Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Mailing list moderation and community openness

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de> wrote:
> Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 3:34 AM, Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> It is about openness vs. isolation.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure most developers, myself included, want to welcome
>> contributions.
>
> Closing of the mailing list does not sound like that.
>

Sure, but it is actually part of the motivation.

Consider this scenario.

Fred is a community member.  Fred consistently harasses and trolls new
contributors in private.  New contributors end up leaving because of
Fred.

Fred gets booted out as a result.  No mention is made of why Fred as
booted out, because everything happened in private.

Now a bunch of community members get upset about Fred being booted out
without reason.  Fred claims it is because he disagrees with the
leadership on something.  People start arguing endlessly about
openness.

Ultimately the leaders just want Fred gone so that new contributors
aren't getting driven away.  They can't explain that because then they
create potential civil liability for the project.  The problem is that
the debate goes on for over a year despite intervening elections and
now this becomes the issue that is driving new contributors away.

What solution would you propose for this problem?  It isn't
hypothetical at all - I can think of one case in Gentoo's past where
this happened that I'm aware of, and I'd be shocked if it were the
only one.

> And anyway, you can be sure that the problem will appear again,
> no matter how closed the list will be.

Sure, but we can at least force the negative advertising of Gentoo to
go elsewhere, rather than basically paying to run a negative PR
campaign against ourselves.

>> A lot of this comes down to considering that most people in these
>> debates probably are well-intended.
>
> Taking away freedom is never justified by good intention.

You might want to choose a BSD-based distro then.  :)

And what about the freedom to endlessly troll and harass you and
others?  Is this truly a freedom we want to stand for?  How about the
freedom to harass members of legally-protected classes (something that
also has happened historically in the community)?

Surely Gentoo's mission isn't to run completely unrestricated forums
for discussion of anything and everything.  Our main purpose here is
to maintain a Linux distro, not provide a platform for anybody who has
an opinion on anything.  Free expression has to be balanced against
the interests of people who want to actually contribute to the distro
without being endlessly trolled and harassed.

-- 
Rich