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KWin Maintainer: Fanboys and Trolls Are the Cancer Killing Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community. Quoting: 'Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it's against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community. But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.'"
I read it. Pretty lame, and I've been using KDE for ten years (skipped 4, it sucked). There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing, just WAAH!! OMG, TROLLS AND FLAMERS!
I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article. If you get even the tiniest bit of recognition you're going to have that. From 1998 to 2002 I had a fairly popular Quake site that was popular enough that every mega site wanted to host me. Yeah, I got hate mail, but not much, and so fucking what anyway? 95% of the mail was YOU ROCK, DUDE!!
This guy needs to grow up and grow a pair. Haters don't hurt open source, and BTW, I HATE GNOME!
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