Larry Garfield Expelled from the Drupal OSS Community for Gor Interest

http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/drupal-larry-garfield-gor.html

by exolymph • 9 years ago

45 18 9 years ago

exolymph2• 9 years ago

Hey everybody, I'm the journalist who wrote this. Let me know if you want to call anything to my attention — my email is smann@inc.com

geerlingguy• 9 years ago

It seems like this story (like others similar to it) may have already been flag killed from appearing on the front page.

exolymph2• 9 years ago

Hmm. Perhaps someone can vouch it back on.

xref• 9 years ago

I didn't realize you worked for Acquia, but I have used your Ansible DevOps repos on Github heavily, thank you for those!

I would be interested in reading your take on this situation, but working for Acquia I guess you may not have complete freedom of speech on the topic.

draw_down• 9 years ago

Yikes.

BadassFractal• 9 years ago

Regressive. The loss of privacy is scary. Having to ideologically conform to certain arbitrary standards even in the privacy of your home cannot be the right way to go forward. Larry didn't hurt anybody, everything was consensual. Moral police following you into your bedroom is unacceptable. The fact that you're a perfectly healthy, productive, and sane member of society is not enough, you must be punished for thought crime.

The last thing I want to know is what my coworkers do at home in their spare time, what kind of sexual preferences they have and how they choose to express their sexuality and kinks. Why is this so important for the Drupal community?

adrianlmm• 9 years ago

Moral police following you into your bedroom

I don't think it was the moral police, but SJW not liking women in the role of being dominated.

andrepd2• 9 years ago

Absolutely. Not only the condemning of a consensual sexual practice (that should be nobody's business but the involved persons') but the invasion of privacy that led to this "outing" (because it's not like he was publicly announcing his sexual preferences).

cfreeman• 9 years ago

I've seen this kind of situation unfold before in a tech community. Without picking a side here, I will say that one thing that really bothers me is the lack of transparency. The whole concept of being able to publicly shame/expel someone without providing real evidence to support that action because of "privacy" seems extremely unfair.

stryk2• 9 years ago

This shit is out of control. Put aside the sexual aspect of situations like this for a second, regardless of what you think of them (a tall order for some, I know). These days it seems as if people aren't allowed to have any individual personality anymore. The Internet has the immensely incredible potential to connect the world, to bring together people of different backgrounds/cultures/communities/etc. Yet this political correctness bullshit means that if you express even the tiniest hint of being anything other than "plain Jane" straight down the middle-of-the-road you are likely to be lambasted, railroaded, harassed, and possibly lose your job/place to live/goodness knows what else.

What is even the point of things like "social media" if you can't truly be yourself? People are strange. Too many people act like like they are in the business of being professionally offended. They jump on the outrage bandwagon far too easily, seemingly just to be able to point out to other people that "yep, see, I too was against that, see my Tweet on the matter? Did ya? Did ya see it!?"

Stephen Fry was right on the money when he said people declaring they were "offended by ..." was the equivalent to the adult version of whining. OK... so you're "offended" by that... so fucking what? People act like if they declare they are offended, or point out how "wrong" something they don't agree with is that it automagically puts them on some sort of moral high ground. Ridiculous.

ams6110• 9 years ago

"These days" ??

It's always been this way. Many people are self-rightous, nosey, and judgemental.

watter• 9 years ago

yes but "these days" they have greater reach so we all have to listen to the crazies more often (constantly)

slackstation• 9 years ago

What's strange is that this is something where people haven't even complained about this person's interaction with them, merely their private sexual preferences.

Both things get treated the same way, "if anything about you makes me uncomfortable, I'll take that as threatening and force you out of the community because the things you like are unpopular"

This is the same line of reasoning that burned witches in Salem, kept gays closeted for decades and is the very thing liberal people say that they are against today.

Drupal showed themselves to be complete and utter hypocrites.

andrepd2• 9 years ago

I disagree with this frantic overreaction. I'm skeptical of speeches if the sort "these days we can't do x anymore like before" in general. Because in fact, today deviating from the norm is more tolerated and even celebrated than at any other time in American history at least. This is unquestionable. This is an edge case. Could you be a public figure 50 years ago and tell someone you were into anything but heterosexual monogamous missionary sex for the purpose of procreation? I don't think so.

stryk2• 9 years ago

That's a pretty big edge. From the sidelines it sure looks to me like this happening all over the field -- and that's just the ones that are publicly reported on, how many are scared away (or scared into reticence) that we never hear about?

devwastaken• 9 years ago

I see people are getting outraged on both sides, but the thing is we really don't know anything about what happened.

Buytaert capped off his rebuttal by implying there's more to the story than Garfield indicated. "What makes this difficult to discuss, is that it is not for me to share any of the confidential information that I've received, so I won't point out the omissions in Larry's blog post," he wrote. Within the Drupal world, the air of mystery created by Buytaert's insinuation has only served to heighten the controversy.

So there is missing information. Community projects, ones where you are having to make important decisions and interact with many people, require many positive attributes. This may be a case of discrimination for their private life, but it may also be a deeply vested ideal that seeps into their work.

Transparency is also a double edged sword for Larry and the org, too. If he really did confess that he believes women should be subservient to men, should you put that in a blog post, or just let them go? I think letting them go is a much more proffessional and moral method, so they can continue on without a worse stain.

nsxwolf• 9 years ago

When I hear someone make an insinuation like that I assume there's no factual basis and that they're a huge asshole. It's only fair. If you really have something you can't talk about, then the right thing to do is shut your mouth, not say "Oh, there's just so, so much more to this story, if only I could tell you you'd really know what a horrible person this guy is"

That should never be acceptable. Anyone can do it to anyone and it's bullshit.

ajsalminen• 9 years ago

The process has been set up so that supposedly the reason is to protect the victims but I just don't think it's possible to allow accusations to be completely anonymous and release no details at all to the community or even to the accused.

Larry Garfield Expelled from the Drupal OSS Community for Gor Interest

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