Comment by zahlman
> do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?
It's not about trying to interfere with projects because you don't like the author's beliefs.
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This includes persons and fields that the author considers harmful or distasteful. And forking and redistributing are core rights granted by the license.
Same thing with XLibre.
There are, apparently, people out there who think that their decision to use something that was provided et gratis et libre should depend on the beliefs of the thing's creator, as if doing so should somehow endorse those beliefs or cause them to rub off on the user. I can't understand this line of thought, however. Quite frankly I don't think that even applies to paid proprietary software. My moral intuition doesn't allow for that kind of transfer of guilt, which seems to be what people mean nowadays when they talk about "complicity".
Shouldn't the "no discrimination" part also apply to the community?
How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS? If a specific maintainer in an otherwise friendly community refuses to merge pull requests from developers with a certain skin color, how should the community handle that?
If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS, or are they suddenly "needlessly introducing politics" and "distracting from development"? If the latter, why would the actions of that one toxic maintainer not fall under the same?
If you notice that your community is rapidly losing core members because they keep getting insulted by that one toxic maintainer, what do you propose one should do? Do you take action, or do you let the project die?