Normal Behavior vs. Our Higher Standards [LWN.net]

Normal Behavior vs. Our Higher Standards

Posted Aug 29, 2017 6:09 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Normal Behavior vs. Our Higher Standards by BrucePerens
Parent article: Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

> We should also be aware that FSF itself has departed from the community standards for enforcement, once with Cisco Systems. The offense was sufficiently egregious, Cisco conducted themselves offensively when people (including me) reached out to help them, and FSF's use of the collected damages (if the amount and purpose was reported to me accurately) was laudable.

Not that I have a clue what happens, but your simple statement "Cisco conducted themselves offensively" is enough to say to me that what the FSF presumably did was both justified and acceptable. Even under community standards!

Bringing Christianity into it, if you actually read the Bible (which many people quote without understanding), Christianity is both harsh and forgiving. Community members are expected to live up to the community standards. Punishment can be severe. Cisco were pretending to be a member of the community.

Read up and *understand* excommunication and its (ab)use in the middle ages.

(Going back to McHardy, he is applying the rules, in all their brutal force, to people who are not traditionally part of the community and understand neither the rules nor their impact. Even worse, they are the sort of people who would gladly comply (and thereby fall under the forgiveness umbrella) but he is not giving them the opportunity).

Cheers,
Wol

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Normal Behavior vs. Our Higher Standards

Posted Aug 29, 2017 21:07 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Having learned from bitter experience in another community.... There is only so much tolerance one should show to those members of a community who have disdain for its norms, and who keep pushing at its boundaries.

Also, with regard to Cisco, it is notorious for fostering a cut-throat, aggressive, internal corporate culture (through banded stack-and-yank that pits colleagues against each other). They're notorious for competing aggressively. They're notorious for aggressive politics at standards bodies. I've observed ex-Cisco employees being much more aggressively political when participating in open-source communities than was otherwise the norm.

Aggression is a feature of that company, and those who come out of it, it seems to me.