Good news: it appears that Jack Dorsey’s FOSDEM talk has been cancelled!

This is a follow up to two earlier posts, which you can read here: one and two.

I say it “appears” so, because there has been no official statement from anyone to that effect. There has also been no communication from staff to the protest organizers, including to our email reaching out as requested to discuss fire safety and crowd control concerns with the staff. The situation is a bit unclear, but… we’ll extend FOSDEM the benefit of the doubt, and with it our gratitude. From all of the volunteers who have been organizing this protest action, we extend our heartfelt thanks to the staff for reconsidering the decision to platform Dorsey and Block, Inc. at FOSDEM. All of us – long-time FOSDEM volunteers, speakers, devroom organizers, and attendees – are relieved to know that FOSDEM stands for our community’s interests.

More importantly: what comes next?

The frustration the community felt at learning that Block was sponsoring FOSDEM and one of the keynote slots¹ had been given to Dorsey and his colleagues uncovered some deeper frustrations with the way FOSDEM is run these days. This year is FOSDEM’s 25th anniversary, and it seems sorely overdue for graduating from the “trust us, it’s crazy behind the scenes” governance model to something more aligned with the spirit of open source.

We trust the FOSDEM organizers — we can extend them the benefit of the doubt when they tell us that talk selection is independent of sponsorships. But it strains our presumption of good faith when the talk proposal was rejected by 3 of the 4 independent reviewers and went through anyway. And it’s kind of weird that we have to take them at their word — that the talk selection process isn’t documented anywhere publicly, nor the conflict of interest policy, nor the sponsorship terms, nor almost anything at all about how FOSDEM operates or is governed internally. Who makes decisions? How? We don’t know, and that’s kind of weird for something so important in the open source space.

Esther Payne, a speaker at FOSDEM 2020, summed up these concerns:

Why do we have so little information on the FOSDEM site about the budget and just how incorporated is FOSDEM as an organisation? How do the laws of Belgium affect the legalities of the organisation? How is the bank account administrated? How much money goes into the costs of this year, and how much of the budget goes into startup costs for the next year?

Peter Zaitsev, a long-time devroom organizer and FOSDEM speaker for many years, asked similar questions last year. I’ve spoken to the volunteers who signed up for the protest – we’re relieved that Dorsey’s talk has been cancelled, but we’re still left with big questions about transparency and governance at FOSDEM.

So, what’s next?

Let’s do something useful with that now-empty time slot in Janson. Anyone who planned to attend the protest is encouraged to come anyway on Sunday at 12:00 PM, where we’re going to talk amongst ourselves and anyone else who shows up about what we want from FOSDEM in the future, and what a transparent and participatory model of governance would look like. We would be thrilled if anyone on the FOSDEM staff wants to join the conversation as well, assuming their busy schedule permits. We’ll prepare a summary of our discussion and our findings to submit to the staff and the FOSDEM community for consideration after the event.

Until then – I’ll see you there!

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P.S. It’s a shame we won’t end up handing out our pamphlets. The volunteers working on that came up with this amazing flyer and I think it doesn’t deserve to go unseen:

We will be doing a modest print run for posterity — find one of us at FOSDEM if you want one.

Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here.

Last week, I wrote to object to Jack Dorsey and his company, Block, Inc., being accepted as main track speakers at FOSDEM, and proposed a protest action in response. FOSDEM issued a statement about our plans on Thursday.

Today, I have some updates for you regarding the planned action.

I would like to emphasize that we are not protesting FOSDEM or its organizers. We are protesting Jack Dorsey and his company, first and foremost, from promoting their business at FOSDEM. We are members of the FOSDEM community. We have variously been speakers, devroom organizers, volunteers, and attendees for years — in other words, we are not activism tourists. We have a deep appreciation for the organizers and all of the work that they have done over the years to make FOSDEM such a success.

That we are taking action demonstrates that we value FOSDEM, that we believe it represents our community, and that we want to defend its — our — ethos. Insofar as we have a message to the FOSDEM organizers, it is one of gratitude, and an appeal to build a more open and participatory process, in the spirit of open source, and especially to improve the transparency of the talk selection process, sponsorship terms, and conflict of interest policies, so protests like ours are not necessary in the future. To be clear, we do not object to the need for sponsors generally at FOSDEM — we understand that FOSDEM is a free, volunteer driven event, many of us having volunteered for years — but we do object specifically to Jack Dorsey and Block, Inc. being selected as sponsors and especially as speakers.

As for the planned action, I have some more information for anyone who wishes to participate. Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk, and only Dorsey’s talk, which is scheduled to take place between 12:00 and 12:30 on Sunday, February 2nd in Janson. If you intend to participate, we will be meeting outside of the upper entrance to Janson at 11:45 AM. We will be occupying the stage for the duration of the scheduled time slot in order to prevent the talk from proceeding as planned.

To maintain the peaceful nature of our protest and minimize the disruption to FOSDEM generally, we ask participants to strictly adhere to the following instructions:

1. Do not touch anyone else, or anyone else’s property, for any reason.
2. Do not engage in intimidation.
3. Remain quiet and peaceful throughout the demonstration.
4. When the protest ends, disperse peacefully and in a timely manner.
5. Leave the room the way you found it.

Dorsey’s time slot is scheduled to end at 12:30, but we may end up staying as late as 14:00 to hand the room over to the next scheduled talk.

I’ve been pleased by the response from volunteers (some of whom helped with this update — thanks!), but we still need a few more! I have set up a mailing list for planning the action. If you plan to join, and especially if you’re willing and able to help with additional tasks that need to be organized, please contact me directly to receive an invitation to the mailing list.

Finally, I have some corrections to issue regarding last week’s blog post.

In the days since I wrote my earlier blog post, Dorsey’s talk has been removed from the list of keynotes and moved to the main track, where it will occupy the same time slot in the same room but not necessarily be categorized as a “keynote”.

It has also been pointed out that Dorsey does not bear sole responsibility for Twitter’s sale. However, he is complicit and he profited handsomely from the sale and all of its harmful consequences. The sale left the platform at the disposal of the far right, causing a sharp rise in hate speech and harassment and the layoffs of 3,700 of the Twitter employees that made it worth so much in the first place.

His complicity, along with his present-day activities at Block, Inc. and the priorities of the company that he represents as CEO — its irresponsible climate policy, $120M in fines for enabling consumer fraud, and the layoffs of another 1,000 employees in 2024 despite posting record profits on $5B in revenue — are enough of a threat to our community and its ethos to raise alarm at his participation in FOSDEM. We find this compelling enough to take action to prevent him and his colleagues from using FOSDEM’s platform to present themselves as good actors in our community and sell us their new “AI agentic framework”.

The open source community and FOSDEM itself would not exist without collective action. Our protest to defend its principles is in that spirit. Together we can, and will, de-platform Jack Dorsey.

I’ll see you there!

Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here.

Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM.

The FOSDEM keynote stage is one of the biggest platforms in the free software community. Janson is the biggest venue in the event – its huge auditorium can accommodate over 1,500 of FOSDEM’s 8,000 odd attendees, and it is live streamed to a worldwide audience as the face of one of the free and open source software community’s biggest events of the year. We’ve platformed Red Hat, the NLNet Foundation, NASA, numerous illustrious community leaders, and many smaller projects that embody our values and spirit at this location to talk about their work or important challenges our community faces.

Some of these challenges, as a matter of fact, are Jack Dorsey’s fault. In 2023 this stage hosted Hachyderm’s Kris Nóva to discuss an exodus of Twitter refugees to the fediverse. After Dorsey sold Twitter to Elon Musk, selling the platform out to the far right for a crisp billion-with-a-“B” dollar payout, the FOSS community shouldered the burden – both with our labor and our wallets – of a massive exodus onto our volunteer-operated servers, especially from victims fleeing the hate speech and harassment left in the wake of the sale. Two years later one of the principal architects of, and beneficiaries of, that disaster will step onto the same stage. Even if our community hadn’t been directly harmed by Dorsey’s actions, I don’t think that we owe this honor to someone who took a billion dollars to ruin their project, ostracize their users, and destroy the livelihoods of almost everyone who worked on it.

Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year. Dorsey and his colleagues want to get us up to speed on what Block is working on these days. Allow me to give you a preview: in addition to posting $5B in revenue and a 21% increase in YoY profit in 2024, Jack Dorsey laid off 1,000 employees, ordering them not to publicly discuss board member Jay-Z’s contemporary sexual assault allegations on their way out, and announced a new bitcoin mining ASIC in collaboration with Core Scientific, who presumably installed them into their new 100MW Muskogee, OK bitcoin mining installation, proudly served by the Muskogee Generating Station fossil fuel power plant and its 11 million tons of annual CO₂ emissions and an estimated 62 excess deaths in the local area due to pollution associated with the power plant. Nice.

In my view, billionaires are not welcome at FOSDEM. If billionaires want to participate in FOSS, I’m going to ask them to refrain from using our platforms to talk about their AI/blockchain/bitcoin/climate-disaster-as-a-service grifty business ventures, and instead buy our respect by, say, donating 250 million dollars to NLNet or the Sovereign Tech Fund. That figure, as a percentage of Dorsey’s wealth, is proportional to the amount of money I donate to FOSS every year, by the way. That kind of money would keep the FOSS community running for decades.

I do not want to platform Jack Dorsey on this stage. To that end, I am organizing a sit-in, in which I and anyone who will join me are going to sit ourselves down on the Janson stage during his allocated time slot and peacefully prevent the talk from proceeding as scheduled. We will be meeting at 11:45 AM outside of Janson, 15 minutes prior to Dorsey’s scheduled time slot. Once the stage is free from the previous speaker, we will sit on the stage until 12:30 PM. Bring a good book. If you want to help organize this sit-in, or just let me know that you intend to participate, please contact me via email; I’ll set up a mailing list if there’s enough interest in organizing things like printing out pamphlets to this effect, or even preparing an alternative talk to “schedule” in his slot.

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Follow-up: FOSDEM ‘25 protest

In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a harmful political agenda which legitimizes adult attraction to minors, consistently defends adults accused of and convicted of sexual crimes with respect to minors, and more generally erodes norms of consent and manipulates language regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault in his broader political program.

In response to this article, and on many occasions when I have re-iterated my position on Stallman in other contexts, a common response is to assert that my calls to censure Stallman are ableist, on the basis that Stallman is neurodivergent (ND). This line of reasoning suggests that Stallman’s awkward and zealous views on sex are in line with his awkward and zealous positions on other matters (such as his insistence on “GNU/Linux” terminology rather than “Linux”), and that together this illustrates a pattern which suggests neurodivergence is at play. This argumentation is flawed, but I think it presents us with a good opportunity to talk about how neurodivergence and sexism presents in our community.

Neurodivergence (antonymous with “neurotypical”) is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of human experiences, including autism, ADHD, personality disorders, bipolar disorder, and others. The particular claims I’ve heard about Stallman suggest that he is “obviously” autistic, or has Asperger syndrome.¹ The allegation of ableism in my criticisms of Stallman are rooted in this presumption of neurodivergence in Stallman: the argument goes that I am putting his awkwardness on display and mocking him for it, that calling for the expulsion of someone on the basis of being awkward is ableist, and that this has a chilling effect on our community, which is generally thought to have a high incidence of neurodivergence. I will respond to this defense of Stallman today.

A defense of problematic behavior that cites neurodivergence to not only explain, but excuse, said behavior, is ableist and harms neurodivergent people, rather than standing up for them as these arguments portray themselves as doing. To illustrate this, I opened a discussion on the Fediverse asking neurodivergent people to chime in and reached out directly to some ND friends in my social circle.

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Aside: Is Stallman neurodivergent?

Stallman’s neurodivergence is an unsolicited armchair diagnosis with no supporting evidence besides “vibes”. This 2008 article summarizes his public statements on the subject:

“During a 2000 profile for the Toronto Star, Stallman described himself to an interviewer as ‘borderline autistic,’ a description that goes a long way toward explaining a lifelong tendency toward social and emotional isolation and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it,” Williams wrote.

When I cited that excerpt from the book during the interview, Stallman said that assessment was “exaggerated.”

“I wonder about it, but that’s as far as it goes,” he said. “Now, it’s clear I do not have [Asperger’s] — I don’t have most of the characteristics of that. For instance, one of those characteristics is having trouble with rhythm. I love the most complicated, fascinating rhythms.” But Stallman did acknowledge that he has “a few of the characteristics” and that he “might have what some people call a ‘shadow’ version of it.”

The theory that Stallman is neurodivergent is usually cited to explain his various off-putting behaviors, but there is no tangible evidence to support the theory. This alone raises some alarms, in that off-putting behavior is sufficient evidence to presume neurodivergence. I agree that some of his behavior, off-putting or otherwise, appears consistent, to my untrained eye, with some of the symptoms of autism. Nevertheless I am not going to forward an armchair diagnosis in either direction. However, because a defense of Stallman on the basis of neurodivergence is contingent on him being neurodivergent, this rest of this article will presume that it is true for the purpose of rebuttal.

tl;dr: we don’t know and the assumption that he is is ableist.

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This defense of Stallman is ableist because it infantalizes and denies agency to neurodivergent people. Consider what’s being said here: it only follows that Stallman’s repugnant behavior is excusable because he’s neurodivergent if neurodivergent people cannot help but be repugnant. An autistic person I spoke to, who wishes to remain anonymous, had the following to say:

As an autistic person, I find these statements deeply offensive, because they build on and perpetuate damaging stereotypes.

Research has repeatedly proved that, on average, autistic folks have high empathy and a higher sense of values than the general population. We are not the emotionless robots that the popular imagination believes we are.

But we are not a monolith, and some autistic folks are absolute assholes who should be called out (and held accountable) for the harm that they cause. Autism is context, not an excuse: it can explain why someone might struggle in some situations and need additional support, but it should never be an excuse to harm others. We can all learn and improve.

I have witnessed people pulling the autism card to avoid consequences for CoC violations, then calling out the organization for “not supporting true diversity” when they’re shown the door. This is manipulative and insulting to the other neurodivergent members of the community, and should never be tolerated.

Bram Dingelstad, a neurodivergent person who participated in the discussion, had this to say:

Problematic behaviour is what it is: problematic.

There are a lot of neurodivergent people out there that are able to carry themselves in a way that doesn’t make anyone unsafe or harm victims of sexual assault by dismissing or downplaying their lived experience. In my opinion, using neurodivergence as an excuse for this behaviour only worsens the perception of neurodiversity.

Richard Stallman should be held accountable for his speech and his actions.

Another commenter put it more concisely, if not as eloquently:

It’s fucking ableist to say neurodiversity disposes you towards problematic behaviors. It’s disgusting trying to hide behind it and really quite insulting.

I came away from these discussions with the following understanding: neurodivergence, in particular autism, causes people to struggle to understand unstated social norms and conventions, sometimes with embarrassing or harmful consequences, such as with respect to interpersonal relationships. The people I’ve spoken to call for empathy and understanding in the mistakes which can be made in light of this, but also call for accountability – to be shown what’s right (and, importantly, why it’s so), and then to be expected to behave accordingly, no different from anyone else.

Being neurodivergent doesn’t make someone sexist, but it can make it harder for them to hide sexist views. To associate Stallman’s sexism with his perceived neurodivergence is ableist, and to hold Stallman accountable for his behavior is not. One commenter puts it this way:

I’ve said quite a few times is that sexism is not a symptom of autism. Writing this sort of behaviour off as “caused by” neurodivergence is itself ableist, I’m not a huge fan of the narrative that I have “the neurodevelopmental disorder that makes you a bigot”.

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the pervasive sexism in tech is because of the high incidence of neurodiversity. It’s because tech has broadly operated as a boys club for decades, and those norms persist.

Using neurodivergence as a cover for sexism and problematic behavior in our communities is a toxic, ableist, and, of course, sexist attitude that serves to provide problematic men with space to be problematic. Note also how intersections between neurodiversity and identity play out: white men tend to be excused on the basis of neurodivergence, whereas for women, transgender people, people of color, etc – the excuse does not apply. Consider the differences in how bipolar disorder is perceived in women – “she’s crazy” – versus how men with autism are accommodated – “he can’t help it”.

So, I reject the notion that it is ableist to criticize problematic behavior that can be explained by neurodivergence. But, even if it were, an anonymous autistic commenter has this to say:

If we accept the hypothesis that it is ableist to condemn behavior which can be explained by neurodivergence (and I don’t), my answer is: be ableist. I don’t like it, but it’s ridiculous to imagine any other option in the physical world, and it’s weird to treat the virtual world so differently.

Here’s an anecdote: when I was at school, a new person, Adam, joined the class. We didn’t want Adam to feel excluded, so we included him in our social events. Adam had narcissistic personality disorder, and likely in part because of this, he was also a serial harasser of women. So what did we do about it?

We stopped inviting Adam. I wish we didn’t have to stop inviting him, but our hands were tied. I’m not going to say it’s something only he could change, because maybe he truly couldn’t change that. Maybe it was ableist to exclude him. But the safety of my friends comes first. The hard part is distinguishing between this situation and a situation where someone is excluded when they are perceived as a threat just because they’re different.

Stallman’s rhetoric and behavior are harmful, and we need to address that harm. The refrain of “criticizing Stallman’s behavior is ableist and alienates neurodiverse individuals in our community” is itself ableist and isn’t doing any favors for our neurodiverse friends.

To conclude this article, I thought I’d take this opportunity to find out what our neurodiverse friends are actually struggling with and how we can better accommodate their needs in our community.

First of all, a recognition of individuals as being autonomous, independent people with agency and independent needs has to come first, with neurodiversity and with everything else. Listen to people when they explain their experiences and their needs as individuals, and don’t rely on romanticized and stereotypical understandings of particular neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism. These stereotypes are often deeply harmful: one person spoke of being accused of incompetence and lying about their neurodivergence in a ploy for sympathy. They experienced severe harassment, at the worst in the form of harassers engineering stressful situations and screenshoting their reactions to humiliate them and damage their reputation.

Standing up for your peers is important, in this as in all things. Not only against harassment, discrimination, and abuse on the basis of neurodivergence, but on any basis, from any person – which I was often reminded is especially important for neurodivergent people who are not cishet white men, as these challenges are amplified in light of these intersectional identities. Talk to people and understand their experiences, their needs, and their worldview. Be patient, but clear and open in your communication. The neurodivergent people I spoke to often found it difficult to learn social mores, moreso than most neurotypical experiences, but nevertheless the vast majority of them felt perfectly capable of it, and the expectation that they weren’t is demeaning and ableist.

I also heard some advice from the neurodivergent community that applies especially to free software community leaders. Clearly stated community norms and expectations, through codes of conducts and visible moderation, is often helpful for neurodivergent people. Many ND people struggle to intuit or “guess” social norms and prefer expectations to be stated unambiguously. Normalizing the use of tone indicators (e.g. “/s”), questions clarifying intent, and conflict de-escalation are also good tools to employ.

Another consideration of merit is accommodations for asynchronous participation in meaningful governance and decision-making processes. Some ND people find it difficult to participate in real-time discussions in chat rooms or in person, and mediums like emails and other long-form slow discussions are easier for them to engage with. Accommodations for sensory sensitivities at in-person events is another good strategy to include more ND folks in your event. Establishing quiet spaces to get away from the busier parts of the event, being considerate of lighting choices, flexible break times, and activities for smaller groups were all highlighted to me by ND people as making their experience more enjoyable.

These are the lessons I took away from speaking to dozens of neurodivergent people in researching this blog post. I encourage you to speak to, and listen to, people in your communities as well, particularly when dealing with an issue which cites their struggles or impacts them directly.

Ugh. Drew’s blogging about Rust again.

– You

I promise to be nice.

Two years ago, seeing the Rust-for-Linux project starting to get the ball rolling, I wrote “Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?”, penning a conclusion consistent with Betteridge’s law of headlines. Two years on we have a lot of experience to draw on to see how Rust-for-Linux is actually playing out, and I’d like to renew my thoughts with some hindsight – and more compassion. If you’re one of the Rust-for-Linux participants burned out or burning out on this project, I want to help. Burnout sucks – I’ve been there.

The people working on Rust-for-Linux are incredibly smart, talented, and passionate developers who have their eyes set on a goal and are tirelessly working towards it – and, as time has shown, with a great deal of patience. Though I’ve developed a mostly-well-earned reputation for being a fierce critic of Rust, I do believe it has its place and I have a lot of respect for the work these folks are doing. These developers are ambitious and motivated to make an impact, and Linux is undoubtedly the highest-impact software in the world, and in theory Linux is enthusiastically ready to accept motivated innovators into its fold to facilitate that impact.

At least in theory. In practice, the Linux community is the wild wild west, and sweeping changes are infamously difficult to achieve consensus on, and this is by far the broadest sweeping change ever proposed for the project. Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work – and it’s a lot of coding work. Every subsystem has its own unique culture and its own strongly held beliefs and values.

The consequences of these factors is that Rust-for-Linux has become a burnout machine. My heart goes out to the developers who have been burned in this project. It’s not fair. Free software is about putting in the work, it’s a classical do-ocracy… until it isn’t, and people get hurt. In spite of my critiques of the project, I recognize the talent and humanity of everyone involved, and wouldn’t have wished these outcomes on them. I also have sympathy for many of the established Linux developers who didn’t exactly want this on their plate… but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of this post, and any of those developers and their fiefdoms who went out of their way to make life difficult for the Rust developers above and beyond what was needed to ensure technical excellence are accountable for these shitty outcomes.¹

So where do we go now?

Well, let me begin by re-iterating something from my last article on the subject: “I wish [Rust-for-Linux] the best of luck and hope to see them succeed”. Their path is theirs to choose, and though I might advise a moment to rest before diving headfirst into this political maelstrom once again, I support you in your endeavours if this is what you choose to do. Not my business. That said, allow me to humbly propose a different path for your consideration.

Here’s the pitch: a motivated group of talented Rust OS developers could build a Linux-compatible kernel, from scratch, very quickly, with no need to engage in LKML politics. You would be astonished by how quickly you can make meaningful gains in this kind of environment; I think if the amount of effort being put into Rust-for-Linux were applied to a new Linux-compatible OS we could have something production ready for some use-cases within a few years.

Novel OS design is hard: projects like Redox are working on this, but it will take a long time to bear fruit and research operating systems often have to go back to the drawing board and make major revisions over and over again before something useful and robust emerges. This is important work – and near to my heart – but it’s not for everyone. However, making an OS which is based on a proven design like Linux is much easier and can be done very quickly. I worked on my own novel OS design for a couple of years and it’s still stuck in design hell and badly in need of being rethought; on the other hand I wrote a passable Unix clone alone in less than 30 days.

Rust is a great fit for a large monolithic kernel design like Linux. Imagine having the opportunity to implement something like the dcache from scratch in Rust, without engaging with the politics – that’s something a small group of people, perhaps as few as one, could make substantial inroads on in a short period of time taking full advantage of what Rust has on offer. Working towards compatibility with an existing design can leverage a much larger talent pool than the very difficult problem of novel OS design, a lot of people can manage with a copy of the ISA manual and a missive to implement a single syscall in a Linux-compatible fashion over the weekend. A small and motivated group of contributors could take on the work of, say, building out io_uring compatibility and start finding wins fast – it’s a lot easier than designing io_uring from scratch. I might even jump in and build out a driver or two for fun myself, that sounds like a good opportunity for me to learn Rust properly with a fun project with a well-defined scope.

Attracting labor shouldn’t be too difficult with this project in mind, either. If there was the Rust OS project, with a well-defined scope and design (i.e. aiming for Linux ABI compatibility), I’m sure there’s a lot of people who’d jump in to stake a claim on some piece of the puzzle and put it together, and the folks working on Rust-for-Linux have the benefit of a great deal of experience with the Linux kernel to apply to oversight on the broader design approach. Having a clear, well-proven goal in mind can also help to attract the same people who want to make an impact in a way that a speculative research project might not. Freeing yourselves of the LKML political battles would probably be a big win for the ambitions of bringing Rust into kernel space. Such an effort would also be a great way to mentor a new generation of kernel hackers who are comfortable with Rust in kernel space and ready to deploy their skillset to the research projects that will build a next-generation OS like Redox. The labor pool of serious OS developers badly needs a project like this to make that happen.

So my suggestion for the Rust-for-Linux project is: you’re burned out and that’s awful, I feel for you. It might be fun and rewarding to spend your recovery busting out a small prototype Unix kernel and start fleshing out bits and pieces of the Linux ABI with your friends. I can tell you from my own experience doing something very much like this that it was a very rewarding burnout recovery project for me. And who knows where it could go?

Once again wishing you the best and hoping for your success, wherever the path ahead leads.

What about drivers?

To pre-empt a response I expect to this article: there’s the annoying question of driver support, of course. This was an annoying line of argumentation back when Linux had poor driver support as well, and it will be a nuisance for a hypothetical Linux-compatible Rust kernel as well. Well, the same frustrated arguments I trotted out then are still ready at hand: you choose your use-cases carefully. General-purpose comes later. Building an OS which supports virtual machines, or a datacenter deployment, or a specific mobile device whose vendor is volunteering labor for drivers, and so on, will come first. You choose the hardware that supports the software, not the other way around, or build the drivers you need.

That said, a decent spread of drivers should be pretty easy to implement with the talent base you have at your disposal, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

We are living through an interesting moment in source-available software.¹ The open source movement has always had, and continues to have, a solid grounding in grassroots programmers building tools for themselves and forming communities around them. Some looming giants brought on large sums of money – Linux, Mozilla, Apache, and so on – and other giants made do without, like GNU, but for the most part if anyone thought about open source 15 years ago they were mostly thinking about grassroots communities who built software together for fun. With the rise of GitHub and in particular the explosion of web development as an open platform, commercial stakeholders in software caught on to the compelling economics of open source. The open source boom that followed caused open source software to have an enormous impact on everyone working in the software industry, and, in one way or another, on everyone living on planet Earth.

Over the past decade or so, a lot of businesses, particularly startups, saw these economics unfolding in front of them and wanted to get in on this boom. A lot of talented developers started working on open source software with an explicit aim towards capitalizing on it, founding businesses and securing capital investments to build their product – an open source product. A few years following the onset of these startups, the catch started to become apparent. While open source was proven to be incredibly profitable and profoundly useful for the software industry as a whole, the economics of making open source work for one business are much different.

It comes down to the fact that the free and open source software movements are built on collaboration, and all of our success is attributable to this foundation. The economics that drew commercial interest into the movement work specifically because of this collaboration – because the FOSS model allows businesses to share R&D costs and bring together talent across corporate borders into a great melting pot of innovation. And, yes, there is no small amount of exploitation going on as well; businesses are pleased to take advantage of the work of Jane Doe in Ohio’s FOSS project to make themselves money without sharing any of it back. Nevertheless, the revolutionary economics of FOSS are based on collaboration, and are incompatible with competition.

The simple truth of open source is that if you design your business model with an eye towards competition, in which you are the only entity who can exclusively monetize the software product, you must eschew the collaborative aspects of open source – and thus its greatest strength. Collaboration in open source works because the collaborators, all representatives of different institutions, are incentivized to work together for mutual profit. No one is incentivized to work for you, for free, for your own exclusive profit.

More than a few of these open source startups were understandably put out when this reality started to set in. It turns out the market capitalization of a business that has an open source product was often smaller than the investments they had brought in. Under these conditions it’s difficult to give the investors the one and only thing they demand – a return on investment. The unbounded growth demanded by the tech boom is even less likely to be attainable in open source. There are, to be entirely clear, many business models which are compatible with open source. But there are also many which are not. There are many open source projects which can support a thriving business or even a thriving sub-industry, but there are some ideas which, when placed in an open source framing, simply cannot be capitalized on as effectively, or often at all.

Open source ate a lot of lunches. There are some kinds of software which you just can’t make in a classic silicon valley startup fashion anymore. Say you want to write a database server – a sector which has suffered a number of rug-pulls from startups previously committed to open source. If you make it closed source, you can’t easily sell it like you could 10 or 20 years ago, ala MSSQL. This probably won’t work. If you make it open source, no one will pay you for it and you’ll end up moaning about how the major cloud providers are “stealing” your work. The best way to fund the development of something like that is with a coalition of commercial stakeholders co-sponsoring or co-maintaining the project in their respective self-interests, which is how projects like PostgreSQL, Mesa, or the Linux kernel attract substantial paid development resources. But it doesn’t really work as a startup anymore.

Faced with these facts, there have been some challenges to the free and open source model coming up in the past few years, some of which are getting organized and starting to make serious moves. Bruce Perens, one of the founding figures of the Open Source Initiative, is working on the “post-open” project; “Fair Source” is another up-and-coming-effort, and there have been and will be others besides.

What these efforts generally have in common is a desire to change the commercial dynamic of source-available software. In other words, the movers and shakers in these movements want to get paid more, or more charitably, want to start a movement in which programmers that work on source-available software as a broader class get paid more. The other trait they have in common is a view that the open source definition and the four freedoms of free software do not sufficiently provide for this goal.

For my part, I don’t think that this will work. I think that the aim of sole or limited rights to monetization and the desire to foster a collaborative environment are irreconcilable. These movements want to have both, and I simply don’t think that’s possible.

This logic is rooted in a deeper notion of ownership over the software, which is both subtle and very important. This is a kind of auteur theory of software. The notion is that the software they build belongs to them. They possess a sense of ownership over the software, which comes with a set of moral and perhaps legal rights to the software, which, importantly, are withheld from any entity other than themselves. The “developers” enjoy this special relationship with the project – the “developers” being the special class of person entitled to this sense of ownership and the class to whom the up-and-coming source-available movements make an appeal, in the sense of “pay the developers” – and third-party entities who work on the source code are merely “contributors”, though they apply the same skills and labor to the project as the “developers” do. The very distinction between “first-party” and “third-party” developers is contingent on this “auteur” worldview.

This is quite different from how most open source projects have found their wins. If Linux can be said to belong to anyone, it belongs to everyone. It is for this reason that it is in everyone’s interests to collaborate on the project. If it belonged to someone or some entity alone, especially if that sense of ownership is rooted in justifying that entity’s sole right to effectively capitalize on the software, the dynamic breaks down and the incentive for the “third-party” class to participate is gone. It doesn’t work.

That said, clearly the proponents of these new source-available movements feel otherwise. And, to be clear, I wish them well. I respect the right for authors of software to distribute it under whatever terms they wish.² And, for my part, I do believe that source-available is a clear improvement over proprietary software, even though these models fall short of what I perceive as the advantages of open source. However, for these movements to have a shot at success, they need to deeply understand these dynamics and the philosophical and practical underpinnings of the free and open source movements.

However, it is very important to me that we do not muddy the landscape of open source by trying to reform, redefine, or expand our understanding of open source to include movements which contradict this philosophy. My well-wishes are contingent on any movements which aim to compete with open source stopping short of calling themselves open source. This is something I appreciate about the fair source and post-open movements – both movements explicitly disavow the label of open source. If you want to build something new, be clear that it is something new – this is the ground rule.

So you want to compete with open source, or even replace it with something new. Again, I wish you good luck. But this question will be at the heart of your challenge: will you be able to assume the mantle of the auteur and capitalize on this software while still retaining the advantages that made open source successful? Will you be able to appeal to the public in the same way open source does while holding onto these commercial advantages for yourself? Finding a way to answer this question with a “yes” is the task laid before you. It will be difficult; in the end, you will have to give something to the public to get something in return. Simply saying that the software itself is a gift equal to the labor you ask of the public is probably not going to work, especially when this “gift” comes with monetary strings attached.

As for me, I still believe in open source, and even in the commercial potential of open source. It requires creativity and a clever business acumen to identify and exploit market opportunities within this collaborative framework. To win in open source you must embrace this collaboration and embrace the fact that you will share the commercial market for the software with other entities. If you’re up to that challenge, then let’s keep beating the open source drum together. If not, these new movements may be a home for you – but know that a lot of hard work still lies ahead of you in that path.

I needed a bit of a break from “real work” recently, so I started a new programming project that was low-stakes and purely recreational. On April 21st, I set out to see how much of a Unix-like operating system for x86_64 targets that I could put together in about a month. The result is Bunnix. Not including days I didn’t work on Bunnix for one reason or another, I spent 27 days on this project.

You can try it for yourself if you like:

• Bunnix 0.0.0 iso

To boot this ISO with qemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom bunnix.iso -display sdl -serial stdio

You can also write the iso to a USB stick and boot it on real hardware. It will probably work on most AMD64 machines – I have tested it on a ThinkPad X220 and a Starlabs Starbook Mk IV. Legacy boot and EFI are both supported. There are some limitations to keep in mind, in particular that there is no USB support, so a PS/2 keyboard (or PS/2 emulation via the BIOS) is required. Most laptops rig up the keyboard via PS/2, and YMMV with USB keyboards via PS/2 emulation.

Tip: the DOOM keybindings are weird. WASD to move, right shift to shoot, and space to open doors. Exiting the game doesn’t work so just reboot when you’re done playing. I confess I didn’t spend much time on that port.

What’s there?

The Bunnix kernel is (mostly) written in Hare, plus some C components, namely lwext4 for ext4 filesystem support and libvterm for the kernel video terminal.

The kernel supports the following drivers:

• PCI (legacy)
• AHCI block devices
• GPT and MBR partition tables
• PS/2 keyboards
• Platform serial ports
• CMOS clocks
• Framebuffers (configured by the bootloaders)
• ext4 and memfs filesystems

There are numerous supported kernel features as well:

• A virtual filesystem
• A /dev populated with block devices, null, zero, and full psuedo-devices, /dev/kbd and /dev/fb0, serial and video TTYs, and the /dev/tty controlling terminal.
• Reasonably complete terminal emulator and somewhat passable termios support
• Some 40 syscalls, including for example clock_gettime, poll, openat et al, fork, exec, pipe, dup, dup2, ioctl, etc

Bunnix is a single-user system and does not currently attempt to enforce Unix file modes and ownership, though it could be made multi-user relatively easily with a few more days of work.

Included are two bootloaders, one for legacy boot which is multiboot-compatible and written in Hare, and another for EFI which is written in C. Both of them load the kernel as an ELF file plus an initramfs, if required. The EFI bootloader includes zlib to decompress the initramfs; multiboot-compatible bootloaders handle this decompression for us.

The userspace is largely assembled from third-party sources. The following third-party software is included:

• Colossal Cave Adventure (advent)
• dash (/bin/sh)
• Doom
• gzip
• less (pager)
• lok (/bin/awk)
• lolcat
• mandoc (man pages)
• sbase (core utils)¹
• tcc (C compiler)
• Vim 5.7

The libc is derived from musl libc and contains numerous modifications to suit Bunnix’s needs. The curses library is based on netbsd-curses.

The system works but it’s pretty buggy and some parts of it are quite slapdash: your milage will vary. Be prepared for it to crash!

How Bunnix came together

I started documenting the process on Mastodon on day 3 – check out the Mastodon thread for the full story. Here’s what it looked like on day 3:

Here’s some thoughts after the fact.

Some of Bunnix’s code stems from an earlier project, Helios. This includes portions of the kernel which are responsible for some relatively generic CPU setup (GDT, IDT, etc), and some drivers like AHCI were adapted for the Bunnix system. I admit that it would probably not have been possible to build Bunnix so quickly without prior experience through Helios.

Two of the more challenging aspects were ext4 support and the virtual terminal, for which I brought in two external dependencies, lwext4 and libvterm. Both proved to be challenging integrations. I had to rewrite my filesystem layer a few times, and it’s still buggy today, but getting a proper Unix filesystem design (including openat and good handling of inodes) requires digging into lwext4 internals a bit more than I’d have liked. I also learned a lot about mixing source languages into a Hare project, since the kernel links together Hare, assembly, and C sources – it works remarkably well but there are some pain points I noticed, particularly with respect to building the ABI integration riggings. It’d be nice to automate conversion of C headers into Hare forward declaration modules. Some of this work already exists in hare-c, but has a ways to go. If I were to start again, I would probably be more careful in my design of the filesystem layer.

Getting the terminal right was difficult as well. I wasn’t sure that I was going to add one at all, but I eventually decided that I wanted to port vim and that was that. libvterm is a great terminal state machine library, but it’s poorly documented and required a lot of fine-tuning to integrate just right. I also ended up spending a lot of time on performance to make sure that the terminal worked smoothly.

Another difficult part to get right was the scheduler. Helios has a simpler scheduler than Bunnix, and while I initially based the Bunnix scheduler on Helios I had to throw out and rewrite quite a lot of it. Both Helios and Bunnix are single-CPU systems, but unlike Helios, Bunnix allows context switching within the kernel – in fact, even preemptive task switching enters and exits via the kernel. This necessitates multiple kernel stacks and a different approach to task switching. However, the advantages are numerous, one of which being that implementing blocking operations like disk reads and pipe(2) are much simpler with wait queues. With a robust enough scheduler, the rest of the kernel and its drivers come together pretty easily.

Another source of frustration was signals, of course. Helios does not attempt to be a Unix and gets away without these, but to build a Unix, I needed to implement signals, big messy hack though they may be. The signal implementation which ended up in Bunnix is pretty bare-bones: I mostly made sure that SIGCHLD worked correctly so that I could port dash.

Porting third-party software was relatively easy thanks to basing my libc on musl libc. I imported large swaths of musl into my own libc and adapted it to run on Bunnix, which gave me a pretty comprehensive and reliable C library pretty fast. With this in place, porting third-party software was a breeze, and most of the software that’s included was built with minimal patching.

What I learned

Bunnix was an interesting project to work on. My other project, Helios, is a microkernel design that’s Not Unix, while Bunnix is a monolithic kernel that is much, much closer to Unix.

One thing I was surprised to learn a lot about is filesystems. Helios, as a microkernel, spreads the filesystem implementation across many drivers running in many separate processes. This works well enough, but one thing I discovered is that it’s quite important to have caching in the filesystem layer, even if only to track living objects. When I revisit Helios, I will have a lot of work to do refactoring (or even rewriting) the filesystem code to this end.

The approach to drivers is also, naturally, much simpler in a monolithic kernel design, though I’m not entirely pleased with all of the stuff I heaped into ring 0. There might be room for an improved Helios scheduler design that incorporates some of the desirable control flow elements from the monolithic design into a microkernel system.

I also finally learned how signals work from top to bottom, and boy is it ugly. I’ve always felt that this was one of the weakest points in the design of Unix and this project did nothing to disabuse me of that notion.

I had also tried to avoid using a bitmap allocator in Helios, and generally memory management in Helios is a bit fussy altogether – one of the biggest pain points with the system right now. However, Bunnix uses a simple bitmap allocator for all conventional pages on the system and I found that it works really, really well and does not have nearly as much overhead as I had feared it would. I will almost certainly take those lessons back to Helios.

Finally, I’m quite sure that putting together Bunnix in just 30 days is a feat which would not have been possible with a microkernel design. At the end of the day, monolithic kernels are just much simpler to implement. The advantages of a microkernel design are compelling, however – perhaps a better answer lies in a hybrid kernel.

What’s next

Bunnix was (note the past tense) a project that I wrote for the purpose of recreational programming, so it’s purpose is to be fun to work on. And I’ve had my fun! At this point I don’t feel the need to invest more time and energy into it, though it would definitely benefit from some. In the future I may spend a few days on it here and there, and I would be happy to integrate improvements from the community – send patches to my public inbox. But for the most part it is an art project which is now more-or-less complete.

My next steps in OS development will be a return to Helios with a lot of lessons learned and some major redesigns in the pipeline. But I still think that Bunnix is a fun and interesting OS in its own right, in no small part due to its demonstration of Hare as a great language for kernel hacking. Some of the priorities for improvements include:

• A directory cache for the filesystem and better caching generally
• Ironing out ext4 bugs
• procfs and top
• mmaping files
• More signals (e.g. SIGSEGV)
• Multi-user support
• NVMe block devices
• IDE block devices
• ATAPI and ISO 9660 support
• Intel HD audio support
• Network stack
• Hare toolchain in the base system
• Self hosting

Whether or not it’s me or one of you readers who will work on these first remains to be seen.

In any case, have fun playing with Bunnix!

One may observe an axis, or a “spectrum”, along which free and open source software licenses can be organized, where one end is “permissive” and the other end is “copyleft”. It is important to acknowledge, however, that though copyleft can be found at the opposite end of an axis with respect to permissive, it is not synonymous with the linguistic antonym of permissive – that is, copyleft licenses are not “restrictive” by comparison with permissive licenses.

Aside: Free software is not synonymous with copyleft and open source is not synonymous with permissive, though this is a common misconception. Permissive licenses are generally free software and copyleft licenses are generally open source; the distinction between permissive and copyleft is orthogonal to the distinction between free software and open source.

It is a common misunderstanding to construe copyleft licenses as more “restrictive” or “less free” than permissive licenses. This view is predicated on a shallow understanding of freedom, a sort of passive freedom that presents as the absence of obligations. Copyleft is predicated on a deeper understanding of freedom in which freedom is a positive guarantee of rights.^[source]

Let’s consider the matter of freedom, obligation, rights, and restrictions in depth.

Both forms of licenses include obligations, which are not the same thing as restrictions. An example of an obligation can be found in the permissive MIT license:

Permission is hereby granted […] to deal in the Software without restriction […] subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

This obliges the user, when distributing copies of the software, to include the copyright notice. However, it does not restrict the use of the software under any conditions. An example of a restriction comes from the infamous JSON license, which adds the following clause to a stock MIT license:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

IBM famously petitioned Douglas Crockford for, and received, a license to do evil with JSON.¹ This kind of clause is broadly referred to in the free software jargon as “discrimination against field of endeavour”, and such restrictions contravene both the free software and open source definitions. To quote the Open Source Definition, clause 6:

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.

No such restrictions are found in free or open source software licenses, be they permissive or copyleft – all FOSS licenses permit the use of the software for any purpose without restriction. You can sell both permissive and copyleft software, use it as part of a commercial cloud service,² use the software as part of a nuclear weapons program,³ or do whatever else you want with it. There are no restrictions on how free software is used, regardless of if it is permissive or copyleft.

Copyleft does not impose restrictions, but it does impose obligations. The obligations exist to guarantee rights to the users of the software – in other words, to ensure freedoms. In this respect copyleft licenses are more free than permissive licenses.

Freedom is a political concept, and in order to understand this, we must consider it in political terms, which is to say as an exercise in power dynamics. Freedom without obligation is a contradiction. Freedom emerges from obligations, specifically obligations imposed on power.

Where does freedom come from?

Consider the United States as an example, a society which sets forth freedom as a core political value.⁴ Freedoms in the US are ultimately grounded in the US constitution and its bill of rights. These tools create freedoms by guaranteeing rights to US citizens through the imposition of obligations on the government. For instance, you have a right to an attorney when accused of a crime in the United States, and as such the government is obliged to provide you with one. It is from obligations such as these that freedom emerges. Freedom of assembly, another example, is guaranteed such that the police are prevented from breaking up peaceful protests – this freedom emerges from a constraint (or restriction, if you must) on power (the government) as a means of guaranteeing the rights and freedom of those with less power by comparison (its citizens).

Who holds the power in the context of software?

Consider non-free software by contrast: software is written by corporations and sold on to users with substantial restrictions on its use. Corporations hold more power than individuals: they have more resources (e.g. money), more influence, and, in a sense more fundamental to the software itself, they retain in private the tools to understand the software, or to modify its behavior, and they dictate the conditions under which it may be used (e.g. only if your license key has not expired, or only for certain purposes). This is true of anyone who retains the source code in private and uses copyright law to enforce their will upon the software – in this way they possess, and exercise, power over the user.

Permissive licenses do not provide any checks on this power; generally they preserve moral rights and little else. Permissive licenses provide for relatively few and narrow freedoms, and are not particularly “free” as such. Copyleft licenses constrain these powers through additional obligations, and from these obligations greater freedoms emerge. Specifically, they oblige reciprocity. They are distinguished from permissive licenses in this manner, but where permissive licenses permit, copyleft does not restrict per-se – better terms might be “reciprocal” and “non-reciprocal”, but perhaps that ship has sailed. “You may use this software if …” is a statement made both by permissive and copyleft licenses, with different ifs. Neither form of license says “you cannot use this software if …”; licenses which do so are non-free.

Permissive licenses and copyleft licenses are both free software, but only the latter provides a guarantee of rights, and while both might be free only the latter provides freedom.

freedesktop(.org), aka FDO, recently banned Hyprland maintainer Vaxry from the FDO community, and in response Vaxry has taken his case to the court of public opinion, publishing their email exchanges and writing about it on his blog.

It saddens me to bear witness to these events today. I wrote in September of last year about problems with toxicity in the Hyprland community. I initially reached out to Vaxry to discuss these problems in private in February of last year. I failed to get through to him, leading to that blog post in September. I spent some time in the following weeks talking with Vaxry on his behavior and his community’s social norms, again in private, but again, I was unable to get through to him. Unfortunately, we find ourselves again leaving the private sphere and discussing Vaxry’s behavior and the problem posed by the Hyprland community once again.

The fact of the matter is that Hyprland remains a toxic community, enabled and encouraged by its toxic leadership, namely Vaxry. FDO’s decision to ban Vaxry is ultimately a consequence of Vaxry’s behavior, and because he has elected to appeal his case in public, I am compelled to address his behavior in public. I hereby rise firmly in defense of FDO’s decision.

I invite you to start by reading the two email threads, one, and two, which Vaxry has published for your consideration, as well as Vaxry’s follow-ups on his blog, one, and two.

Here’s my read on the situation.

The FDO officer that reached out to Vaxry did it after Vaxry’s problematic behavior was brought to her attention by members of the FDO community, and was acting on her mandate within the FDO conduct enforcement board by investigating complaints submitted to her by this community. It is not a stretch to suggest a close relationship between these communities exists: FDO is the steward of both the Wayland protocol and implementation and the wlroots library, essential dependencies of Hyprland and sources for collaboration between Hyprland and FDO. Vaxry and other members of the Hyprland community had already participated extensively in these projects (mainly in discussions on IRC and GitLab issues) at the time of the email exchange, in spaces where the code of conduct applies.

The FDO officer duly investigated the complaints she had received and found, in collaboration with the other members of the FDO conduct enforcement team, that they were credible, and worrying. There are numerous examples of behavior from Vaxry that contravenes the FDO code of conduct in several different respects, and any number of them would be grounds for an immediate ban. Since these behaviors are concerning, but did not take place in the FDO community, the conduct board decided to issue a warning in private, stating that if this sort of behavior was seen in the FDO community that it would result in enforcement action from the conduct team.

All of the actions from the FDO conduct team are reasonable and show considerable restraint. Vaxry could have taken it in stride with no consequences to himself. Instead, he immediately escalated the situation. He construes the FDO officer’s polite and well-reasoned warning as threats and intimidation. He minimizes examples of his own hate speech by shrugging them off as a joke. He belittles the FDO officer and builds a straw man wherein her email is an official statement on behalf of RedHat, and cites a conspiracy theory about DEI programs at RedHat as justification for calling the FDO officer a hypocrite. He is insulted on my behalf that my name was cited in the FDO officer’s email in lowercase, “drew”, and feels the need to address this.

The FDO officer responds to Vaxry’s unhinged rant with a sarcastic quip clarifying that it was indeed within the FDO conduct team’s remit to ban Vaxry from their GitLab instance – I confess that in my view this was somewhat unprofessional, though I can easily sympathize with the FDO officer given the context. Following this, Vaxry states that Hyprland will cease all communication with FDO’s conduct team and ignore (emphasis his) any future emails from them. Finally, he threatens legal action (on what basis is unclear) and signs the email.

Regardless of how you feel about the conduct team issuing a private warning to Vaxry on the basis of activities outside of FDO community spaces, the email thread that ensues most certainly is within the scope of the FDO code of conduct, and Vaxry’s behavior therein is sufficient justification for a ban from the FDO community as far as I’m concerned. The conduct team cites Vaxry’s stated intention to ignore any future conduct interventions as the ultimate reason for the ban, which I find entirely reasonable on FDO’s part. I have banned people for far less than this, and I stand by it.

Vaxry’s follow-up blog posts only serve to underscore this point. First of all, he immediately opens with a dog-whistle calling for the reader to harass the FDO officer in question: “I don’t condone harassing this person, but here is their full name, employer and contact details”:

I do not condone any hateful messages sent towards any of the parties mentioned.

Recently I have received an email filled with threats to my inbox, from a member of the X.org board, Freedesktop.org, and a Red Hat employee. Their name is [redacted].

Moreover, Vaxry claims to have apologised for his past conduct, which is not true. In lieu of an apology, Vaxry has spent the “1.5 years” since the last incident posting angry rants on his blog calling out minority representation and “social justice warriors” in light of his perceived persecution. Meanwhile the Hyprland community remains a toxic place, welcoming hate, bullying, and harassment, but now prohibiting all “political” speech, which in practice means any discussion of LGBTQ topics, though this is largely unenforced. In the end, the Hyprland community’s fundamental problem is that they’re all “just having fun”, and it seems that they can’t have “fun” unless it’s at someone else’s expense.

The FDO team is right that Hyprland’s community reflects poorly on the Linux desktop community as a whole. Vaxry has created a foothold for hate, transphobia, homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the Linux desktop community. We are right to take action to correct this problem.

Every option other than banning Vaxry has been exhausted over the past year and a half. I personally spent several weeks following my last blog post on the matter discussing Vaxry’s behavior in confidence and helping him understand how to improve, and at my suggestion he joined a private community of positive male role models to discuss these issues in a private and empathetic space. After a few weeks of these private discussions, the last thing he said to me was “I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide”.¹

There’s nothing left to do but to build a fence around Hyprland and protect the rest of the community from them. I know that there’s a lot of good people who use and contribute to Hyprland, and I’m sorry for those of you who are affected by this problem. But, in the end, actions have consequences. The rest of the community has no choice but to sanction Vaxry.

And, to Vaxry – I know you’re reading this – there are going to continue to be consequences for your actions, but it’s still not too late to change. I know it’s humiliating to be called out like this, and I really would rather not have had to do so. FDO is probably not the last time you’re going to be banned if you don’t change course, and it would reflect better on you if you took it on the chin and didn’t post inflammatory rants on your blog – trust me, you don’t look like the good guy here. You are trapped in an echo chamber of hate, anger, and bigotry. I hope that you find a way out, and that someday you can build a community which is as great as your software is.

And, to the FDO officer in question: I’m so sorry that you’re at the ass end of all of this hate and abuse. You don’t deserve any of it. You did a good job, and I’m proud of you and the rest of the FDO conduct team. If you need any support, someone to talk to, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask, on IRC, Matrix, email, whatever. Don’t read the comments.

And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. The vile harassment and hate directed at the FDO officer in question is obscene and completely unjustifiable. I don’t care what window manager or desktop environment you use – this kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I expect better.

---

P.S. The Hyprland community has already descended on me before even publishing this post, after I called Vaxry out on Mastodon a few hours ago. My notifications are not full of reasonable objections to my complaints, but instead the response is slurs and death threats. This only serves to prove my characterization of the Hyprland community as deeply toxic.

Prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer which has a long history of being admired by the 3D printing community for high quality, open source printers. They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.¹

Armin Ronacher uses Prusa as a case-study in why open source companies fail, and uses this example to underline his argument that open source needs to adapt for commercial needs, namely by adding commercial exclusivity clauses to its licenses – Armin is one of the principal proponents of the non-free Functional Source License. Armin cites his experience with a Chinese manufactured 3D printer as evidence that intellectual property is at the heart of Prusa’s decline, and goes on to discuss how this dynamic applies to his own work in developing a non-free license for use with Sentry. I find this work pretty interesting – FSL is a novel entry into the non-free license compendium, and it’s certainly a better way to do software than proprietary models, assuming that it’s not characterized as free or open source. But, allow me to use the same case study to draw different conclusions.

It is clear on the face of it that Prusa’s move to a non-free firmware is unrelated to their struggles with the Chinese competition – their firmware was GPL’d, and the cited competitor (Bambu) evidently respects copyleft, and there’s no evidence that Bambu’s printers incorporate derivatives of Prusa’s firmware in a manner which violates the GPL. Making the license non-free is immaterial to the market dynamics between Prusa and Bambu, so the real explanation must lie elsewhere.

If you had asked me 10 years ago what I expected Prusa’s largest risk would be, I would have simply answered “China” and you would have probably said the same. The Chinese economy and industrial base can outcompete Western manufacturing in almost every manufacturing market.² This was always the obvious vulnerability in their business model, and they absolutely needed to be prepared for this situation, or their death was all but certain. Prusa made one of the classic errors in open source business models: they made their product, made it open source, sold it, and assumed that they were done working on their business model.

It was inevitable that someday Chinese manufacturers would undercut Prusa on manufacturing costs. Prusa responded to this certainty by not diversifying their business model whatsoever. There has only ever been one Prusa product: their latest 3D printer model. The Mk4 costs $1,200. You can buy the previous generation (at $1,000), or the MINI (from 2019, $500). You can open your wallet and get their high-end printers, which are neat but fail to address the one thing that most users at this price-point really want, which is more build volume. Or, you can buy an Ender 3 off Amazon right now for $180 and you’ll get better than half of the value of an Mk4 at an 85% discount. You could also buy Creality’s flagship model for a cool $800 and get a product which beats the Mk4 in every respect. China has joined the market, bringing with them all of the competitive advantages their industrial base can bring to bear, and Prusa’s naive strategy is causing their position to fall like a rock.

Someone new to 3D printing will pick up an Ender and will probably be happy with it for 1-2 years. When they upgrade, will they upgrade to a Prusa or an Ender 5? Three to five years a customer spends in someone else’s customer pipeline is an incredibly expensive opportunity cost Prusa is missing out on. This opportunity cost is the kind of arithmetic that would make loss leaders like a cheap, low-end, low-or-negative-margin Prusa printer make financial sense. Hell, Prusa should have made a separate product line of white-labeled Chinese entry-level 3D printers just to get people on the Prusa brand.

Prusa left many stones unturned. Bambu’s cloud slicer is a massive lost opportunity for Prusa. On-demand cloud printing services are another lost opportunity. Prusa could have built a marketplace for models & parts and skimmed a margin off of the top, but they waited until 2022 to launch Printables – waiting until the 11th hour when everyone was fed up with Thingiverse. Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The print you want is too big for your build volume? Click here to have it cloud printed – do you want priority shipping for that? Your hot-end is reaching the end of its life – as one of our valued business customers on our premium support contract we would be happy to send you a temporary replacement printer while yours is shipped in for service.

Prusa’s early foothold in the market was strong, and they were wise to execute the way they did early on. But they absolutely had to diversify their lines of business. Prusa left gaping holes in the market and utterly failed to capitalize on any of them. Prusa could have been synonymous with 3D printing if they had invested in the brand (though they probably needed a better name). I should be able to walk into a Best Buy and pick up an entry-level Prusa for $250-$500, or into a Home Depot and pick up a workshop model for $1000-$2000. I should be able to bring it home, unbox it, scan a QR code to register it with PrusaConnect, and have a Benchy printing in less than 10 minutes.

Chinese manufacturers did all of this and more, and they’re winning. They aren’t just cheaper – they offer an outright better product. These are not cheap knock-offs: if you want the best 3D printer today it’s going to be a Chinese one, regardless of how much you want to spend, but, as it happens, you’re going to spend less.

Note that none of this is material to the license of the product, be it free or non-free. It’s about building a brand, developing a customer relationship, and identifying and exploiting market opportunities. Hackers and enthusiasts who found companies like Prusa tend to imagine that the product is everything, but it’s not. Maybe 10% of the work is developing the 3D printer itself – don’t abandon the other 90% of your business. Especially when you make that 10% open: someone else is going to repurpose it, do the other 90%, and eat your lunch. FOSS is great precisely because it makes that 10% into community property and shares the cost of innovation, but you’d be a fool to act as if that was all there was to it. You need to deal with sales and marketing, chase down promising leads, identify and respond to risks, look for and exploit new market opportunities, and much more to be successful.

This is a classic failure mode of open source businesses, and it’s Prusa’s fault. They had an excellent foothold early in the market, leveraging open source and open hardware to great results and working hand-in-hand with enthusiasts early on to develop the essential technology of 3D printing. Then, they figured they were done developing their business model, and completely dropped the ball as a result. Open source is not an “if you build it, the money will come” situation, and to think otherwise is a grave mistake. Businesses need to identify their risks and then mitigate them, and if they don’t do that due diligence, then it’s their fault when it fails – it’s not a problem with FOSS.

Free and open source software is an incredibly powerful tool, including as a commercial opportunity. FOSS really has changed the world! But building a business is still hard, and in addition to its fantastic advantages, the FOSS model poses important and challenging constraints that you need to understand and work with. You have to be creative, and you must do a risk/reward assessment to understand how it applies to your business and how you can utilize it for commercial success. Do the legwork and you can utilize FOSS for a competitive advantage, but skip this step and you will probably fail within a decade.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been subject to numerous allegations of misconduct. He stepped down in 2019, and following his re-instatement in 2021, a famous open letter was published in which numerous organizations and individuals from throughout the Free Software ecosystem called for his removal from the Free Software Foundation. The letter had no effect; Stallman remains a voting member of the FSF’s board of directors to this day and continues to receive numerous speaking engagements.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and all of the above with respect to minors, as well as the systemic normalization of abuse, and directly quotes statements which participate in the normalization of abuse.

This article presents an analysis of Stallman’s political discourse on sex with the aim of establishing the patterns that cause the sort of discomfort that led to Stallman’s public condemnation. In particular, we will address how Stallman speaks about sexual assault, harassment, consent, and minors in his discourse.

I think that it is important to acknowledge this behavior not as a series of isolated incidents, nor a conflict with Stallman’s “personal style”, but a pattern of behavior from which a political narrative forms, and draws attention to the fact that the meager retractions, excuses, and non-apologies from both Stallman and the Free Software Foundation as a whole fail to account for that pattern in a meaningful way.

The failure of the Free Software community to account for Richard Stallman’s behavior has a chilling effect. The norms set by our leadership influence the norms of our broader community, and many members of the Free Software community look to Stallman as a ideological and political leader. The norms Stallman endorses are harmful and deeply confronting and alienating to many people, in particular women and children. Should these norms be adopted by our movement, we risk creating a community which enables the exploitation of vulnerable people.

Let’s begin to address this by considering Stallman’s retraction of his comments in support of pedophilia. The following comment from Stallman in 2013 drew harsh criticism:

There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

— stallman.org, 04 January 2013 “Pedophilia”

Following much of the criticism directed at Stallman, he had a number of “personal conversations” which reframed his views. Of the many comments Stallman has made which drew ire, this is one of the few for which a correction was made, in September 2019:

Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.

Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.

— stallman.org, 14 September 2019 “Sex between an adult and a child is wrong”

This statement from Stallman has been accepted by his defenders as evidence of his capitulation on pedophilia. I argue that this statement is misleading due to the particular way Stallman uses the word “child”. When Stallman uses this word, he does so with a very specific meaning, which he explains on his website:

Children: Humans up to age 12 or 13 are children. After that, they become adolescents or teenagers. Let’s resist the practice of infantilizing teenagers, by not calling them “children”.

— stallman.org, “Anti-glossary”

It seems clear from this definition is that Stallman’s comments are not a capitulation at all. His 2019 retraction, when interpreted using his definition of “children”, does not contradict most of Stallman’s past statements regarding sex and minors, including his widely criticized defenses of many people accused of sexual impropriety with minors.

Stallman’s most recent direct response to his criticism underscores this:

It was right for me to talk about the injustice to Minsky, but it was tone-deaf that I didn’t acknowledge as context the injustice that Epstein did to women or the pain that caused.

— fsf.org, April 12, 2021, “RMS addresses the free software community”

Stallman qualifies his apology by explicitly re-affirming his defense of Marvin Minsky, which is addressed in detail later in this piece. Stallman’s doubling-down here is consistent with the supposition that Stallman maintains the view that minors can have sexual relationships with adults of any age, provided that they aren’t “children” – in other words, provided they’re at least 13 or 14 years old.

Stallman cares deeply about language and its usage. His strange and deliberate usage of the word “children” is also found many times throughout his political notes over the years. For example:

It sounds horrible: “UN peacekeepers accused of child rape in South Sudan.” But the article makes it pretty clear that the “children” involved were not children. They were teenagers.

— stallman.org, 30 April 2018 “UN peacekeepers in South Sudan”

Here Stallman again explicitly distinguishes “teenagers” from children, drawing this distinction especially in the context of sexual relationships between adults and minors. Stallman repeats this pattern many times over the years – we see it again in Stallman’s widely criticized defense of Cody Wilson:

Cody Wilson has been charged with hiring a “child” sex worker. Her age has not been announced, but I think she must surely be a teenager, not a child. Calling teenagers “children” in this context is a way of smearing people with normal sexual proclivities as “perverts”.

— stallman.org, 23 September 2018 “Cody Wilson”

And once more when defending Roy Moore:

Senate candidate Roy Moore tried to start dating/sexual relationships with teenagers some decades ago.

He tried to lead Ms Corfman step by step into sex, but he always respected “no” from her and his other dates. Thus, Moore does not deserve the exaggerated condemnation that he is receiving for this. As an example of exaggeration: one mailing referred to these teenagers as “children”, even the one that was 18 years old. Many teenagers are minors, but none of them are children.

The condemnation is surely sparked by the political motive of wanting to defeat Moore in the coming election, but it draws fuel from ageism and the fashion for overprotectiveness of “children”.

— stallman.org, 27 November 2017 “Roy Moore’s relationships”

Ms. Corfman was 14 at the time Roy Moore is accused of initiating sexual contact with her; Moore was 32 at the time. Here we see an example of him re-iterating his definition of “children”, a distinction he draws especially to suggest that an adult having sex with a minor is socially acceptable.

Note that Stallman refers to Ms. Corfman as Moore’s “date”. Stallman’s use of this word is important: here he normalizes the possibility that a minor and an adult could engage in a healthy dating relationship. In this statement, Stallman cites an article which explains circumstances which do not resemble such a normalized dating experience: Moore isolated Corfman from her mother, drove her directly to his home, and initiated sexual contact there.

Note also that the use of the phrase “step by step” in this quotation is more commonly referred to as “grooming” in the discourse on child sexual exploitation.

Stallman reaches for similar reasoning in other political notes, such as the following:

A British woman is on trial for going to a park and inviting teenage boys to have sex with her there. Her husband acted as a lookout in case someone else passed by. One teenager allegedly visited her at her house repeatedly to have sex with her.

None of these acts would be wrong in any sense, provided they took precautions against spreading infections. The idea that adolescents (of whatever sex) need to be “protected” from sexual experience they wish to have is prudish ignorantism, and making that experience a crime is perverse.

— stallman.org, 26 May 2017, “Prudish ignorantism”

The woman in question, aged 60, had sex with her husband, age 69, in a public space, and invited spectators as young as 11 to participate.

Stallman has also sought to normalize adult attraction to minors, literally describing it as “normal” in September 2018:

Calling teenagers “children” encourages treating teenagers as children, a harmful practice which retards their development into capable adults.

In this case, the effect of that mislabeling is to smear Wilson. It is rare, and considered perverse, for adults to be physically attracted to children. However, it is normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents. Since the claims about Wilson is the latter, it is wrong to present it as the former.

— stallman.org, 23 September 2018, “Cody Wilson”

One month prior, Stallman made a statement which similarly normalized adult attraction to minors, and suggests that acting on this attraction should be acceptable to society, likening opposition to this view to homosexual conversion therapy:

This accords with the view that Stendhal reported in France in the 1800s, that a woman’s most beautiful years were from 16 to 20.

Although this attitude on men’s part is normal, the author still wants to present it as wrong or perverted, and implicitly demands men somehow control their attraction to direct it elsewhere. Which is as absurd, and as potentially oppressive, as claiming that homosexuals should control their attraction and direct it towards to the other sex. Will men be pressured to undergo “age conversion therapy” intended to brainwash them to feel attracted mainly to women of their own age?

— stallman.org, 21 August 2018, “Age and attraction”

A trend is thus clearly seen in Stallman’s regular political notes, over several years, wherein Stallman re-iterates his position that “adolescents” or “teenagers” are distinct from “children” for the purpose of having sex with adults, and normalizes and defends adult attraction to minors and adults who perform sexual acts with minors. We see this distinction of the two groups, children and adolescents, outlined again on his “anti-glossary”, which still published on his website today, albeit without the connotations of sex. His regular insistence on a definition of children which excludes adolescents serves such that his redaction of his controversial 2013 comment serves to redact none of the other widely-condemned comments he has made since.

Stallman has often written political notes when people accused of sexual impropriety, particularly with minors, appear in the news, or appear among Stallman’s social circle. Stallman’s comments generally downplay the abuse and manipulate language in a manner which benefits perpetrators of abuse. We see this downplaying in another example from 2019:

Should we accept stretching the terms “sexual abuse” and “molestation” to include looking without touching?

I do not accept it.

— stallman.org, 11 June 2019 “Stretching meaning of terms”

Stallman is writing here in response to a news article outlining accusations of sexual misconduct directed at Ohio State athletics doctor Richard Strauss. Strauss was accused of groping at least 177 students between 1979 and 1997 during routine physical exams, accusations corroborated by at least 50 members of the athletic department staff.

In addition to Stallman’s regular fixation of the use of the word “children” with respect to sex, this political note also draws our attention to the next linguistic fixation of Stallman I want to question: the use of phrases like “sexual abuse” and “sexual assault”. The term “sexual assault” also appears in Stallman’s “Anti-glossary”:

Sexual assault: The term is applied to a broad range of actions, from rape on one end, to the least physical contact on the other, as well as everything in between. It acts as propaganda for treating them all the same. That would be wrong.

The term is further stretched to include sexual harassment, which does not refer to a single act, but rather to a series of acts that amounts to a form of gender bias. Gender bias is rightly prohibited in certain situations for the sake of equal opportunity, but that is a different issue.

I don’t think that rape should be treated the same as a momentary touch. People we accuse have a right to those distinctions, so I am careful not to use the term “sexual assault” to categorize the actions of any person on any specific occasion.

— stallman.org, “Anti-glossary”

Stallman often fixates on the term “sexual assault” throughout his political notes. He feels that the term fails to distinguish between “grave” and “minor” crimes, as he illustrated in 2021:

“Sexual assault” is so vague that it makes no sense as a charge. Because of that term, we can’t whether these journalists were accused of a grave crime or a minor one. However, the charge of espionage shows this is political persecution.

— stallman.org, 21 July 2021, “Imprisonment of journalists”

I would like to find out what kind of crimes Stallman feels the need to distinguish along this axis. His other political notes give us some hints, such as this one regarding Al Franken’s sexual misconduct scandal:

If it is true that he persistently pressured her to kiss him, on stage and off, if he stuck his tongue into her mouth despite her objections, that could well be sexual harassment. He should have accepted no for an answer the first time she said it. However, calling a kiss “sexual assault” is an exaggeration, an attempt to equate it to much graver acts, that are crimes.

The term “sexual assault” encourages that injustice, and I believe it has been popularized specifically with that intention. That is why I reject that term.

— stallman.org, 30 July 2019, “Al Franken”

Stallman also wrote in 2020 to question the use of the phrase again:

In the US, when thugs¹ rape people they say are suspects, it is rare to bring them to justice.

I object to describing any one crime as “sexual assault” because that is vague about the severity of the crime. This article often uses that term to refer to many crimes that differ in severity but raise the same issue. That may be a valid practice.

— stallman.org, 12 August 2020, “When thugs rape people they say are suspects”

In the article Stallman cites in this political note, various unwelcome sexual acts by the police are described, the least severe of which is probably molestation.

More alarmingly, Stallman addresses his views on the term “sexual assault” in this 2017 note, affording for the possibility that a 35-year-old man could have had consensual sex with an 11-year-old girl.

Jelani Maraj (who I had never heard of) could be imprisoned for a long time for “sexual assault”. What does that concretely mean?

Due to the vagueness of the term “sexual assault” together with the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as “rape” even if they are willing, we cannot tell from this article what sort of acts Maraj was found to have committed. So we can’t begin to judge whether those acts were wrong.

I see at least three possibilities. Perhaps those acts really constituted rape — it is a possibility. Or perhaps the two had sex willingly, but her parents freaked out and demanded prosecution. Or, intermediate between those two, perhaps he pressured her into having sex, or got her drunk.

— stallman.org, 13 November 2017, “Jelani Maraj”

Another article by Stallman does not explicitly refer to sexual assault, but does engage in a bizarre defense of a journalist who was fired for masturbating during a video conference. In this article Stallman fixates on questions such as whether or not the genitals being in view of the webcam was intentional or not, and suggests that masturbating on a video call would be acceptable should the genitals remain unseen.

The New Yorker’s unpublished note to staff was vague about its grounds for firing Toobin. Indeed, it did not even acknowledge that he had been fired. This is unfair, like convicting someone on unstated charges. Something didn’t meet its “standards of conduct”, but it won’t tell us what — we can only guess. What are the possibilities? Intentionally engaging in video-call sex as a side activity during a work meeting? If he had not made a mistake in keeping that out of view of the coworkers, why would it make a difference what the side activity was?

— stallman.org, November 2020, “On the Firing of Jeffrey Toobin”

Finally, Stallman elaborated on his thoughts on the term most recently in October 2023. This note gives the clearest view of Stallman’s preferred distinction between various sexual crimes:

I warned that the stretchable term “sexual assault”, which extends from grave crimes such as rape through significant crimes such as groping and down to no clear lower bound, could be stretched to criminalize minor things, perhaps even stealing a kiss. Now this has happened.

What next? Will a pat on the arm or a hug be criminalized? There is no clear limit to how far this can go, when a group builds up enough outrage to push it.

— stallman.org, 15 October 2023, “Sexual assault for stealing a kiss”

From Stallman’s statements, we can refine his objection to the term “sexual assault”, and sexual behaviors generally, to further suggest that the following beliefs are held by Stallman on the subject:

• Groping and molestation are not sexual assault, but are crimes
• Kissing someone without consent is not sexual assault, furthermore it is not wrong
• Masturbating during a video conference is not wrong if you are not seen doing so
• A 35-year-old man having sex with an 11-year-old girl does not constitute rape, nor sexual assault, but is in fact conscionable

The last of these may be covered under Stallman’s 2019 retraction, even accounting for Stallman’s unconventional use of the word “children”.

Stallman’s fixation on the term “sexual assault” can be understood in his political notes as having the political aims of eroding the meaning of the phrase, questioning the boundaries of consent, downplaying the importance of agency in intimate interactions, appealing for the defense of people accused of sexual assault, and arguing for sexual relationships between minors and adults to be normalized. In one notable case, he has used this political angle to rise to the defense of his friends – in Stallman’s infamous email regarding Marvin Minsky, he writes the following:

The injustice [done to Minsky] is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.

(…)

The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.

We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.

— Excerpt from Selam G’s recount of Stallman’s email to MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory mailing list, September 2019. Selam’s quotation has been corroborated by other sources. Minsky is, in this context, accused of having had a sexual encounter with a minor facilitated by convicted child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. The original accusation does not state that this sexual encounter actually occurred; only that the minor in question was instructed to have sex with Minsky. Minsky would have been at least 75 years old at the time of the alleged incident; the minor was 16.

There is an important, but more subtle pattern in Stallman’s statements that I want to draw your attention to here: Stallman appears to have little to no understanding of the role of power dynamics in sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Stallman appears to reject the supposition that these acts could occur without an element of outwardly apparent violent coercion.

This is most obviously evidenced by his statements regarding the sexual abuse of minors; most people understand that minors cannot consent to sex even if they “appear willing”, in particular because an adult in this situation is exploiting a difference in experience and maturity to manipulate the child into sexually satisfying them – in other words, a power differential. Stallman seems to reject this understanding of consent in his various defenses of people accused of sexual impropriety with minors, and in cases where the pretense of consent cannot be easily established, he offers the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt.

We can also find an example of Stallman disregarding power dynamics with respect to adults in the following political note from 2017:

A famous theater director had a habit of pestering women, asking them for sex.

As far as I can tell from this article, he didn’t try to force women into sex.

When women persistently said no, he does not seem to have tried to punish them.

The most he did was ask.

He was a pest, but nothing worse than that.

— stallman.org, 29 October 2017, “Pestering women”

In this case we have an example of “quid pro quo”, a kind of sexual harassment which weaponizes power dynamics for sexual gratification. This kind of sexual harassment is explicitly cited as illegal by Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act. A lack of competence in this respect displayed by Stallman, whose position in the Free Software Foundation board of directors requires that he act in a manner consistent with this law, is alarming.

I have identified this blindness to power dynamics as a recurring theme in Stallman’s comments on sexual abuse, be it with respect to sexual relationships between minors and adults, managers and subordinates, students and teachers, or public figures and their audience. I note for the reader that Stallman has held and currently holds several of these positions of power.

In addition to his position as a voting member of the Free Software Foundation’s Board of Directors, Stallman is still invited to speak at events and conferences. Stallman’s infamous rider prescribes a number of his requirements for attending an event; most of his conditions are relatively reasonable, though amusing. In this document, he states his preference for being accommodated in private, on a “spare couch”, when he travels. At these events, in these private homes, he may be afforded many opportunities to privacy with vulnerable people, including minors that, in his view, can consent to having sex with adults.

In summary, Stallman has a well-documented and oft-professed set of political beliefs which reject the social and legal norms regarding consent. He is not simply quietly misled in these beliefs; rather he advocates for these values using his political platform. He has issued no meaningful retractions of these positions or apologies for harm caused, and has continued to pursue a similar agenda since his return to the FSF board of directors.

This creates a toxic environment not only in the Free Software Foundation and in Stallman’s direct purview, but in the broader Free Software movement. The free software movement is culturally poisoned by our support of Stallman as our ideological leader. The open letter calling for Stallman’s removal received 3,000 signatures; the counter-letter in support of Stallman received 6,876 before it stopped accepting submissions.

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and has performed innumerable works to the benefit of our community since then. We’ve taken Stallman’s views on software freedom seriously, and they’ve led us to great achievements. It is to Stallman’s credit that the Free Software community is larger than one man. However, one’s political qualifications to speak about free software does not make one qualified to address matters of sex; in this respect Stallman’s persistence presents as dangerous incompetence.

When we consider his speech on sex as a discourse that has been crafted and rehearsed methodically over the years, he asks us to consider him seriously, and so we must. When we analyze the dangerous patterns in this discourse, we have to conclude that he is not fit for purpose in his leadership role, and we must acknowledge the shadow that our legitimization of his discourse casts on our community.

I am working on rousing the Hare community to get the word out about our work. I have drafted the Hare evangelism guidelines to this effect, which summarizes how we want to see our community bringing Hare to more people.

We’d like to spread the word in a way which is respectful of the attention of others – we’re explicitly eschewing unsolicited prompts for projects to consider writing/rewriting in Hare, as well as any paid sponsorships or advertising. Blog posts about Hare, videos, participating in (organic) online discussions – much better! And one idea we have is to talk about Hare on podcasts which might be interested in the project.

If that describes your podcast, here’s my bold request: can I make an appearance?

Here are some mini “press kits” to give you a hook and some information that might be useful for preparing an interview.

The Hare programming language

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.

Hare has been in development since late 2019 and today has about 100 contributors.

• Official website
• Source code & development resources
• “Introducing the Hare programming language”, video, 2022
• GPLv3, MPL 2.0, MIT

Hare’s official mascot, Harriet. Drawn by Louis Taylor, CC-0

The Ares operating system

Ares is an operating system written in Hare which is under development. It features a micro-kernel oriented design and runs on x86_64 and aarch64. Its design is inspired by the seL4 micro-kernel and Plan 9.

• Official website
• Source code & development resources
• “Introducing the Helios micro-kernel”, video, FOSDEM 2023
• GPLv3

A picture of a ThinkPad running Ares and demonstrating some features

Himitsu: a secret storage system

Himitsu is a secure secret storage system for Unix-like systems. It provides an arbitrary key/value store (where values may be secret) and a query language for manipulating the key store.

Himitsu is written in Hare.

• Official website
• Source code & development resources
• Video tour
• GPLv3

Interested?

If any of these topics are relevant for your podcast and you’d like to talk about them, please reach out to me via email: sir@cmpwn.com

Thanks!

Some free software projects reject anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, requiring you to author patches using your “real name”. Such projects have a so-called “real name” policy; Linux is one well-known example.¹

The root motivations behind such policies vary, but in my experience the most often cited rationale is that it’s important to establish the provenance of the contribution for copyright reasons. In the case of Linux, contributors are asked to “sign-off” their commits to indicate their agreement to the terms of the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), which includes clauses like the following:

The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license indicated in the file.

To some extent, the DCO serves as a legal assertion of copyright and an agreement to license a work under given copyright terms (GPLv2 in the case of Linux). This record also means that the author of the code is accountable in case the copyright is challenged; in the case of an anonymous or pseudonymous contributor you’re shit out of luck. At that point, liability over the disagreement would likely fall into the hands of the maintainer that accepted the contribution. It is reasonable for a maintainer to ask a contributor to assert their copyright and accept liability over the provenance of their code in a legally meaningful and accountable form.

The possibility that someone may have something useful to offer to a free software project, but is not comfortable disclosing their name for any number of reasons, is a reasonable supposition. A maintainer whose “real name” policy is challenged on this basis would also be reasonable in saying “I feel for you, but I cannot agree to accept legal liability over the provenance of this code, nor can I communicate that risk to end-users who acquire code under a license that may or may not be valid as such”.

“Real name” policies are controversial in the free software community. I open with this perspective in an attempt to cool down the room. Those who feel marginalized by “real name” policies often skew young, and many treat matters such as copyright and licensing with disdain. Moreover, the problem tends to inflame deeply hurtful sentiments and raise thorny matters of identity and discrimination, and it’s easy to construe the intent of the policymakers as the intent to cause harm. The motivations behind these policies are reasonable.

That said, intent or otherwise, these policies can cause harm. The profile of the contributor who is comfortable using their “real name” is likely to fall more narrowly into over-represented demographics in our community; enforcing a real-name policy will ostracize some people. Those with marginalized identities tend to be less comfortable with disclosing their “real name”. Someone who has been subject to harassment may not be comfortable with this disclosure, since it offers more fuel to harassers keeping tabs on their activities. The use of a “real name” also confers a gender bias; avoiding a “real name” policy neatly eliminates discrimination on this basis. Of course, there are also many falsehoods programmers believe about names which can present in the implementation of such a policy.

There is also one particular problem which has been at the heart of conflict surrounding the use of “real-name” policies in free software: transgender identities. A transgender person is likely to change their name in the process of assuming their new identity. When this happens, their real name changes. However, it may or may not match their legal name – some trans people opt to change it, others don’t; if they do it is a process that takes time. Meanwhile, addressing a trans person by their old name, or “deadname”, is highly uncomfortable. Doing so deliberately, as a matter of policy or otherwise, is a form of discrimination. Many trans people experience deliberate “deadnaming” as a form of harassment in their daily lives, and institutionalizing this behavior is cruel.

The truth is, managing the names of participants is more challenging than anyone would like. On the one hand, names establish accountability and facilitate collaboration, and importantly, credit the authors of a work for services performed. On the other hand, names are highly personal and deeply affecting, and their usage and changes over time are the subject of important consideration at the discretion of their owner. A complicating factor is that handling names properly introduces technical problems which must be overcome.

To embrace the advantages of “real name” policies – establishing provenance, encouraging accountability, fostering a social environment – without causing harm, the approach I have settled on for my projects is to use the DCO to establish provenance and encourage contributors to sign-off and participate under the identity they feel most comfortable with. I encourage people to utilize an identity they use beyond the project’s walls, to foster a social environment and a connection to the broader community, to establish accountability, and to ensure that participants are reachable for further discussion on their work. If a contributor’s identity changes, we make every effort to support this change in contemporary, future, and historical use.

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the same fundamental goals and strive to live the same life.

I think of such a life experiences as “following the script”. Society lays down for us a framework for living out our lives. Everyone deviates from the script to some extent, but most people hit the important beats. In Western society, these beats are something like, go to school, go to college, get a degree, build a career, get married, have 1.5 children, retire to Florida, die.

There are a number of reasons that someone may deviate from the script. The most common case is that the deviations are imposed by circumstance. A queer person will face discrimination, for instance, in marriage, or in adopting and raising children. Someone born into the lower class will have reduced access to higher education and their opportunities for career-building are curtailed accordingly; similar experiences follow for people from marginalized groups. Furthermore, more and more people who might otherwise be able to follow the script are finding that they can’t afford a home and don’t have the resources to build a family.

There are nevertheless many people who are afforded the opportunity to follow the script, and when they do so, they often experience something resembling a happy and fulfilling life. Generally this is not the result of a deliberate choice – no one was presented with the script and asked “is this what you want”? Each day simply follows the last and you make the choices that correspond with what you were told a good life looks like, and sometimes a good life follows.

Of course, it is entirely valid to want the “scripted” life. But you were not asked if you wanted it: it was just handed to you on a platter. The average person lacks the philosophical background which underpins their worldview and lifestyle, and consequently cannot explain why it’s “good”, for them or generally. Consider your career. You were told that it was a desirable thing to build for yourself, and you understand how to execute your duties as a member of the working class, but can you explain why those duties are important and why you should spend half of your waking life executing them? Of course, if you are good at following the script, you are rewarded for doing so, generally with money, but not necessarily with self-actualization.

This state of affairs leads to some complex conflicts. This approach to life favors the status quo and preserves existing power structures, which explains in part why it is re-enforced by education and broader social pressures. It also leads to a sense of learned helplessness, a sense that this is the only way things can be, which reduces the initiative to pursue social change – for example, by forming a union.

It can also be uncomfortable to encounter someone who does not follow the script, or even questions the script. You may be playing along, and mostly or entirely exposed to people who play along. Meeting someone who doesn’t – they skipped college, they don’t want kids, they practice polyamory, they identify as a gender other than what you presumed, etc – this creates a moment of dissonance and often resistance. This tends to re-enforce biases and can even present as inadvertent micro-aggressions.

I think it’s important to question the script, even if you decide that you like it. You should be able to explain why you like it. This process of questioning is a radical act. A radical, in its non-pejorative usage, is born when someone questions their life and worldview, decides that they want something else, and seeks out others who came to similar conclusions. They organize, they examine their discomfort and put it to words, and they share these words in the hope that they can explain a similar discomfort that others might feel within themselves. Radical movements, which by definition is any movement which challenges the status quo, are the stories of the birth and spread of radical ideas.

Ask yourself: who are you? Did you choose to be this person? Who do you want to be, and how will you become that person? Should you change your major? Drop out? Quit your job, start a business, found a labor union? Pick up a new hobby? Join or establish a social club? An activist group? Get a less demanding job, move into a smaller apartment, and spend more time writing or making art? However you choose to live, choose it deliberately.

The next step is an exercise in solidarity. How do you feel about others who made their own choices, choices which may be alike or different to your own? Or those whose choices were constrained by their circumstances? What can you do together that you couldn’t do alone?

Who do you want to be? Do you know?

There are forbidden topics in the hacker community. One is sternly reprimanded for bringing them up, by their peers, their leaders, and the community at large. In private, one can expect threats and intimidation; in public, outcry and censorship. The forbidden topics are enforced by the moderators of our spaces, taken off of forums, purged from chat rooms, and cleaned up from GitHub issues and mailing lists; the ban-hammers fall swiftly and resolutely. My last article to touch these subjects was removed from Hacker News by the moderators within 30 minutes and landed several death threats in my inbox. The forbidden topics, when raised, are met with a resounding, aggressive dismissal and unconditional condemnation.

Some years ago, the hacker community possessed near-unanimous praise for the ideals of free speech; the hacker position was generally that of what we would now understand as “radical” free speech, which is to say the kind of “shout ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater” radical, but more specifically the kind that tolerates hate speech. The popular refrain went, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. Many hackers hold this as a virtue to this day. I once held this as a virtue for myself.

However, this was a kind of free speech which was unconsciously contingent on being used for speech with which the listener was comfortable. The hacker community at this time was largely homogeneous, and as such most of the speech we were exposed to was of the comfortable sort. As the world evolved around us, and more people found their voice, this homogeneity began to break down. Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.

The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic. Speech which challenged their preconceptions and challenged their power structures was not so easily acceptable. The pretense is dropped and they lash out in anger, calling for the speakers to be excluded from our communities.

Some of the once-forbidden topics are becoming less so. There are carefully chalked-out spaces where we can talk about them, provided they are not too challenging, such as LGBTQ identities or the struggles of women in our spaces. Such discussions are subject to careful management by our leaders and moderators, to the extent necessary to preserve power structures. Those who speak on these topics are permitted to do so relatively free of retaliation provided that they speak from a perspective of humility, a voice that “knows its place”. Any speech which suggests that the listener may find themselves subject to a non-majority-conforming person in a position of power, or even that of a peer, will have crossed the line; one must speak as a victim seeking the pity and grace of your superiors to be permitted space to air your grievances.

Similarly, space is made for opposition to progressive speech, again moderated only insofar as it is necessary to maintain power structures. Some kinds of overt hate speech may rouse a response from our leaders, but those who employ a more subtle approach are permitted their voice. Thus, both progressive speech and hate speech are permitted within a carefully regulated framework of power preservation.

Some topics, however, remain strictly forbidden.

Our community has persistent and pervasive problems of a particular sort which we are not allowed to talk about: sexual harassment and assault. Men who assault, harass, and even rape women in our spaces, are protected. A culture of silence is enforced, and those who call out rape, sexual assault, or harassment, those who criticise they who enable and protect these behaviors, are punished, swiftly and aggressively.

Men are terrified of these kinds of allegations. It seems like a life sentence: social ostracization, limited work opportunities, ruined relationships. We may have events in our past that weigh on our conscience; was she too drunk, did she clearly consent, did she regret it in the morning? Some of us have events in our past that we try not to think about, because if we think too hard, we might realize that we crossed the line. This fills men with guilt and uncertainty, but also fear. We know the consequences if our doubts became known.

So we lash out in this fear. We close ranks. We demand the most stringent standards of evidence to prove anything, evidence that we know is not likely to be there. We refuse to believe that our friends were not the men we thought they were, or to confront that we might not be ourselves. We demand due process under the law, we say they should have gone to the police, that they can’t make accusations of such gravity without hard proof. Think of the alleged perpetrator; we can’t ruin their lives over frivolous accusations.

For victims, the only recourse permitted by society is to suffer in silence. Should they speak, victims are subject to similar persecutions: they are ostracized, struggle to work, and lose their relationships. They have to manage the consequences of a traumatic experience with support resources which are absent or inadequate. Their trauma is disbelieved, their speech is punished, and their assailants walk free among us as equals while they are subject to retaliatory harassment or worse.

Victims have no recourse which will satisfy men. Reporting a crime is traumatic, especially one of this nature. I have heard many stories of disbelief from the authorities, disbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence. They were told it was their fault. They were told they should have been in a different place, or wearing something else, or should have simply been a different person. It’s their fault, not the aggressor’s. It’s about what they, the victim, should have done differently, never mind what the perpetrator should have done differently. It’s estimated that less than 1% of rapes end with the rapist in jail¹ – the remainder go unreported, unprosecuted or fail after years of traumatic legal proceedings for the victims. The legal system does not provide justice: it exacerbates harm. A hacker will demand this process is completed before they will seek justice, or allow justice to be sought. Until then, we will demand silence, and retaliate if our demands are not met.

The strict standards of evidence required by the justice system are there because of the state monopoly on violence: a guilty verdict in a crime will lead to the imprisonment of the accused. We have no such recourse available in private, accordingly there is no need to hold ourselves to such standards. Our job is not to punish the accused, but rather to keep our communities safe. We can establish the need to take action to whatever standard we believe is sufficient, and by setting these standards as strict as the courts we will fail to resolve over 99% of the situations with which we are faced – a standard which is clearly not sufficient to address the problem. I’m behind you if you want to improve the justice system in this regard, but not if you set this as a blocker to seeking any justice at all. What kind of hacker puts their faith in authority?

I find the state of affairs detestable. The hypocrisy of the free speech absolutist who demands censorship of challenging topics. The fact that the famous hacker curiosity can suddenly dry up if satisfying it would question our biases and preconceptions. The complicity of our moderators in censoring progressive voices in the defense of decorum and the status quo. The duplicitous characterization of “polite” hate speech as acceptable in our communities. Our failure to acknowledge our own shortcomings, our fear of seeing the “other” in a position of power, and the socially enforced ignorance of the “other” that naturally leads to failing to curtail discrimination and harassment in our communities. The ridiculously high standard of evidence we require from victims, who simply ask for our belief at a minimum, before we’ll consider doing anything about their grievance, if we could even be convinced in the first place.

Meanwhile, the problems that these forbidden topics seek to discuss are present in our community. That includes the “polite” problems, such as the conspicuous lack of diversity in our positions of power, which may be discussed and commiserated only until someone suggests doing something about it; and also the impolite problems up to and including the protection of the perpetrators of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and, yes, rape.

Most hackers live under the comfortable belief that it “can’t happen here”, but it can and it does. I attended a hacker event this year – HiP Berlin – where I discovered that some of the organizers had cooperated to make it possible for multiple known rapists to participate, working together to find a way to circumvent the event’s code of conduct – a document that they were tasked with enforcing. One of the victims was in attendance, believing the event to be safe. At every hacker event I have attended in recent memory, I have personally witnessed or heard stories of deeply problematic behavior and protection for its perpetrators from the leadership.

Our community has problems, important problems, that every hacker should care about, and we need the bravery and humility to face them, not the cowardice to retaliate against those who speak up. Talk to, listen to, and believe your peers and their stories. Stand up for what’s right, and speak out when you see something that isn’t. Demand that your leaders and moderators do the right thing. Make a platform where people can safely speak about what our community needs to do right by them, and have the courage to listen to them and confront yourself.

You need to be someone who will do something about it.

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Edit: Case in point: this post was quietly removed by Hacker News moderators within 40 minutes of its submission.

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!

Unfortunately, the effect is spoilt by an incredibly toxic and hateful community. I cannot recommend Hyprland to anyone who is not prepared to steer well clear of its community spaces. Imagine a high school boys’ locker room come to life on Discord and GitHub and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like.

I became aware of the issues with Hyprland’s community after details of numerous hateful incidents on their Discord came to my attention by way of the grapevine. Most of them stem from the community’s tolerance of hate: community members are allowed to express hateful views with impunity, up to and including astonishing views such as endorsements of eugenics and calls for hate-motivated violence. Such comments are treated as another act in the one big inside joke that is the Hyprland community – the community prefers not to take itself “too seriously”. Hate is moderated only if it is “disruptive” (e.g. presents as spam), but hate presented with a veneer of decorum (or sarcasm) is tolerated, and when challenged, it’s laughed off as a joke.

In one particular incident, the moderators of the Discord server engaged in a harassment campaign against a transgender user, including using their moderator privileges to edit the pronouns in their username from “they/she” to “who/cares”. These roles should be held by trusted community leaders, and it’s from their behavior that the community’s culture and norms stem – they set an example for the community and define what behaviors are acceptable or expected. The problem comes from the top down.

Someone recently pitched a code of conduct – something that this project sorely needs – in a GitHub issue. This thread does not have much overt hate, but it does clearly show how callous and just plain mean the community is, including its leadership (Vaxerski is the original author of Hyprland). Everything is a joke and anyone who wants to be “serious” about anything is mercilessly bullied and made fun of. Quoting this discussion:

I think [a Code of Conduct] is pretty discriminatory towards people that prefer a close, hostile, homogeneous, exclusive, and unhealthy community.

First of all, why would I pledge to uphold any values? Seems like just inconveniencing myself. […] If I’d want to moderate, I’d spend 90% of the time reading kids arguing about bullshit instead of coding.

If you don’t know how to behave without a wall of text explaining how to behave online then you shouldn’t be online.

I am not someone who believes all projects need a code of conduct, if there exists a reasonable standard of conduct in its absence – and that means having a community that does not bully and harass others for expressing differing points of view, let alone for simply having a marginalized identity.

I would have preferred to address these matters in private, so I reached out to Vaxry in February. He responded with a lack of critical awareness over how toxicity presents in his community. However, following my email, he put out a poll for the Discord community to see if the community members experienced harassment in the community – apparently 40% of respondents reported such experiences. Vaxry et al implemented new moderation policies as a result. But these changes did not seem to work: the problems are still present, and the community is still a toxic place that facilitates bullying and hate, including from the community leaders.

Following my email conversation with Vaxry, he appeared on a podcast to discuss toxicity in the Hyprland community. This quote from the interview clearly illustrates the attitude of the leadership:

[A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of their pronouns [..] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a big deal out of them because people were referring to them as “he” [misgendering them], which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default. And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”. […] Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.

Later he describes a more moderated community (the /r/unixporn discord server) as having an environment in which everyone is going to “lick your butthole just to be nice”. He compared himself to Terry Davis, the late operating system developer whose struggles with mental illness were broadcast for the world to see, citing a video in which he answers a phone call and refers to the person on the phone by the N-word “ten times” – Vaxry compares this to his approach to answering “stupid questions”.

It really disappoints me to see such an exciting project brought low by a horribly mismanaged community of hate and bullying. Part of what makes open source software great is that it’s great for everyone. It’s unfortunate that someone can discover this cool project, install it and play with it and get excited about it, then join the community to find themselves at the wrong end of this behavior. No one deserves that.

I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean. I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt. What motivates us to build and give away free software if not bringing joy to ourselves and others? Can we be proud of a community which brings more suffering into the world?

My advice to the leadership begins with taking a serious look in the mirror. This project needs a “come to Jesus” moment. Ask yourself what kind of community you can be proud of – can you be proud of a community that people walk away from feeling dejected and hurt? Yours is not a community that brings people joy. What are you going to do about it?

A good start will be to consider the code of conduct proposal seriously, but a change of attitude is also required. My inbox is open to any of the leaders in this project (or any other project facing similar problems) if you want to talk. I’m happy to chat with you in good faith and help you understand what’s needed and why it’s important.

To members of the Hyprland community, I want each of you to personally step up to make the community better. If you see hate and bullying, don’t stay silent. This is a community which proclaims to value radical free speech: test it by using your speech to argue against hate. Participate in the community as you think it should be, not as it necessarily is, and change will follow. If you are sensitive to hate, or a member of a marginalized group, however, I would just advise steering clear of Hyprland until the community improves.

If the leadership fails to account for these problems, it will be up to the community to take their activity elsewhere. You could set up adjacent communities which are less toxic, or fork the software, or simply choose to use something else.

To the victims of harassment, I offer my sincere condolences. I know how hard it is to be the subject of this kind of bullying. You don’t deserve to be treated like this. There are many places in the free software community where you are welcome and celebrated – Hyprland is not the norm. If you need support, I’m always available to listen to your struggles.

To everyone else: please share this post throughout the Hyprland community and adjacent communities. This is a serious problem and it’s not going to change unless its clearly brought to light. The Hyprland maintainers need to be made aware that the broader open source community does not appreciate this kind of behavior.

I sincerely hope that this project improves its community. A serious attitude shift is needed from the top-down, and I hope for the sake of Vaxry, the other leaders, and the community as a whole, that such change comes sooner rather than later. When Vaxry is older and wiser, I want him to look back on the project and community that he’s built with pride and joy, not with regret and shame.

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Vaxry has published a response to this post.

I was also privately provided some of the enusing discussion from the Hyprland Discord. Consider that this lacks context and apply your grain of salt accordingly.

I apologise to Vaxry for interrupting their rest, and wish them a speedy recovery.

Here is a plain text log which includes some additional discussion.