Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

> Assigning malicious significance and meaning where their is none is the fault of the person being offended. To then make a big deal out of nothing is itself a cause of offense since it's assigning motives and maliciousness where there is none.

Exactly.

> Assigning malicious significance and meaning where their is none is the fault of the person being offended. To then make a big deal out of nothing is itself a cause of offense since it's assigning motives and maliciousness where there is none. This is demeaning and if taken very far is dehumanizing.

And where does it stop? IT DOESN'T. That's why I'm anti-PC - because it just goes on and on. Look at the history of words used to describe the humble latrine (or equivalent). I carefully used the word "latrine" because, to the best of knowledge, it doesn't have any prior ancestry. But pretty much every other word was initially used as a euphemism, then became *the* word, then was euphamised itself out of polite vocabulary. And it did nothing to solve the real problem (that we all need a pee).

I regularly use the example of race on Groklaw - I couldn't take part because my normal, acceptable, British vocabulary was offensive in PJ's living room. Her blog, her choice, but being PC blocked me out of the debate :-(

At the end of the day, we're all biased. We all discriminate. IT'S CALLED BEING HUMAN. And if we took Jesus' words to heart ("Take the log out of your own eye, before complaining about the mote in your neighbour's"), the world would be a much nicer place.

Cheers,
Wol

I feel it's silly, though if there's a just-as-specific term, and the use of "slave" wastes time in dumb debate, maybe it's worth using some other term? I don't know one though.

To me offense stems from association origins. For example, if we used slave to describe the controlled nodes BECAUSE we look down on slaves as lacking in will, then it might be offensive. But we don't, so it seems toothless to me.

Of course most people in my world think of human slavery as a non-problem belonging to the past, and it remains a big problem, so I'm not totally shocked that some people end up with misplaced distress over it.

I don't think it's the amount of money that matters, its the fact that people care about language use at all that some people find so offensive that they feel the need to complain about it at length on the Internet.

> Do the Czechs have a multi-hundred year history of en-robot-ing a substantial percentage of their current population that I missed out on?

The word "slave" itself comes (with high probability) from "Slavs", the population that for centuries have been exploited as, well, slaves. [1] Current Czech Republic was home to part of the Slavonic population. [2]

[1] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/181477
[2] http://www.andrzejb.net/slavic/

Well, of course, slavery has existed at some point in most parts of the world, including central Europe.

Actually the word robot is used in Hungarian to describe the work the serfs were forced to do for their landlord. It happened through hundreds of years (serfdom was only abolished in 1848). Although serfs weren't technically slaves, but for example they were not allowed to move. So the word robot could be considered as offensive as slave.

Yes. Bohemia (the predecessor of the Czech Republic) had de-facto slavery in form of serfdom, which had been finally abolished in 1848 (the first steps happened in 1781). Serfs were freely sold and bought and couldn't even marry without their lord's permission.

The word "robota" itself meant the mandatory/forced work the serfs had to do on their owner's land before they could tend to their own fields. So "robotnik" means "the one who does the mandatory work".

Personally, I find this drive to remove every "offensive" meaning to be somewhat ridiculous and pointless. Even counterproductive since it blurs the difference between people struggling against real discrimination and "professional offendees" screaming against imaginary offenses.

Egads... Has any of you bothered to read the damn thing? R.U.R, that is. Rather than arguing about the origin of the word, recall what had it been applied to at the first use. Čapek hadn't been all that subtle there - his robots are (originally) subsentient humans, mass-produced to do all the hard and dirty work and to leave the humanity to the life of leisure. Incapable of emotions and will of their own. Biological, BTW. As could be expected, later it turns out that they can develop said will of their own, with predictably nasty consequences for their masters. In the end a couple of them somehow manages to develop the full range of emotions as well (and it's quite obvious that the rest is on the way to at least some of that), with the implication that the life will somehow go on. Except that the character delivering that conclusion is more than slightly insane by that point and quite desperate to convince himself that everything would somehow work out...

BTW, the word "otrok" is directly applied to them and that's the word used when translating English "slave", including the contexts refering to slavery in US (fun example of a translator trap, that - e.g. in Russian an identical cognate is a somewhat archaic equivalent of "подросток" == "teenager". Judging by other slavic languages the original meaning was (male) child/youngster, shifted in Czech and Slovak at some point. Not sure when the shift had happened; it certainly isn't unique - consider e.g. the nastier meaning of "boy" in Southern dialects of USAnian)

FWIW, the original is in public domain; see http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13083; an English translation is on https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/

It's often the case that similar words mean completely different things even in fairly closely related Slavic languages. Words for "fresh food" in Czech sound like "stale poison" in Russian, for example.

Keep in mind that "раб" has the same stem. So's "ребенок", for that matter (and yes, it really used to imply a very low social status of child in question). Original form appears to have been a cognate of "orphan", with the usual metathese of word-initial vowel+R...

All this stuff is missing the point, though - there are tons of potentially offensive terminology that only utter twits would try to remove. Remember the Jesux hoax and morons who'd taken it seriously? "Slave" has nasty associations, indeed, but so does "demon" (and, for real fundies, "daemon" as well). And let's recall such syscalls as kill(2) - if _that_ doesn't have unpleasant associations, I don't know what does. So's "orphan", for that matter...

There's a difference between people *actually* finding things offensive or unpleasant to deal with (a documented fact in re lkml exchanges) and stuff being excised on the bare possibility that someone, somewhere, might at some point in the future find something offensive without actually being able to point to any such people. (For that matter, such people can actually be wrong, since you can get offended by something you believe to be an offensive word when it in fact isn't offensive and you just don't know the language you're speaking well enough: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_wor...>. Drawing lines in these cases is difficult.)

I think culture and how people talk about those acts is far more important than using the terms in different contexts.
It probably does a lot more harm to say "a little slavery here and there doesn't hurt" compared to "the slave machine will poll the master for work". In the first case I hope people will either prominently turn away or, even better, say that slavery treads peoples right of self-determination. In the second case, I wouldn't expect anyone to do the same (contrary to what we're seeing with this whole discusion).

> Agreed, but in a way that is the problem. This use of the terms is seen as offensive precisely because it appears to trivialize slavery.
How so? Is anybody under impression that "build slaves" are somehow related to actual slavery?

That's just ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind is going to suggest that: "Slavery was OK, since my build slaves are not suffering".

It might be worth mentioning that I'm generally okay with pretty much all of the code of conducts I've seen coming up here and there. I think that toxic behaviour is toxic and should be discouraged or even retaliated against, and I know there's a lot of it in the FOSS world today. These problems are not trivialities. What is trivial is the use of "slave" in technical documentation as appropriate, and it takes things too far. Those working to improve inclusivity in FOSS would be wise to put their effort (and money, in Mozilla's case) into issues that actually matter instead of wasting time and ruining their credibility with stupid things like this.