> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 at 1:10 PM
> From: "Frosku" <fro...@frosku.com>
> To: "Alexandre Oliva" <ol...@gnu.org>, "Jonathan Wakely via Gcc"
> <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> 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.
That's quite accurate. I can see again the emergence of the phreakers
types of the 1980's, the minority that were up to no good. Want to join
the club Frosku?
> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>
