Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 9, 2024 10:17 UTC (Tue) by immibis (subscriber, #105511)
In reply to: Volunteering to be the maintainer by rra
Parent article: Free software's not-so-eXZellent adventure

Certainly I'm not entitled to talk to people who don't want to listen. However:

- such a ban has a collateral effect as people who do want to listen aren't allowed to listen and often aren't even aware they're not allowed to listen.
- as a society we should probably value rightness, not be indifferent to it.

Volunteering to be the maintainer

Posted Apr 9, 2024 11:15 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

You seem to be mixing up two sorts of bans:

A ban that happens simply because you tried to observe but not speak.
A ban that happens after you spoke in a disruptive fashion.

Most, if not all, open source projects don't ban you from observing public forums; there may be invite-only forums that you're not part of, but as long as you're not speaking, you can listen, although you may need to use a different identity to your normal identity if you've previously been banned for being disruptive (or rely on external logs - e.g. you can use mailing list archives to read a list you're banned from, or a project's IRC log, or Incognito Mode in your browser to read a web forum).

And it is surely right that society excludes disruptive people from areas where they cause issues; society is, in this situation, valuing rightness over ability to disrupt.