Eric wrote a good post on the sad goings on at the Open Source Initiative. The article, and comments are, as usual, worth reading (even when I disagree with Eric, which is not so much, here).
The historian Robert Conquest once wrote: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
Today I learned that the Open Source Initiative has reached that point of bureaucratization. I – OSI’s co-founder and its president for its first six years – was kicked off their lists for being too rhetorically forceful in opposing certain recent attempts to subvert OSD clauses 5 and 6. This despite the fact that I had vocal support from multiple list members who thanked me for being willing to speak out.
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that there is an effort afoot to change – I would say corrupt – the fundamental premises of the open-source culture. Instead of meritocracy and “show me the code”, we are now urged to behave so that no-one will ever feel uncomfortable.
See also Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy when it's infiltrated by SJW's.
Other than pointing you in the direction of an excellent post, there's one other thing - a sterling example of LOLbertarianism that would have Brian Neimeier shaking his head in sorrow. Yes, for some it is better off we let breakers in than violate some liberty.
So, the following cropped up:
Paraphrased: To preserve freedom for all, we cannot ban socialists, communists, fascists, or other undesirable political groups for their political beliefs. Note my emphasis, we'll get back to that later.
I'll also be the first to point out how quickly most of the above said groups were willing to do so.
Someone mocks him for it in and in full smug LOLbertarian mode, the reply is given. he implictly acknowledges what I just said above about the propensity of said groups to punish for thoughtcrime, and he's happy to not be one. Note again that he's also just admitted that those aforementioned groups do not merely hold political beliefs, they act on them.
Even if you buy into the non-agression principle, there are actions a person can take that justify self-defense even if he hasn't fired a shot. This can include, among other things, brandishing a weapon while making explicit threats.
So I replied:
I could have made clearer that a number of these people no longer even preach "no litmus tests", but have made repeatedly and publicly clear that they have no live and let live attitude. But then the commenter had been around - leaving aside the context of this article and the petty, tyrannical behavior at play, this is far from the first post of Eric's to shine the spotlight on tyranical leftists in tech.
The point I made still stands - those who won't abide by the rules need to be kicked out. The reply I received (and a nice pushback to him):
Again, the conflation of blocking/banning people for hijacking an organization and killing it to wear it's skinsuit with "banning people for their political beliefs." - aka "stirring up trouble on twitter". The problem is that even if we didn't already have people within the project attempting to kill the very ethos that founded it, we're not talking about people who just have a set of political beliefs. We aren't talking about reading the minds of "commies" and thinking they're up to something. We are talking about people with a repeated history of subverting the organizations they have joined, and more to the point, people who have openly declared their intent to do so while taking actions in alignment with their declared goal.
It's particularly dishonest to argue like that when he's already admitted that people holding those opinions act on them in a manner directly antithetical to what he holds dear (though in this case I suspect the dishonesty is within himself, and that he believes what he says). Even if we weren't going to ban someone for, say, being a member of the communist party, on the grounds that he hasn't taken actions antithetical to liberty yet, we are talking about people have declared their intent and taken action in alignment with it. Just because someone who's firing on your friends hasn't pointed the gun at you yet and pulled the trigger doesn't mean you have to wait for the bullet to come your way before you take steps to defend what you hold dear.
As I've pointed out, reciprocity is a thing.
The worst reply though was this:
No. You mustn't. All you need is declared intent and steps taken to implement that intent. I don't need an organization poisoned just to prove how virtuous I am.
It's also a false binary, though the first is not a terrible option, and very close to the reason why people in that very community were happy that Linus T was a "benevolent tyrant" over the kernel. Anyone familiar with the patterns of strongmen and the tyranny of the minority know why the latter will never happen.
