Comment by zahlman
> 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?
No, but this is irrelevant to any of the currently discussed situations.
> If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS
To have this argument requires accepting your framing around "toxic maintainers" which is probably not very productive. But of course forking projects to do your own thing is entirely in the spirit.
Regardless, though, that is not what people are objecting to. For example, an XLibre project wiki was defaced with disparaging comments, including by Jordan Petridis (deeply involved with both GNOME and Xorg) (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/346#issuecomment-...). This was highly unprofessional and XLibre should not have to deal with it regardless of what you think about the politics of anyone involved.
> No, but this is irrelevant to any of the currently discussed situations.
It's somehow always relevant, because they all pretend to be speaking for black people, or that their situation is exactly as if they were black people. It's unbelievably grating to actual black people. And when black people say it to them, how they feel about actual black people comes out instantly. You see, we're symbols. We represent unfair suffering.
Just like their parents who were trying to be rappers, their grandparents were trying to be "white n-----s" (because having to go to Vietnam made them black, you see), and their great-grandparents were talking in jazz talk (like Biden.) It did nothing for black people.