
Larry Garfield Expelled from the Drupal OSS Community for Gor Interest - exolymph
http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/drupal-larry-garfield-gor.html
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stryk
This shit is out of control. Put aside the sexual aspect of situations like
this for a second, regardless of what you think of them (a tall order for
some, I know). These days it seems as if people aren't allowed to have any
individual personality anymore. The Internet has the immensely incredible
potential to connect the world, to bring together people of different
backgrounds/cultures/communities/etc. Yet this political correctness bullshit
means that if you express even the tiniest hint of being anything other than
"plain Jane" straight down the middle-of-the-road you are likely to be
lambasted, railroaded, harassed, and possibly lose your job/place to
live/goodness knows what else.

What is even the point of things like "social media" if you can't truly be
yourself? People are strange. Too many people act like like they are in the
business of being professionally offended. They jump on the outrage bandwagon
far too easily, seemingly just to be able to point out to other people that
"yep, see, I too was against that, see my Tweet on the matter? Did ya? Did ya
see it!?"

Stephen Fry was right on the money when he said people declaring they were
"offended by ..." was the equivalent to the adult version of whining. OK... so
you're "offended" by that... so fucking what? People act like if they declare
they are offended, or point out how "wrong" something they don't agree with is
that it automagically puts them on some sort of moral high ground. Ridiculous.

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ams6110
"These days" ??

It's always been this way. Many people are self-rightous, nosey, and
judgemental.

~~~
watter
yes but "these days" they have greater reach so we all have to listen to the
crazies more often (constantly)

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BadassFractal
Regressive. The loss of privacy is scary. Having to ideologically conform to
certain arbitrary standards even in the privacy of your home cannot be the
right way to go forward. Larry didn't hurt anybody, everything was consensual.
Moral police following you into your bedroom is unacceptable. The fact that
you're a perfectly healthy, productive, and sane member of society is not
enough, you must be punished for thought crime.

The last thing I want to know is what my coworkers do at home in their spare
time, what kind of sexual preferences they have and how they choose to express
their sexuality and kinks. Why is this so important for the Drupal community?

~~~
andrepd
Absolutely. Not only the condemning of a consensual sexual practice (that
should be nobody's business but the involved persons') but the invasion of
privacy that led to this "outing" (because it's not like he was publicly
announcing his sexual preferences).

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cfreeman
I've seen this kind of situation unfold before in a tech community. Without
picking a side here, I will say that one thing that really bothers me is the
lack of transparency. The whole concept of being able to publicly shame/expel
someone without providing real evidence to support that action because of
"privacy" seems extremely unfair.

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devwastaken
I see people are getting outraged on both sides, but the thing is we really
don't know anything about what happened.

>Buytaert capped off his rebuttal by implying there's more to the story than
Garfield indicated. "What makes this difficult to discuss, is that it is not
for me to share any of the confidential information that I've received, so I
won't point out the omissions in Larry's blog post," he wrote. Within the
Drupal world, the air of mystery created by Buytaert's insinuation has only
served to heighten the controversy.

So there is missing information. Community projects, ones where you are having
to make important decisions and interact with many people, require many
positive attributes. This may be a case of discrimination for their private
life, but it may also be a deeply vested ideal that seeps into their work.

Transparency is also a double edged sword for Larry and the org, too. If he
really did confess that he believes women should be subservient to men, should
you put that in a blog post, or just let them go? I think letting them go is a
much more proffessional and moral method, so they can continue on without a
worse stain.

~~~
nsxwolf
When I hear someone make an insinuation like that I assume there's no factual
basis and that they're a huge asshole. It's only fair. If you really have
something you can't talk about, then the right thing to do is shut your mouth,
not say "Oh, there's just so, so much more to this story, if only I could tell
you you'd really know what a horrible person this guy is"

That should never be acceptable. Anyone can do it to anyone and it's bullshit.

~~~
ajsalminen
The process has been set up so that supposedly the reason is to protect the
victims but I just don't think it's possible to allow accusations to be
completely anonymous and release no details at all to the community or even to
the accused.

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exolymph
Hey everybody, I'm the journalist who wrote this. Let me know if you want to
call anything to my attention — my email is smann@inc.com

~~~
geerlingguy
It seems like this story (like others similar to it) may have already been
flag killed from appearing on the front page.

~~~
xref
I didn't realize you worked for Acquia, but I have used your Ansible DevOps
repos on Github heavily, thank you for those!

I would be interested in reading your take on this situation, but working for
Acquia I guess you may not have complete freedom of speech on the topic.

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draw_down
Yikes.

