ex tempore

Sad, really sad. Utterly dumb, too. ‘An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems‘

I just come across this entry, i hit via the Planet Gnome feeds. As a Gnome user, and packager, i come ashamed of it. Murray Cumming may have had all the reasons of the world to be mad with Jeff Waugh, but he lost them all, by writing what he wrote, the way he wrote it. If he does not act quickly – showing him as a grown up, and apologizing – he just ends painting himself as bad, or as worst, as he painted Jeff Waugh. Open Source is not a religion, Open Source is a process, a process where there should be no place for certain types of behavior, and for certain types of language. I don’t know for sure if Jeff Waugh is a good fit for the Gnome foundation, probably there are way better choices, but one thing i know now for sure – Murray Cumming is a catastrophic one. Jeff Waugh got democratically elected before, and, good or bad, i’m sure he did his best. There are better choices – great! – that is what periodic elections are for.

From true leaders one expects a capacity to unite, not to divide or fuel even more, already heated disputes, from leaders we expect them to achieve peace, not to come with war declarations. Murray Cumming didn’t show up as an uniter, or one able to get the best even from those he thinks are bad people, he just showed up in incandescent rhetoric as a far {left|right}¹ wing jihadist. That’s not, i think, the portrait we – gnome/open source community community – want to show to the world at large…

¹ your pick here.

Addendum.

It’s really sad seeing so many savvy people failing to see what – to me – is the bare essential in any kind of society – that whatever are our disagreements we all agree (with the other side) to disagree. No one, as fair i can tell, ever asked Murray Cumming to ’shut up’, all what, i and others, had asked was – plain and simply, for him to agree with Jeff Waugh in a very plain point – that they both agreed to disagree. And that would mean for them to keep two layers clearly separate – the personal, and the Gnome one. By mixing them both, Murray Cumming IMHO failed, and did a disservice to the community at large. Freedom is not about saying whatever comes to our mind, Freedom is knowing, and realizing, above all that our freedom ends just right where the freedom of the other starts. What differentiates us, as a species, is our ability to learn, to interact, to improve things, to make things better. We are too few, so let’s find, and fight, for all the things that unite all us, and not trying to get a race to find all the things which make us different, and… better.