Opensource game rejected from Debian for authors' social beliefs
An open source casino video game was recently posted to the Debian bug tracker as a request for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing such things in Debian. The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix." The reason given by one of the Debian developers alluded to the authors' conservative views and his advocacy of them.
The author in question clearly expressed his views back in 2005, resulting in him being the first person ever banned from Debian mailing lists, and a month later from the bug tracking system.
The piece of software in question is licensed under the GPL and is one of the only of it's kind for Linux (ASCII-art console slot machine software). Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement for being allowed to contribute to open source?
[Ed. note: The question is, rather, where should the line be between personal and professional?]
The author in question clearly expressed his views back in 2005, resulting in him being the first person ever banned from Debian mailing lists, and a month later from the bug tracking system.
The piece of software in question is licensed under the GPL and is one of the only of it's kind for Linux (ASCII-art console slot machine software). Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement for being allowed to contribute to open source?
[Ed. note: The question is, rather, where should the line be between personal and professional?]
That all said, this is part of the issue with the big central repositories trying to have nearly everything all in one centralized place. Nobody would EVER make this kind of fuss over something not being thrown into the main Slackware repositories, because instead of trying to do everything, they focus on maintaining the core, and making things rock solid there (which is why it's one of the only major distros that didn't rush to move away from sysvinit, as Slackware's BSD style init scripts can't really be called a mess to begin with), rather than trying to package up everything and ending up with tons of packages that may or may not actually be tailored to play nice with the rest of the system (anyone remember how fun it use to be to work with multiarch support on Debian a few years ago, or perhaps the state Pulseaudio was in on Debian and associated distros?). It wouldn't be the first distro to crumble after spreading too thin trying to support anything and everything, and considering that it's the biggest defense against Redhat taking a much bigger foothold in the Linux market, I'd have to insist that that would be a terrible eventuality that should be diligently avoided. Perhaps modularizing repositories such that each major official branch sticks to its own specialization, or encouraging more independent repository use rather than leaving them to the domain of power users.
As usual, excess centralization makes things cumbersome and unwieldy. While I won't discount the extent to which the big central repositories have played making things easier to new users, it's time to swing the pendulum back in the other direction a bit while keeping the gains so that good design isn't being sacrificed in the process of catering to the needs of people who just don't have time or inclination to be *nix nerds. It is harder than just throwing "RTFM" around at everyone, but considering that at least the big distros like Debian seem to be trying to attract people that aren't *nix nerds, it's pretty obviously a task worth doing.