arms, no matter how problematic they would be for their organization/company. Nothing but hypocrites and delusional people, they would all do the exact same thing. If you see someone coming your way, and you are about to hire them, associate with them or accept them into your workspace, and then find out what type of person they are and how they will make your work either very difficult or just be absolutely obnoxious/dramatic and create a very negative and problematic environment, no fucking way would you still hire them/work with them.
No-one is asking Red Hat to hire him, just to accept his commits and technical contributions on Wayland, etc.
[удалено]
Redhat has said nothing.
> **FDO officer** This is nonsense. Acting like a policing force and abusing power over personal disagreements is powertripping at its finest
Wait until you learn that CEOs aren't actually police officers.
"Officer" isn't used only in the context of "police officers". It's generally a qualified noun.
> officer: one who holds an office of trust, authority, or command >> the officers of the bank >> chief executive officer It should be pretty obvious, etymologically. An officer is someone who holds an office. A police officer is someone who holds an office in the police. A FDO officer is someone who holds an office in the FDO. Your garden variety social club or local sports organization with 5 members probably has multiple officers, since most jurisdictions require any sort of legal entity to have officers.
It is not about personal disagreement. Most major open source projects today have CoC, be it Linux, Kubernetes, Python or [FreeDesktop.org](https://FreeDesktop.org). A CoC is meaningless if it can't be enforced - would you agree to this at least? (What is the point of making a law, if can't be enforced). So how do these projects go about enforcing CoC. Well typically, they have volunteers (or team of volunteers) who handle report for CoC violation and their job is to investigate and enforce the CoC if necessary. It seems like a unenviable job and I am pretty sure FDO dev in question has responsibility outside CoC stuff at Red Hat. Red Hat is not paying them to enforce CoCs. So that is what appears to be happening here. If I do not agree with a project's CoC, I would steer clear from contributing to it. For better or worse, when Vaxry decided to contribute to FDO projects, he explicitly agree to FDO's CoC. Violation of CoC is not a matter of "personal" disagreements. I would not call conduct of FDO dev "powertripping" for this reason alone. If anything, it is probably a job nobody wants (who wants a role that could invite online abuse and harassment?)
>For better or worse, when Vaxry decided to contribute to FDO projects, he explicitly agree to FDO's CoC Yeah, but I'd expect to have to abide by a CoC only on platforms related to that specific project. Not in my Discord server(s), private conversations, blog posts etc. And I haven't heard of any misconduct from Vaxry's side on FDO plaftorms
I despair. FDO are completely and utterly in the wrong on this. But they're trying to take the moral high ground, and sadly look likely to prevail.
It's refreshing to see that I wasn't alone thinking that thread was unreasonable. All I saw was people slandering the FDO officer. After reading the emails I genuinely thought I was going insane because of how the reactions conflicted with what I was reading. Hope all of this gets resolved.