On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote: > That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude > their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've > driven dissenters into silence.
The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the dissenting side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" -- and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because we don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day are coming from the pro-forking side. Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' opinions were as valid as contributor's opinions. For a project like a compiler which exists solely to enable other projects to exist, it seems like the only users who are deemed worthy of representation in the 'room where it happens' now are the major Corporations with the ability to sponsor a contributor on their behalf. It's becoming very difficult to engage in good faith against this kind of overt hostility to the grassroots users. > Violent emotional responses is what trolls of all alignments aim for. > Let's not give them that. Let's not give them reasons to denounce > censorship either. Let's dissent politely and kindly, without calling > them names, whether trolls or jerks or crazy. Ad troll[i]um is a very > popular fallacious argument these days, but it's just as logically > unsound as other fallacies. I've only seen one or two genuine 'trolls' in the discussion, as in, people who are just here to fish for a reaction who don't have an actual vested interest in the outcome. All of them have sent a couple of messages and then left. Completely agree with you that 'ad trollum' is being deployed here to conflate the legitimate voices of concerned free software advocates with childish trolling, much to the detriment of the level of conversation. > It's true that negotiating and settling with wildly different opinions > requires more effort than having despotic powers to dictate the right > answer. The community has made it clear what political model it > prefers, so let's put that in practice, shall we? I think there's a fundamental disagreement here where we're defining 'the community' broadly -- to include contributors, users, and pretty much the whole free software and GNU community -- and certain people on the pro- fork side are taking a more corporate view that only 'the firm' should get any input into 'internal business'. This is not the free software community that I recognize. >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<