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I second @Ben___Garrison that Im interested, but I need some more explanation to figure out what's going on. Is Free Desktop important? What's hyprland? Is Vaxry important?
Otherwise it kind of just seems like standard tech nerd/trans culture war drama. You, or someone affiliated with you, made a a slight joke somewhere (anywhere) making fun of the sacred trans pronouns? You WILL apologize, or they will cast you out! No mercy, no compromise, no negotiation. Vaxry in his blog post makes an analogy "what if the religious right did this to censor the left?" That misses the point because the religious right has zero power in the world of software development, and I cant imagine it ever will. Whereas the trans activists have huge power and they are not shy to use it. Hopefully someday, enough tech nerds will learn this lessson and stand up to them.
FreeDesktop is the space (literally a GitLab instance, may heaven have mercy on their souls) where people build the tools that almost all Linux desktop environments run on, including X11 (the user interface drawing framework that underlies every conventional desktop from GNOME to KDE to Cinnamon to ChromeOS) and Wayland (which is what Linux is starting to move toward as a replacement). So it's about as relevant as Linux On The Desktop is, for better or worse.
Hyprland is technically 'just' the window compositor (lies-to-children version: stitches applications together into a function desktop 'screen'), but it's more generally used as a name for the desktop environment produced by mixing it and other pieces together, like GNOME or KDE would be. This is a quick video showing just how it looks, and this some of the different behaviors. Essentially, it's designed for rapid but space-optimized window control, whether by mouse or keyboard, and management of many virtual desktops easily.
Hyprdots is a more fully-featured mix of it and those other pieces.
It doesn't have a huge userbase, even by not-Chromebook Linux standards, but it's easily the most popular Wayland-specific desktop environment. The Discord has a 10k members, for what little that's worth, and most users probably only bother with the discord if something breaks and they can't fix it.
Vaxry is the founder and lead developer for hypr, along with having done some work for wl-roots, which is a library many projects use to simplify common Wayland requirements. He's not the only person working on hyprland, but the commit comparison looks like this, and the other hypr stuff is even more lopsided.
This ban won't prevent him from writing further hyprland work, but it will block him from writing any pull requests or even issues for Wayland or wl-roots, and the broader response will make hypr-like conventions or projects harder to adopt, even when correct.
Thanks. So, is it fair to say that while Hyprland looks really cool, and has a decent number of fans, it doesn't do anything essential and isn't a major part of the FreeDesktop ecosystem? It seems like Vaxry overestimated his power and is now completely shut out of his community with no recourse. Since it's free software, they can even go on using the tools he wrote without asking him for anything, or fork it and make their own version if they dont' want his name on it.
For the most part. I'm not sure whether Vaxry overestimated his 'power' -- from the e-mail chain, he pretty clearly saw the RedHat dev's starting e-mail as absolutely showing the FreeDesktop team was ready and willing to ban his ass, knew they could and would, and he seemed more concerned that FreeDesktop was going to try to take over as much of the Hypr space as possible. And while he worked on FreeDesktop's git, it wasn't his community, or really even a community given how much of a kludge any communication around the FreeDesktop-specific areas tended to be.
FreeDesktop could always fork Hypr, and Vaxry could (and since, has) forked wlroots, and FreeDesktop was already using a lot of his tools; that's what FOSS means, to a large extent.
The problem's more that this fractures an (admittedly small) portion of the FOSS community: even if we don't get the whole 'bad person touched this thing' reaction, there's definitely people on the "start looking at how they want to see their world curated" chain. A lot of things like 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' or 'working with the best ideas on the planet' start falling apart once you start banning people from your Issues and PR pages.
It wasn't just the rest of the posters. Vaxry himself comes off as overtly hostile to the idea of being empathetic.
Agreeing with posts like-
and saying things like:
Yes- I can parse this as (95% unironically) reasonable to an extremely sharp culture environment. Or I can parse it as fully ironic, but OBVIOUSLY its going to be a bad look when the freedesktop.org code of conduct includes "Using welcoming and inclusive language" and "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences."
There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone. You have to actually address individual needs, and if your ideals are explicitly contrary to going through the effort of addressing individual needs... You are inevitably going to find yourself in a bit of a catch-22. That's just the structure of the territory.
I didn't claim Vaxry is blameless or looks good, or even that his faults were merely insufficient empathy. From my first post:
But there's a bit of a problem.
As a nitpick, Popper's Paradox of Tolerance wasn't using 'tolerance' to mean 'things that progressives like today', but the simple possibility of open debate and discussion.
But more critically, few if any people who try to bring this more expansive non-Popperian version forward do so in any even-handed way. Vaxry's Discord isn't part of freedesktop.org. Vaxry is not accused of behaving poorly in FreeDesktop.org spaces, and I've not been able to find any evidence of such, whether because he's autistic enough to follow their rules in their spaces, or just from lack of opportunity.
You may say that there's a competing access need, but the modern-day variant turns into an insistence that the competition is over. If Vaxry and his cohort can't "express the 'nasty' things they believe to be true to think properly" in a Discord and github issue specific to their project, they can't be 'acerbic' anywhere -- and that's very clearly the target that the FreeDesktop.org held. In that view, the choice is between 'banning' people in the sense that they feel excluded and turned around because of things they found by digging at depth into it, and just directly actually-banning people. The first group will always be able to expand their ranks and justify greater interdiction.
And, to be blunt, the direct-bans get no small amount of people knowing that they'll be excluded by assholes, anyway. It's just that the banhammer-wielders are sort of asshole that the people in charge like.
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