On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 10:19 AM rosea.grammostola <
rosea.grammostola(a)protonmail.com> wrote:
I am writing to you to let you know that I will hereby remove you from
this mailing list and permanently ban you from it as well.
I'm not going to discuss whether a post does or does not comply to the
rules of a mailinglist. But banning and certainly, banning for life, is
almost never a good solution.
But the problems are much deeper then this. It seems that small a group of
people are deciding what is appropriate and what not and accidentally
they're the same people behind the fork of non-session-manager and they now
ban the developer of the project they forked. Read on.
I hope we all agree that freedom of speech is a precious right. And people
are free to raise issues and have firm criticism, even while the majority
of people disagrees. Here a good amount of tolerance is needed and healthy.
Linuxaudio community has a serious problem at the moment I think though,
where people who have a certain opinion, which is shared by a core group
backed up by a majority have more freedom of speech and more freedom to
misbehave then people who are part of a minority or have a less shared
opinion or doesn't belong to that core group.
It's related to the problem I've raised yesterday on this LAD list, about
the misuse of the linuxaudio consortium by a small group of people who are
moderators of
linuxaudio.org, github and apparently also the
mailinglists. (I was not aware of any messages to LAA by the NON developer,
timing is coincidence). Where the normal neutral linuxaudio consortium is
now used to release and promote a fork.
Whether you like it or not, those people have to admit there is a conflict
of interests here and in healthy organizations and communities this should
be avoided as much as possible.
I don't think it will be fruitful to discuss the details of the fork here
again or to do a competition who behaved the worst. And this isn't about
his particular case, it's broader then that.
This community has a problem when it comes to freedom of speech (not all
are equal) and a conflict of interests (moderators ban developers and
release their fork from the neutral linuxaudio consortium they moderate).
It's basically a misuse of power by some core members of this community.
Let's assume it's just a consequence of (group)emotions and ambitions, but
it's hard to deny and it should be stopped and fixed.
Well said Rosea.
David:
I have no interest in a flame war. However, I'm a little surprised that in
his first post to a LA* list in years the ban-hammer is wielded against
Jonathon. He did go into ad-hominem and direct attack of people by name,
which is not appropriate. He is assigning motives to others' actions in a
way that I don't believe is accurate, however I would expect that a
misunderstanding could be handled a bit more delicately and get cleared up.
I have talked with most of the parties involved through the years and
really believe that their intent is indeed to benefit linux audio in
general through their contributions, however I do see that there is a
conflict of interest. This is directly the result of willing people simply
stepping up to take on maintaining more and more aspects of the community
but unfortunately it seems that maybe in this case one interest got the
better of the other. It just doesn't look very good. I generally don't feel
that absolute intolerance is a virtue. When a dissenting voice is suddenly
silenced, it does not feel like freedom and this is a community where that
is (I believe) held in high regard.
Can we start over with this conversation? If the parties involved would
prefer to handle this over private conversation that is fine, though it
would be good PR to make that clear to the rest of the list. I am fairly
disinterested in NSM personally and would be happy to mediate if it would
help.
I unfortunately have no suggestions for a solution of the conflict of
interest. Until others are willing to assist in maintaining things like
this list the potential for this to happen will persist.
_spencer