Just ban non-technical discussions?
Just ban non-technical discussions?
Posted Sep 30, 2025 19:11 UTC (Tue) by GNUtoo (guest, #61279)In reply to: Just ban non-technical discussions? by marcH
Parent article: NixOS moderation team resigns
The problem is also that many of the things you cite can be related to a given FLOSS project. For instance projects like Guix and Debian sometime have to discuss "extremely political topics" because they do impact Guix or Debian.
For instance what software not to package will bring "political discussions", and sometimes people can decide not to package a given software just to avoid these discussions. How to make contributors welcome is also a very "political" discussion. Also not all distributions have the same policies with regard to laws and jurisdictions. For instance libdvdcss is legal in France, it might not be everywhere. The inclusion or not of nonfree software is also political. And if you accept that "political" has a wide definition, then everything is political.
Though projects like Debian have a long history of having discussions and so they also have insights on how to get things done while limiting infighting between people that are basically on the same side.
Though not everybody agree on political views and/or are on the same side and this is how things are. There are FLOSS projects with completely different goals. For instance some enable privacy (the Tor project) while other probably do the opposite (tracking). And there might actually be more than one field where there are cat and mice games between FLOSS projects and/or people or organizations that have completely opposite goals, though I don't pretend to know every FLOSS project or communities out there.
