Sorry, but no. [LWN.net]

Sorry, but no.

Posted Nov 20, 2014 10:41 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
In reply to: Sorry, but no. by tomegun
Parent article: Today's Debian technical committee resignation: Ian Jackson

People get judged by their recent actions. To illustrate it with an extreme example imagine someone that people know as being a nice person goes and kills people. The latest action will surely overshadow what he did in the past.

So while Ian's recent actions are surly not comparable to "killing people" they did harm the debian project. So not really surprising that people forget about his past achievements and focus on that.

to post comments

Sorry, but no.

Posted Nov 20, 2014 12:42 UTC (Thu) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (1 responses)

No, because his actions "harming the project" is debatable. Now you could say that isn't so and have *that* debate, but:

-the votes are in
-Ian resigned from the TC

so it would be perpetuating the debate to perpetuate the debate, since it would involve the same amount of strife, but with nothing at stake.

Sorry, but no.

Posted Nov 20, 2014 14:00 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]

Oh I am not asking to rehash the debate actually its good that this whole thing is finally ending. Just tried to explain why some people don't simply go "ok doesn't matter he did great work in the past" ... things simply don't work that way.

No imagination required

Posted Nov 20, 2014 19:00 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

To illustrate it with an extreme example imagine someone that people know as being a nice person goes and kills people. The latest action will surely overshadow what he did in the past.

It doesn't take much imagination, given that one prominent Linux developer was convicted of killing his wife. A fair number of people were willing to defend him when there was still a serious question of his guilt, but he quickly became an unperson once he confessed.