Opensource game rejected from Debian for authors' social beliefs

Anonymous Coward

in linux on 2014-11-21 19:59 (#2V55)

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?]

Conservative views? (Score: 4, Insightful)

by dgoodmaniii@pipedot.org on 2014-11-23 13:19 (#2V6V)

It's hard for me to see how these views could be described as "conservative," unless you predefine that term to mean "sexist and/or generally distasteful." In any case, it seems clear to me that he was banned not for his views, but his socially poisonous rhetoric. There's a pretty clear line between "feminism is ultimately a bad thing" and "I hate you all, your group is terrible, and women are worthless scum, and by the way you're all also probably whores." The first might be described as a "conservative view"; the second is poisonous to all useful discourse (not to mention bad and wrong, but that's opinion). If this nastiness affected his code, then as someone who could reasonably be described as "conservative" on some issues, I have no problem with it being excluded. Maybe a cleansed fork would be possible.