this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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[–] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 3 points 7 months ago

I feel like we should separate this problem into two problems.

First is Vaxry's behavior. It's by no means ideal, but whether it's really that terrible might not be as clear as it seems. This comment by @drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com provides some very interesting points worth reading IMO.

The second problem, that I think is more important, is that whether people should be banned from contributing to FOSS projects because of their behavior outside of it (AFAIK Hyprland community's behavior didn't directly affect FDO's GitLab, please correct me if I'm wrong). Vaxry don't gain anything from contributing to Wlroots (except it helps his Hyprland, from which he also don't gain anything), and his contributions help the whole community. I don't see a reason to deny him helping the whole wayland community, regardless if he is a bad person or not.

My key argument for this is that I don't think FOSS would be in a state it currently is if every project did this. People have various opinions, often very wrong, but in my opinion that's not a reason to not collaborate with them on FOSS software - the code is public and if it's good, it's good. Why does the author matter? As an example, lead dev of Lemmy is an genocide-denying tankie. I more than disagree with his political view and I think it's comparable to nazism in how bad it is. However, I don't see it as a problem if I ever learn rust and contribute to Lemmy codebase, or in filling issues and other ways of collaboration. And I don't see a reason to not use Lemmy because of that.

I know that FDO has right to ban him, but from reading the e-mails, it really seems like the person enforcing the CoC has a personal problem with Vaxry and wanted to use her position to ban him. That's just my feeling though. And of course if FDO reverted her verdict, they would be accused of everything Vaxry was (maybe rightfully) accused of.

I was really thinking about it today and yesterday, and this was what I came up to. I'm definitely open to discussion, but please, keep it civil. Also sorry for my terrible english, I'm working on improving it.