On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 10:19 AM rosea.grammostola <rosea.grammostola@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