On Wed, 24 Mar 2021 at 23:17, Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
IMHO the complete brouha is political correctness run amok!
It's been suggested - initially by Neil Gaiman¹ - that the term used above should be replaced by “treating other people with respect”. Your first paragraphs read quite differently if we make the substitution:
There are numerous reasons why that substitution is wholly unreasonable and itself quite agenda-driven. The explanation of why is massively off-scope here but I'm happy to engage offline. To me, it is trivially demonstrable that the FSF has both engaged in political correctness -- as a primary tactic -- and is now a victim of it. But IMO that point is actually quite irrelevant to the justified criticism of the FSF's self-inflicted wound. What's left to see is how deep it was. I would request that we return to the matter at hand - - - - computers and
computing and its tools
GTALUG ... and to a broader extent the wider FOSS community ... has always engaged in both technical and non-technical activities. In the past it has participated in trade shows, run instalfests, and had speakers providing very un-technical explanations of the benefits and the challenges for the IT mainstream using and developing FOSS software. There's room for both tech and advocacy, and GTALUG has broadly managed the balance well over decades. The FSF -- as distinct from the GNU project -- is an utterly non-technical entity. It produces no code; it manages no projects. It deals with politics and IP law and morality and media. If someone wants to advance the position that discussing the FSF is out of scope in GTALUG because its role is non-technical, that's a legitimate take but quite inconsistent with the group's history. - Evan