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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."
First, someone's personal life is their business. We are supposed to be building code, not snooping.
Second, he was doxxed. Fruit of the poison tree.
Third, maybe most importantly, who cares what you have to say about Gorean philosophy. They are BDSM addicts who play too much D&D.
Fourth, someone was genuinely hurt by seeing this doxxed screenshot. Let's not forget the victim.
https://twitter.com/DrupalScar... ... with that in mind, we can't do something to keep the two separated? It's a HUGE community. Take him off session selection if you want. Chase him out - we can do better than that. We're supposed to be innovators. Find a better way.
It would be a boring world if people could not enjoy some socially-unaccepted hobbies in private without fearing for their employment.
Hobby?
For crying out loud, he kept a sex slave for several years. The sex slave was a vulnerable highly-autistic woman. She also had social agoraphobia. Garfield then passed her on to a friend of his.
If it doesn't affect their work, counter examples being excessive drinking or drug taking. I dislike cats (they shit in my garden and eat garden birds) but will work with people that own them.
The key words here are mutual consent and boundaries. He was not asking or coercing any of his coworkers to join him. So, I'm with the letter writers.
--
Honi soit qui mal y pense
Wait? WTF did you just say? You just said it didn't affect their work, so how could you possibly then say it is an exception? If I fit shows up for work every day, bangs out quality work with a positive attitude, what business of yours is it if he uses drugs including Alcohol on his own time? Brainwashed by the government much?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
SPLC-designated hate group? This is the same SPLC that calls Ayaan Hirsi Ali an hateful extremist, mocking her experience with female genital mutilation, for speaking out about such matters in the context of the Islamic world, right?
I'm afraid the once-proud SPLC has squandered all moral authority.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It's the Gorean part I think that's the problem. What it means to be a "Gorean" is vague enough that the range of possibilities straddle the line between what is acceptable even in a place like the Bay Area.
It seems likely that most self-described Goreans are irony-mongers and play-actors -- as harmless as baseball card traders. There are a few crackpot cultists who genuinely believe a society organized around slavery would be a good thing, but opinions per se can't really hurt anyone. And if there's a large enough number of Goreans, they're bound to have their share of genuinely twisted people, but their numbers are so low in the first place they hardly present any kind of risk to the general public; they're mainly going to be a problem for other Goreans who want to play act.
So it seems to me you could handle it like anything else. It's OK for people on the team to be militant Christians or atheists, but if that difference of opinion is hindering work then they should keep those opinions out of the work (including volunteer work) or leave the team. It's not a judgment of who's right or wrong, it's a judgment of who's helping or hurting the work. People in leadership positions you might hold to more arbitrary standards because their public persona reflects on the project.
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If his sexual preference was for young children, he's breaking the law. Entirely different matter. Stop being a dick and conflating "sexual kinks with consenting adults" into "sexual assault of a minor".
If he was a mysognist who refused to hire women - also MORE ILLEGAL than being into BDSM. If you have a problem with this, get the law changed.
As such, where the law - and these developers - have drawn a straight line along "what he did was perfectly legal and his own business", you and the people who are the target of this letter haven't. Your line is all squiggly and routes round personal prejudices tries to blur the line between legal and illegal, and draws huge boundaries around what YOU are into sexually as what is acceptable.
The facts of life are that people can pick the workers they like. WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LAW. Don't like it? Get the law changed. And you can't just pick up Drupal developers off the street, so they can hold their employer hostage. Or, rather, insist that their employer upholds the law around employment. Never heard of unions? (P.S. I disagree insanely with the concept of unions, personally, but that's another matter entirely).
There is a "commercial reputation" element, yes, but you can't just let people set out on DELIBERATELY DESTROYING the commercial reputation of the company in order to GET BACK at someone whose legal and consenting sexual life you disagree with. No company wants dickheads like that on the staff.
If they were to let the staff go, they'd still not solve the problem. The problem is one of culture where it's acceptable to target and destroy the reputation of staff members. If that's acceptable, next thing you know, every piece of dirt on every "new" member of staff will come out too. Is that acceptable?
I honestly don't get why anyone's sex life matters whatsoever. Politicians, policemen, or cleaners. Who gives a shit. Their CRIMINAL life, yes. That matters. But their personal sexual life? No.
And dickheads like you are just reinforcing hatred because of personal sexual preferences. You're no different to a homophobe, a puritan or a prude.
When a BDSM participant starts hitting me with his whip without my consent, someone starts modifying my genitalia without my consent, etc, then I will hate on those people the way I hate on smokers. On the other hand, keep your filthy drug habit to yourself and out of the public air I need to breath, and I've got no problem with smokers either.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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