Don't Be Nice: Why Open Source Communities Must Draw the Line
Daniel Roe, a core maintainer of Nuxt, argues that open source communities shouldn't stay neutral when members promote hateful views. He recounts banning a user with a Nazi avatar and calling out DHH for racist and anti-Roma statements, urging projects like 1Password and DigitalOcean to reconsider their support for his work. Being good matters more than being nice.
Nice? It's better to be good.
- 0manrho
Fully agreed.
This "Let's avoid politics" is just "Let's avoid conflict resolution and let things fester until it all boils over and goes to shit"
If you break the social contract of granting everyone a common baseline of respect and civility, such as by identifying with those that explicitly wish to violently purge entire peoples from the planet, I no longer am obligated to grant them the decorum outlined in that same social contract, as they've violated the accord.
- alwa
Time and a place. I only see these kind of online spats refracted through people’s reactions like this one. Invariably I find myself asking how someone’s unattractive idea even came up there in the first place…
Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.
Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…
- neuroticnews25
People openly signaling they don't care about your feelings and rules are rarely missed. But as a former antisocial outcast myself, I always try to be nice to everyone and show them the light, prefer warnings to kicks and kicks to bans. Politics is really not that serious, decent people can have wildly different views.
- basicoperation
By this logic every person born in North America is a Native American.
Of course, this criticism is very popular amongst Scots who live in Scotland which is still overwhelmingly Scottish even in the major cities.
- sajithdilshan
I totally agree that one can decide for themselves to be nice or not nice to anyone, but I wonder as adults is it the right course of action to block/kick someone out as soon as they disagree with you or say, write something you don’t like or when just simply have a difference of opinion. I think that’s very childish and when did we stopped simply to agree to disagree and move forward.
The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism. But what if someone express their opinion, which is very conservative, or nationalistic like as an example I love Switzerland and I want Swiss people to prosper and have everything. Would that be incentive because they are excluding rest of the world?