Bonum Certa Men Certa

'Cancel Culture' in Debian Project

The 'free speech police' is seemingly everywhere now

The 'free speech police'



Summary: Nothing seems safe to say anymore, not even well outside the context of one's employment (Debian is banishing developers for rather shallow reasons or superficial reasoning)

I WAS rather saddened this morning when I read this latest post from a Debian community site (published quite late yesterday) and I wrote about it in relation to the Linux Foundation with its cryptic and selectively-applied (or arbitrarily if not discriminately-enforced) CoC. Corporate culture wherein people can be fired (dismissed) for no particular reason (also no legal recourse), sometimes for merely having particular views (or having expressed such views a very long time ago, even outside the context of a workplace and prior to employment) creeps even into "community" distros. Among the examples given by the Debian community site are criticisms of policies of the Israeli government (or the party currently in power), questioning of money from Google, breaking unjustified secrecy (conflict of interest exposed) and so on.



"Among the examples given by the Debian community site are criticisms of policies of the Israeli government (or the party currently in power), questioning of money from Google, breaking unjustified secrecy (conflict of interest exposed) and so on."Leaks served to show that even Bruce Perens was suggested for 'cancellation' (impeachment from Debian) when he was the DPL. This is the same Bruce Perens who openly complained about the "Open Source" founders maliciously scheming to 'cancel' Richard Stallman (a very long time ago). If we cannot have free speech in Free software, then Free software will cease being about freedom. Many developers are well aware of this, but corporate money seems to be poisoning communities profoundly.

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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock