Comment on Lemmy developer, @SleeplessOne1917, argues for the killing of Israeli civilians and children
shagie@programming.dev 1 year agoWhen people make their professional (developer contributing to FOSS software) and their personal identity the same - especially when there are a limited number of people as representatives of the project or organization the personal views run the risk of causing issues for the professional organization.
This was seen before when Richard Stallman’s less than savory views on some current events of the time came to light and the blowback on FSF.
Having the two original developers be pro China at the time, with funding from NLNet is one thing… but to be actively seeking donations and looking to get enough funding that they can hire more developers - and that may include this individual… that runs the risk of bringing more politics into the core group. That in turn runs the risk of having this be “we’re looking for donations to pay these people.”
We’ve seen it in other companies - where someone on social media representing the company says something “off” and gets fired.
The only way for a financial contributions to “fire” a core group contributor is to withhold funding from the project.
I’ll say it quite frankly - I do not want one iota of any donations that I make to go to this individual.
gelberhut@lemdro.id 1 year ago
In this thread people often talk about “a contributor”. However, lemmy’s the core dev teams has a very specific “political view” which is coupled with the project. The project was started to serve people with that “political view”. And this makes really hard to decouple project and the people who drive it.
shagie@programming.dev 1 year ago
You can decouple it by looking to include people who have a broader range of political ideals rather than hiring people further and further to the extremes.
We’re here, we’ve made peace with that the original authors of the project created it because they wanted to have some place where they wouldn’t/couldn’t get kicked off for their political views. That’s fine.
However, as they’re seeing donations from the public and they’re looking to hire people, and the candidates are further to the extremes - that makes this more of a political project than not.
Yes, we can ask our server admins to defederate from those instances… but as long as a criteria for getting paid with the money that Lemmy gets as donations or grants is that you have anti-western views then it is a political project first.