The FOSDEM organizers, insofar as they are FOSDEM organizers, exist for the purpose of organizing FOSDEM. In that role, they have decided that there will be such and such a speaker at such and such a time at such and such a place.
You can disagree with that decision. You can register your disagreement through channels they’ve provided. If that’s proven ineffective, you can disengage with the whole affair. If you don’t like that option, you can register your disagreement by non-obstructive protest, which clearly indicates friendly criticism. Or if you don’t like that option, you can register your disagreement via obstructive protest. But in that case you have declared yourself to desire to obstruct FOSDEM’s reason for existence; it’s not surprising that FOSDEM will in turn assert its will to proceed with itself.
There’s a bizarre trend among vaguely-radical Westerners whereby they expect to be able to disrupt the operations of an organization and not suffer any opposition for their own disruption because they call the disruption “protest”. This is a very confused understanding of human relations. If you are intentionally disrupting the operations of an organization, at least in that moment, the org is your enemy and you are theirs. Of course your enemy is not going to roll over and let you attack it. Own your enemyship.
FOSDEM is volunteer-run, by people who are involved in F/LOSS themselves. It exists thanks to a lot of goodwill from the ULB. Protestors are not fighting the cops or some big corporations, they’re causing potential grief for normal working-class people like themselves.
While the ULB campus always gives me the impression it’s not averse to a bit of political activism, it would be an own goal if some tone deaf protestors were to jeopardise the possibility of future FOSDEM conferences.
Dorsey won’t care, he’ll take his same carefully rehearsed speech and deliver it again at any of the hundreds of for-profit tech conferences. They’ll be delighted to have him. But there’s really only one volunteer-run event of FOSDEM’s scale in the EU.
By all means, boo away Dorsey, but be considerate of the position of the people running this.
Protestors are not fighting the cops or some big corporations, they’re causing potential grief for normal working-class people like themselves.
As a former and future conference organizer who has taken a tiny paycheck from three of the ~dozen conferences I’ve organized but never a salary °, this is 100% true. I’ve been fortunate that my conferences have had no real controversy, but two that did have a bit of a tempest in a teapot were went to two directions. One, the controversy was forgotten in a week, aside from a couple of people who just couldn’t let it go on Twitter. It took about a month for their attention to swing elsewhere. In retrospect, almost a decade later now, we’d have made a different decision, and the controversy wouldn’t have happened. Unfortunately, the other was life-altering for a few of the organizers because of poor assumptions and unclear communication on our part and a handful of attendees who felt that it was reasonable to expect intra-day turnaround on questions leading to a hostile inquiry two weeks before a $1M event for 1,500 people put on by eight volunteers spread way too thin.
I’ve also had to kick out attendees who were causing a disruption. No, man, you can’t come into the conference and start doing like political polling, petitioning, and signature collection, even if I agree with you, and might have considered setting aside a booth for you if you’d arranged for it ahead of time.
As conference organizers, we have a duty to platform ideas worth being heard and balance that with the person presenting them. The most effective way to protest a person or a presentation is not to attend, and the second most is to occupy space in silence with a to-the-point message on an unobtrusive sign or article of clothing. Anything more disruptive, and you’re creating a scene that will get you kicked out according to the customs of the organizer team, the terms of attendance, and the laws of venue if the organizers enforce their code of conduct. I’ve never physically thrown someone out of an event in my 24 years of event organization, but I’ve gotten temptingly close and been fortunate that someone with a cooler head yet more formidable stature intervened (and I was 6’2” 250 lbs at the time!).
° A tenet of my conf organizer org is “pay people for their work.”
As conference organizers, we have a duty to platform ideas worth being heard
Or you can just acknowledge that a person has done enough damage in their life that you won’t let them shout out any other weird takes.
It’s not like FOSDEM is mainstream enough that it needs to have people who are more well-known outside of FLOSS circles to keynote. There are enough figureheads (often people who spent decades of their life doing good things) who would be more well-suited. This is not some random enterprise conference where you may invite any random startup CEO to shill their stuff. FOSDEM should do better. (I remember phk, and it was great)
As conference organizers, we have a duty to platform ideas worth being heard and balance that with the person presenting them.
that’s cool but literally nobody had heard of block’s involvement in open source until this was announced, so i don’t know what ideas you’re referring to
Respectfully I disagree with this. Peaceful protest can be non-disruptive but still effective. If Jack is talking the whole time with people on the stage in protest around him, I think a lot of attendees will inevitably read Drew DeVault’s article and understand his argument.
I was going to point this out, but then I realized the concern is more likely the “presumably” in “presumably being platformed”. In other words, they’re not saying that Block’s sponsorship is a lie, they’re saying FOSDEM did not accept a bribe: Block’s sponsorship is not the reason Dorsey got a keynote as DeVault alleges.
Yes, that could be it. If so, a bit disappointing to see such misconstrual or misrepresentation of DeVault’s clear statement of presumption as a statement of fact. (There’s also a lot of grey area between “bribe” and “total neutrality”. Patronage is a thing.)
Would you agree then with the statement that “presumably DeVault lied when he construed Block’s main sponsorship as the reason Dorsey got the keynote selection”? Would presumably have made @talideon ’s comment acceptable?
The linked article makes it clear that patronage is not in play for this event.
To be clear, in our 25 year history, we have always had the hard rule that sponsorship does not give you preferential treatment for talk selection; this policy has always applied, it applied in this particular case, and it will continue to apply in the future. Any claims that any talk was allowed for sponsorship reasons are false.
Not trying to be adversarial, just trying to highlight how others are reading DeVault’s statement in light of the clear answer from FOSDEM that Block’s sponsorship had no role in his keynote. I don’t care one way or the other about the keynote, have no feelings either way about DeVault (who seems to be the most polarizing figure on this site), and will not be at FOSDEM. But when I read DeVault’s wording, I generally understood he believes FOSDEM accepted Block’s sponsorship in return for a keynote address and “presumably” is there to avoid any legal issues from making such a claim.
Would you agree then with the statement that “presumably DeVault lied when he construed Block’s main sponsorship as the reason Dorsey got the keynote selection”?
No, because there’s no need to presume anything when you can just go look at his words. None of it gets anywhere near “lie”, to me. It strikes me as easy and reasonable to take his words as a true statement of his belief.
[FOSDEM’s very clear statement snipped]
Thanks for pointing that out.
But when I read DeVault’s wording, I generally understood he believes FOSDEM accepted Block’s sponsorship in return for a keynote address and “presumably” is there to avoid any legal issues from making such a claim.
We’re on roughly the same page here. To me, he’s definitely casting aspersions on the integrity of the selection process, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a clear belief of quid pro quo: this is the bit where the grey area is.
To me, he’s definitely casting aspersions on the integrity of the selection process, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a clear belief of quid pro quo: this is the bit where the grey area is.
Protesting is the act of clearly communicating that you don’t like something. Effective protests are those where the specific ideas being communicated are convincing enough, or the people doing the protest are important enough or widespread enough, that you take the communication seriously.
Communication takes many forms and some of them are more disruptive than others. But it is a popular fiction that disrupting and shouting down events because you don’t like the speakers is an effective form of protest - in fact there could be nothing more ineffective than associating your side of the argument with something that would make an ordinary attendee annoyed. Only if an ordinary attendee would side against the speaker by default would this be a good strategy.
But when employed, usually this is not about actually communicating that you protest against the thing, it’s about attempting to get your way by force, just with a 1A-tinted veneer. Protesting is allowed as long as it is actually protesting, instead of trying to take control.
This is just another example of the black and white thinking responsible for a large part of the awfulness in the world.
Effectiveness isn’t binary. The allowed form of protesting probably not as effective as it could be in a different form than what is allowed. That doesn’t make it ineffective.
Protesting is making your disagreement and numbers visible. If you’re physically stopping somebody from doing whatever it is they’re planning and you’re against, it is not a protest, it’s just disrupting. And by implication it means you have the power to stop it and are not the oppressed underdog you are likely proclaiming to be.
‘Protesting is allowed as long as it is ineffective’ is an appeal to the moral valence of the particular action of protesting. If you change the meaning of the word to refer to a completely different thing, you cannot keep the moral valence. Physically stopping something from occurring is not something anyone has to tolerate just because you used a certain set of Latin glyphs/mouth-noises to identify it.
Could be, I’m not very pleased with how I worded that so I might not be very clear about what I meant exactly, but it seems disingenuous to go back and edit it, given I’m not sure it’d end up better anyway. I’m trying to point at a meaningful difference between bringing attention to an issue and the size of the cohort in agreement with you, versus unilaterally acting to stop people doing something simply because you wish they wouldn’t. Of course everybody thinks that they’re in the right, therefore their actions are justified, but that can’t really be the case all that often, since everybody thinks it.
I’m trying to point at a meaningful difference between bringing attention to an issue and the size of the cohort in agreement with you, versus unilaterally acting to stop people doing something simply because you wish they wouldn’t.
The latter sounds like direct action. It is widely regarded as a kind of protest. Protests typically involve a small minority of the population deliberately causing a disruption to force a response. Often, a majority of the contemporary population disagree with the aims of protest, even protests that we consider good and/or effective in retrospect.
How interesting! The talk doesn’t appear anywhere on the keynote schedule or either of the main track schedules now. Perhaps it has been withdrawn or cancelled.
The thing to take from this is that Drew DeVault spread mistruths because his nose is out of joint due to Jack Dorsey keynoting. Feel free to hate on Dorsey all you like (I’m not remotely a fan), but that’s not an excuse to lie to whip up a mob that risks the continuation of FOSDEM. If anything, this should be a reminder to take anything Drew DeVault says or writes with a mountain of salt even if you broadly agree with his stances. He’s not acting in good faith.
The weak, feeble protest of “not a good look” grows more impotent by the day, and is only modestly effective (rhetorically) at cudgeling people still roughly in alignment–true opponents don’t care why you think about them; the only thing you do is alienate potential and situational allies. I’d politely suggest doing better.
Re: “siding with a billionaire over regular people”:
If I go to a taco truck, even odds their payment processor is Square–as is the person at the farmer’s market, as is any number of small businesses. If I look for people sharing art, showing off neat things about their pets, or even just feeling like they get to have their voice heard when normally they’re just some poor wagie, Twitter filled that well–and that’s not even counting things like its role in the Arab Spring, the various Ukraine-Russian conflicts, BLM and George Floyd protests and riots, and so on and so forth.
There are plenty of critiques of Dorsey of varying degrees of fairness, but you cannot deny that regular people benefited tremendously from two of the companies he founded and directed in various cases (whether or not that is balanced out by the harms, that’s a different question). Saying “hurr durr he’s a billionaire we should automatically dismiss or side against him” is intellectually lazy at best and gleeful willful ignorance at worst.
Re: “hoping the police get involved”:
As a purely practical matter, the police getting involved is the correct and legal escalation of force–and to the degree that such things matter anymore, it should be an obvious double-standard that if the organizers did physically remove the people from the stage there would be the immediate calls for police intervention because of being battered.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Performative dismissal is pretty much the opposite of a good conversation. You can ignore and move on if you disagree.]
I am with Drew here. The actions of billionaires put strain on volunteers. Jack’s company donating some small amount of money to a conference, where it seems he’ll plea for more FOSS involvement, in a space where having the biggest war chest gets you the most capability… is kind of weird.
Maybe he’s announcing a billion dollar donation to a foundation to advance ethical AI technology…. But it’s not really ethical by default given the current power requirements…
Maybe he’s announcing a billion dollar donation to a foundation to advance ethical AI technology…. But it’s not really ethical by default given the current power requirements…
There’s a number of reasons people think current AI technology is unethical, most of which I disagree with. With respect to the energy usage argument for why current AI technology is unethical, see https://lobste.rs/s/ww8kcv/using_chatgpt_is_not_bad_for_environment . In any case, I don’t think that Jack Dorsey or his company is obliged to donate to a specific cause in order to be able to speak about open-source software at an open-source software conference without having the talk disrupted by protesters who don’t want to platform him.
Because Drew has principles and fights for them. You don’t have to agree with him, and I certainly don’t always. I do truly appreciate that he stands up for what he believes in.
(Just read the linked blog post for context. Thanks, Drew! Good luck with the sit-in!)
It’s not a rule of thumb, but if I find myself agreeing with DeVault I have to go out of my way to look into what he’s talking about. As when he authored the Stallman report and pretended he hadn’t, he’s doesn’t exude trustworthiness.
As it stands, this is off-topic IMO, and also contains personal attacks, so @pushcx, I suggest closing this. (Personally, I like political discussion, but only when it’s on-topic and/or written by experts.)
“Open Source and Free Software are inherently political”
Friendly reminder that you may not be into politics, but politics is always into you.
“Protesting is allowed as long as it is ineffective”.
The FOSDEM organizers, insofar as they are FOSDEM organizers, exist for the purpose of organizing FOSDEM. In that role, they have decided that there will be such and such a speaker at such and such a time at such and such a place.
You can disagree with that decision. You can register your disagreement through channels they’ve provided. If that’s proven ineffective, you can disengage with the whole affair. If you don’t like that option, you can register your disagreement by non-obstructive protest, which clearly indicates friendly criticism. Or if you don’t like that option, you can register your disagreement via obstructive protest. But in that case you have declared yourself to desire to obstruct FOSDEM’s reason for existence; it’s not surprising that FOSDEM will in turn assert its will to proceed with itself.
There’s a bizarre trend among vaguely-radical Westerners whereby they expect to be able to disrupt the operations of an organization and not suffer any opposition for their own disruption because they call the disruption “protest”. This is a very confused understanding of human relations. If you are intentionally disrupting the operations of an organization, at least in that moment, the org is your enemy and you are theirs. Of course your enemy is not going to roll over and let you attack it. Own your enemyship.
FOSDEM is volunteer-run, by people who are involved in F/LOSS themselves. It exists thanks to a lot of goodwill from the ULB. Protestors are not fighting the cops or some big corporations, they’re causing potential grief for normal working-class people like themselves.
While the ULB campus always gives me the impression it’s not averse to a bit of political activism, it would be an own goal if some tone deaf protestors were to jeopardise the possibility of future FOSDEM conferences.
Dorsey won’t care, he’ll take his same carefully rehearsed speech and deliver it again at any of the hundreds of for-profit tech conferences. They’ll be delighted to have him. But there’s really only one volunteer-run event of FOSDEM’s scale in the EU.
By all means, boo away Dorsey, but be considerate of the position of the people running this.
As a former and future conference organizer who has taken a tiny paycheck from three of the ~dozen conferences I’ve organized but never a salary °, this is 100% true. I’ve been fortunate that my conferences have had no real controversy, but two that did have a bit of a tempest in a teapot were went to two directions. One, the controversy was forgotten in a week, aside from a couple of people who just couldn’t let it go on Twitter. It took about a month for their attention to swing elsewhere. In retrospect, almost a decade later now, we’d have made a different decision, and the controversy wouldn’t have happened. Unfortunately, the other was life-altering for a few of the organizers because of poor assumptions and unclear communication on our part and a handful of attendees who felt that it was reasonable to expect intra-day turnaround on questions leading to a hostile inquiry two weeks before a $1M event for 1,500 people put on by eight volunteers spread way too thin.
I’ve also had to kick out attendees who were causing a disruption. No, man, you can’t come into the conference and start doing like political polling, petitioning, and signature collection, even if I agree with you, and might have considered setting aside a booth for you if you’d arranged for it ahead of time.
As conference organizers, we have a duty to platform ideas worth being heard and balance that with the person presenting them. The most effective way to protest a person or a presentation is not to attend, and the second most is to occupy space in silence with a to-the-point message on an unobtrusive sign or article of clothing. Anything more disruptive, and you’re creating a scene that will get you kicked out according to the customs of the organizer team, the terms of attendance, and the laws of venue if the organizers enforce their code of conduct. I’ve never physically thrown someone out of an event in my 24 years of event organization, but I’ve gotten temptingly close and been fortunate that someone with a cooler head yet more formidable stature intervened (and I was 6’2” 250 lbs at the time!).
° A tenet of my conf organizer org is “pay people for their work.”
Or you can just acknowledge that a person has done enough damage in their life that you won’t let them shout out any other weird takes.
It’s not like FOSDEM is mainstream enough that it needs to have people who are more well-known outside of FLOSS circles to keynote. There are enough figureheads (often people who spent decades of their life doing good things) who would be more well-suited. This is not some random enterprise conference where you may invite any random startup CEO to shill their stuff. FOSDEM should do better. (I remember phk, and it was great)
that’s cool but literally nobody had heard of block’s involvement in open source until this was announced, so i don’t know what ideas you’re referring to
[Comment removed by author]
Respectfully I disagree with this. Peaceful protest can be non-disruptive but still effective. If Jack is talking the whole time with people on the stage in protest around him, I think a lot of attendees will inevitably read Drew DeVault’s article and understand his argument.
Drew lied about FOSDEM taking money from Dorsey for the keynote. You should take anything he says with a large grain of salt.
Where did he say that? I don’t see that claim anywhere in the article.
There you go.
What? How is that a “lie”? Dorsey’s blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year.
I was going to point this out, but then I realized the concern is more likely the “presumably” in “presumably being platformed”. In other words, they’re not saying that Block’s sponsorship is a lie, they’re saying FOSDEM did not accept a bribe: Block’s sponsorship is not the reason Dorsey got a keynote as DeVault alleges.
Yes, that could be it. If so, a bit disappointing to see such misconstrual or misrepresentation of DeVault’s clear statement of presumption as a statement of fact. (There’s also a lot of grey area between “bribe” and “total neutrality”. Patronage is a thing.)
Would you agree then with the statement that “presumably DeVault lied when he construed Block’s main sponsorship as the reason Dorsey got the keynote selection”? Would presumably have made @talideon ’s comment acceptable?
The linked article makes it clear that patronage is not in play for this event.
Not trying to be adversarial, just trying to highlight how others are reading DeVault’s statement in light of the clear answer from FOSDEM that Block’s sponsorship had no role in his keynote. I don’t care one way or the other about the keynote, have no feelings either way about DeVault (who seems to be the most polarizing figure on this site), and will not be at FOSDEM. But when I read DeVault’s wording, I generally understood he believes FOSDEM accepted Block’s sponsorship in return for a keynote address and “presumably” is there to avoid any legal issues from making such a claim.
No, because there’s no need to presume anything when you can just go look at his words. None of it gets anywhere near “lie”, to me. It strikes me as easy and reasonable to take his words as a true statement of his belief.
Thanks for pointing that out.
We’re on roughly the same page here. To me, he’s definitely casting aspersions on the integrity of the selection process, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a clear belief of quid pro quo: this is the bit where the grey area is.
I like the fact that they demoted Mr Dorsey to a ordinary main track! Free speech but no billionaire privilege!
That’s fair. Have a wonderful day!
[Comment removed by author]
[Comment removed by author]
Protesting is the act of clearly communicating that you don’t like something. Effective protests are those where the specific ideas being communicated are convincing enough, or the people doing the protest are important enough or widespread enough, that you take the communication seriously.
Communication takes many forms and some of them are more disruptive than others. But it is a popular fiction that disrupting and shouting down events because you don’t like the speakers is an effective form of protest - in fact there could be nothing more ineffective than associating your side of the argument with something that would make an ordinary attendee annoyed. Only if an ordinary attendee would side against the speaker by default would this be a good strategy.
But when employed, usually this is not about actually communicating that you protest against the thing, it’s about attempting to get your way by force, just with a 1A-tinted veneer. Protesting is allowed as long as it is actually protesting, instead of trying to take control.
This is just another example of the black and white thinking responsible for a large part of the awfulness in the world.
Effectiveness isn’t binary. The allowed form of protesting probably not as effective as it could be in a different form than what is allowed. That doesn’t make it ineffective.
Protesting is making your disagreement and numbers visible. If you’re physically stopping somebody from doing whatever it is they’re planning and you’re against, it is not a protest, it’s just disrupting. And by implication it means you have the power to stop it and are not the oppressed underdog you are likely proclaiming to be.
That’s a very narrow definition of protest which - afaict - isn’t in line with how that word is used by the rest of the English-speaking world.
‘Protesting is allowed as long as it is ineffective’ is an appeal to the moral valence of the particular action of protesting. If you change the meaning of the word to refer to a completely different thing, you cannot keep the moral valence. Physically stopping something from occurring is not something anyone has to tolerate just because you used a certain set of Latin glyphs/mouth-noises to identify it.
Could be, I’m not very pleased with how I worded that so I might not be very clear about what I meant exactly, but it seems disingenuous to go back and edit it, given I’m not sure it’d end up better anyway. I’m trying to point at a meaningful difference between bringing attention to an issue and the size of the cohort in agreement with you, versus unilaterally acting to stop people doing something simply because you wish they wouldn’t. Of course everybody thinks that they’re in the right, therefore their actions are justified, but that can’t really be the case all that often, since everybody thinks it.
The latter sounds like direct action. It is widely regarded as a kind of protest. Protests typically involve a small minority of the population deliberately causing a disruption to force a response. Often, a majority of the contemporary population disagree with the aims of protest, even protests that we consider good and/or effective in retrospect.
Further reading:
this comment didn’t age well
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4507-infusing-open-source-culture-into-company-dna-a-conversation-with-jack-dorsey-and-manik-surtani-block-s-head-of-open-source/
This link now gives a 404, so either the talk has been rescheduled, cancelled, or the website has been redesigned.
Update: Drew thinks it has been canceled: “Join us to discuss transparency and governance at FOSDEM ’25” (via drewdevault.com)
How interesting! The talk doesn’t appear anywhere on the keynote schedule or either of the main track schedules now. Perhaps it has been withdrawn or cancelled.
Goodness gracious! Manik has come quite a ways since I knew him at RedHat years back (he was building a product to compete with ours). Great guy.
I dislike this use of “peaceful.” In my mind, peace is about the absence of danger, not the absence of disruption.
They’re asking for any protests not to be the kind that put FOSDEM itself in danger. That is itself a form of danger. Not all danger is physical.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: This is pretty much all ad hominem, don't do this here.]
The thing to take from this is that Drew DeVault spread mistruths because his nose is out of joint due to Jack Dorsey keynoting. Feel free to hate on Dorsey all you like (I’m not remotely a fan), but that’s not an excuse to lie to whip up a mob that risks the continuation of FOSDEM. If anything, this should be a reminder to take anything Drew DeVault says or writes with a mountain of salt even if you broadly agree with his stances. He’s not acting in good faith.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Belated, but I missed that he repeated his violent dogwhistle in a third comment.]
Siding with a billionaire over regular people and hoping police get involved is not a good look.
The weak, feeble protest of “not a good look” grows more impotent by the day, and is only modestly effective (rhetorically) at cudgeling people still roughly in alignment–true opponents don’t care why you think about them; the only thing you do is alienate potential and situational allies. I’d politely suggest doing better.
Re: “siding with a billionaire over regular people”:
If I go to a taco truck, even odds their payment processor is Square–as is the person at the farmer’s market, as is any number of small businesses. If I look for people sharing art, showing off neat things about their pets, or even just feeling like they get to have their voice heard when normally they’re just some poor wagie, Twitter filled that well–and that’s not even counting things like its role in the Arab Spring, the various Ukraine-Russian conflicts, BLM and George Floyd protests and riots, and so on and so forth.
There are plenty of critiques of Dorsey of varying degrees of fairness, but you cannot deny that regular people benefited tremendously from two of the companies he founded and directed in various cases (whether or not that is balanced out by the harms, that’s a different question). Saying “hurr durr he’s a billionaire we should automatically dismiss or side against him” is intellectually lazy at best and gleeful willful ignorance at worst.
Re: “hoping the police get involved”:
As a purely practical matter, the police getting involved is the correct and legal escalation of force–and to the degree that such things matter anymore, it should be an obvious double-standard that if the organizers did physically remove the people from the stage there would be the immediate calls for police intervention because of being battered.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Performative dismissal is pretty much the opposite of a good conversation. You can ignore and move on if you disagree.]
Allowing someone to speak is different to siding with them.
I am with Drew here. The actions of billionaires put strain on volunteers. Jack’s company donating some small amount of money to a conference, where it seems he’ll plea for more FOSS involvement, in a space where having the biggest war chest gets you the most capability… is kind of weird.
Maybe he’s announcing a billion dollar donation to a foundation to advance ethical AI technology…. But it’s not really ethical by default given the current power requirements…
There’s a number of reasons people think current AI technology is unethical, most of which I disagree with. With respect to the energy usage argument for why current AI technology is unethical, see https://lobste.rs/s/ww8kcv/using_chatgpt_is_not_bad_for_environment . In any case, I don’t think that Jack Dorsey or his company is obliged to donate to a specific cause in order to be able to speak about open-source software at an open-source software conference without having the talk disrupted by protesters who don’t want to platform him.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Calling for political violence.]
The fact we have billionaires at all is kinda problematic, I’d say.
Would you change your mind if you viewed FOSDEM as an emanation of the state?
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Calling for political violence. I heard the dogwhistle to Hans-Hermann Hoppe.]
Why is it always Drew DeVault?
Because Drew has principles and fights for them. You don’t have to agree with him, and I certainly don’t always. I do truly appreciate that he stands up for what he believes in.
(Just read the linked blog post for context. Thanks, Drew! Good luck with the sit-in!)
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Don't insult people like this.]
Bad faith response: so when he gets angry over transphobia or racism, that gives a good impression of transphobes and racists?
It’s not a rule of thumb, but if I find myself agreeing with DeVault I have to go out of my way to look into what he’s talking about. As when he authored the Stallman report and pretended he hadn’t, he’s doesn’t exude trustworthiness.
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Don't post insults.]
As it stands, this is off-topic IMO, and also contains personal attacks, so @pushcx, I suggest closing this. (Personally, I like political discussion, but only when it’s on-topic and/or written by experts.)
Thanks, I’ve tidied up the insults. Closing threads is not a feature of the site, though, and I wouldn’t want to create a heckler’s veto.
Good outcome IMO, the only downside being that it was more work for you!
Looks like the entire talk with removed the schedule
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Laughing at a situation doesn't create a good discussion.]
I have not participated at FOSDEM in many years, but since they capitulated against extreme left-wing bullies, I know I won’t ever participate.