ESR pressure made feminists host detractor's code

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 01 November 2009 22:01

Opinion and Analysis

But truth, like oil and cadavers, has a troublesome way of floating to the surface.

Raymond's post makes it clear that had he not intervened, there would have been no hosting of Kvaratskhelia's code.

While he makes no secret of his contempt for Kvaratskhelia, whom he describes as a werewolf, Raymond also makes it clear that if people really care about freedom of speech then it is not enough if they defend it when they are comfortable doing so.

As background it must be pointed out that Kvaratskhelia has been posting to various forums - including the iTWire discussion forums from which his posts were removed as they were found to contravene Australian media laws - justifying discrimination against women in FOSS.

According to Raymond, Kvaratskhelia had written to FSF chief Richard Stallman, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, senior Open Source personality Bruce Perens, and Raymond, after his code was taken down by SourceForge, complaining about what had transpired.

Raymond says he did not pursue the matter until Stallman replied on October 15 "asking whether Kvaratskhelia had made backups of the censored material."

He then searched for Eicher's original blog entry and read it. "I felt, at that point, the pricking of my conscience for not having responded to Kvaratskhelia’s earlier complaint immediately," he wrote. "I wrote Ms. Eicher an email condemning the suppression of speech and expressing my judgment that she owed Kvaratskhelia an apology for her suppressive conduct – which she refused to do."

He says the precedent that Eicher wanted people to accept would have been dangerous to liberty in general and to the hacker community in particular.

Raymond gives Eicher credit for coming up with the idea of getting someone to host the code, while warning people about its origins.

There were 199 responses to Raymond's post, but there was very little flaming, if any. While some did disagree with what he had done, the tone of discussion was generally civil.