It’s sad when all we have to offer to sexually frustrated people is hate and social exclusion. I’ve started to wonder if the bad reputation of Open Source communities is more related to their unsympathetic behavior than to their photos.
If we’d do power management like that…
July 15th, 2008 | General
11 comments ↓
“unsympathic behavior”, I think that’s exactly the point, I can’t say how ignorant all that ranting that currently takes place more than usual is.
KDE people rant on Gnome, Gnomers even more rant on KDE (just my feeling while reading both planets). Haters of (Linux amongst them) encourages people on even rant more with less arguments and increasing ignorance. People tend to hate each and everything they don’t wave their flags to.
I’d love to see all those people calm down and get reasonable again. planet.gnome seems to need a bit more quality management/moderation (like dot and planet kde already started), please people, blog about the progress you make with your beloved project, blog about cool new features or bugs you hunted down and be quiet on other topics.
I’m not a Gnome dev, but I enjoy reading this planet, footnotes and most of the important mailinglists, but I don’t want to hear “this sucks, that sucks” all the time.
Wouldn’t you say that nicu is being unsympathetic to women or at least insensitive? Wouldn’t that partially account for why we are not proportionately representative of all sexes? I think pointing out behaviour we think is harmful is a perfectly legitimate activity. It breeds awareness more than censoring would. Others can make their own judgement on the appropriateness of the post.
J5, nicu definitely is unsympathetic, no questions asked, and it’s good that people talk to him about it.
That is not the thing I want to argue however. What I miss is people trying to understand why he did it and how to best convince him to not behave like that in the future. Instead they just say “it’s bad, stop it” in the better cases and “you’re a disgrace to humanity” in the worse cases.
I thought it’s a poor state because this behavior was coming from more respected people of our community and especially because it showed a better-than-you-but-don’t-tell-you-why attitude.
It’s not like if engineer type of people really had normal feelings and social abilities…
I debated whether or not to respond to this, and–especially given some of the remarks I made at GUADEC last week–I think there are some things worth saying.
First, I’m not really certain that aiding the sexually frustrated is necessarily in the charter of this community.
Second, I have a real concern about inclusiveness in our broader community, particularly in terms of making it welcoming to women, who are hugely under-represented. The sort of thing that Nicu is doing is precisely the sort of thing that would discourage women from greater involvement, and turning a blind eye to it, or worse, somehow being supportive of it would be even worse.
J5 posted a pointer to an excellent piece of commentary from Paul Frields on this.
In a situation like this, censure is an entirely appropriate response. The kindest terms I can come up with for clandestine attempts to photographs the underwear of random female passersby are “childish” and “inappropriate”. It was wrong, and there’s nothing wrong with saying it was wrong. Trying to minimize it it equally wrong.
Lefty, you are the perfect example for the problem I talked about. You didn’t even get my blog post.
And it doesn’t help your case that you talk about excluding certain people in one sentence and inclusiveness in the next.
Lefty got your point perfectly well; sometimes you need to set clear boundaries, and this is one of those times. How nice a person you are is irrelevant if you behave inappropriately. Welcome to Real Life.
snerd:
Who are you to decide whether or not Lefty got the point? Who are you to decide what is and what isn’t “one of those times”? Who are you to decide what is and isn’t appropriate in Real Life? Do you possess a GNOME Foundation license reading “I represent the silent majority”?
I sincerely doubt that Lefty got the point when he talks about being inclusive to women offended by photos of unidentifiable human legs in one sentence and exclusive to men who aren’t in the other.
Obviously, the point Otte was making was not whether which segment is more godly or better coders or more worthy of our ‘aid’ than the other. Obviously, the point, which is a fine one, was how poor a community must be that can not contain and work with both parties of a dispute – that in the case of conflict, all we have to offer is alienation and favoring sides as opposed to the establishment of working and mutually accepted norms of behavior.
Even more disturbing is it that prominent contributors like Lefty advocate the former rather than the latter. We can only pray that our software is not produced by the same methods – hence the title of the blog post, I assume.
Sigh. I got the point, Anders: Otte feels that we’re being insufficiently “inclusive” of Nicu. The “point”, however, is sadly mistaken.
I’m not judging Nicu as a person–I don’t know him from a hole in the ground. I am on the other hand, judging his actions, which I find deplorable. I’m not attempting to either demonize or exclude him. I’m simply saying that taking that picture was wrong (but that’s his own worry) and, more importantly, that the wide syndication of the picture speaks very badly of our community (and that’s a worry we should all have). The attempts to minimize or explain this all away speak equally badly of us.
There’s no “working with both parties” of this dispute, Anders: one of the parties is an anonymous young woman, whose picture is now grist for gawkers, thanks to Nicu’s willingness to target her as “a pair of legs in a short skirt”. There’s nothing to “work with” here. Nor is there a fair comparison between this situation and the methods by which we produce software, that’s simply a strawman. We produce software based on technical decisions (hopefully); this is a discussion of ethics.
My point is not even so much about Nicu (although I think his actions here are reprehensible–my daughter wears short skirts from time to time, and if I caught some low-life trying to take an “upskirt” photo of her, said low-life would end up ingesting his own cell phone).
My point, again, is that both Nicu’s actions, and even more, the tolerance extended toward those actions by many folks in this discussion, speak very badly of our larger community, and especially so in terms of the issue of our community’s willingness to be inclusive, particularly toward women.
It seems people have missed that in their rush to defend or minimize Nicu’s little bit of interpersonal blindness here. “Inclusiveness”, “acceptance” and “toleration” don’t mean putting up with egregiously bad behavior. I wouldn’t accept that sort of thing from a friend, I’d express my feelings about the wrongness of it. Why would I not do the same in this case?
My grandfather, having grown up in a rather different era than any of us, was quite a racist, although otherwise a perfectly nice guy. It’s not a contradiction for me to have loved my grandfather on the one hand while despising his racism on the other. That’s the point Otte and others seem to have missed.
What would your reaction be if, instead of that photo, Nicu were posting racist jokes? How about if he’d been a little “luckier”, and had actually gotten the flash of panties he was clearly hoping for? Should those things be treated “sympathetically”?
Where, as a community, do we draw the line?
Lefty:
This is not aimed at you specifically, but it’s really the same arguments, from both sides, being reiterated over and over. Show me one piece of objective evidence that exclusion of Nicu, on whatever level, is better for the community and I’ll happily stay quite. Since you can’t do this, and I can’t do the opposite either, we can now continue reiterating the same arguments over and over again.
Don’t pretend that your side of the dispute represents the “anonymous young woman”. You don’t know her and you have just as little right to speak for her as Nicu or anyone else has. The complaint about this post came from named individuals within the community. Whether the woman herself is on the side of those individuals or not is anybody’s guess and hence irrelevant. Besides, I like to think that the norms of our community is set by its members and not by some unknown woman in Bucharest.
As for software, you know as well as I do that software is created by people and not technical procedures. The development process can (must) be technically informed, but design decisions will always be politically motivated. If you have a piece of code which is fast and another, functionally equivalent, piece of code which is small, no algorithm (not one not taking human input at least) will tell you which piece of code is “the right one”.
You are not shy to label Nicu’s actions “egregiously bad behavior” and base most of your argument on that premise. Others, like myself, are more hesitant with labels like that. His actions does not appear so “egregious” to me – “silly” or “childish” and a little “lame” maybe, but “egregious” … no, not really. Hence there is nothing wrong or suspect about the “tolerance” you have perceived for these actions.
Where, as a community, do we draw the line? Short answer: we don’t. Each individual member of the community takes a personal stance on a case-by-case basis, speaking only on their own behalf. Not on behalf of a demographic they perceive as needing special protection (note how you yourself liken the woman you don’t even know to your own daughter) and certainly not on behalf of the community as a whole.
If you wanted to help sexually frustrated guys, you’d tell them that isn’t how you pick up chicks. Duh.