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Drupal Developers Threaten To Quit Drupal Unless Larry Garfield Is Reinstated (drupalconfessions.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot previously covered the story of Larry Garfield, a Drupal developer who was allegedly banned from the community for his BDSM/Gorean lifestyle, after he was outed by a colleague with a grudge. Now, dozens of core Drupal developers, committers, and funders have banded together in an open letter to Dries Buytaert, the CTO of Acquia, Drupal trademark owner, and Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) of the Drupal project. Among other things, they demand that Larry Garfield be reinstated, threatening to abandon the project if their demands are not met. Here's an excerpt from the letter: "If you will not fight for us and restore our faith in the professionalism of the Drupal community, then a number of us will be permanently leaving the Drupal community, ceasing all contributions to the official, Drupal-branded branch of the codebase, and ceasing participation in all Drupal communities. This is not our first choice, but we cannot and will not participate in a community that encourages abusers to totally destroy people's careers for personal or ideological reasons."
Open source project. Major schism in the developer base.
DEAD
The asshole who thought he was in charge killed it.
Politics, bedroom antics, sports, reading habits, religion - none of it should be a firing offence...
Thing is, literal Naziism is a political position too. That's people who literally want to kill me and people like me. If someone goes expressing those views publicly (if it's privately, I won't know), then you can bet your ass I won't be working with them. At what point is the business owner required to protect such a person when (say) half of his staff won't go near the guy, because the guy wants to kill them or at least clearly considers them subhuman.
I don't even know what proposition 8 is
It was a law to deny certain rights to gay people, you know, by force of law. He wasn't merely expressing opinions, he was donating money to a cause to actively harm them.
Now here's the thing, the people working at the organisation he was heading thought that was unacceptable behaviour. It's entirely their right, and in fact their duty[*] in some ways to say they won't work at an organisation headed by that guy. The organisation now has a choice: keep the head or keep many of its workers.
but whatever politics someone has it shouldn't matter in the workplace unless you are directly working for a political group on political matters.
Why on earth not? I'd argue that it's more important for people to be able to choose where they spend their labour. And people should absolutely be free to not work for someone who spends money to actively attempt to harm them.
I don't see why people should be completely absolved of responsibility for their actions because of business. I think that is the cause of a vast number of problems.
[*]Pithy quote time: All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The Gorean philosophy that Garfield follows isn't BDSM. It advocates real slaves, the kind without safewords. It also advocates disgusting, misogynistic garbage that makes women feel unwelcome in the Drupal community and is against the community's values. I'm really shocked that people are lining up to defend this scumbag. I get the idea that it's being misconstrued as some sort of "bedroom privacy" issue when it is nothing of the sort.
...what is the issue here? I don't get it.
The issue is that his belief system tells him not to treat everyone as equals. This was discussed fairly conclusively in our prior discussion on the subject.
The discussion should be about whether Drupal should have a mission of inclusivity and equality, or whether it should just be a CMS framework. But Gorean beliefs are clearly incompatible with those of the Drupal foundation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"