Jelle Hermsen

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OpenRespect

You may have noticed the heated discussions on Ubuntu and Canonical lately. The decision to move to Unity as the main desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and Canonical insisting on developers assigning their copyright to them hasn’t made them many new friends. Whether you agree with Canonical or not some people seem to speak very harshly of their latest actions and deviate from a well-mannered debate. There seems to be an increase of rudeness in the open source / free software debate. To counter these tendencies Ubuntu’s community manager Jono Bacon launched openrespect.org.

On 26th October I read this dent from @jonobacon:

amuses me how some corners of the Open Source community assume mal-intent before good intent…we are all on the same side people!

That sentiment seemed to be a precursor for Jono’s blogpost “Making our world more respectful” in which he describes his tiredness of all the bickering in Open Source and his want for a more polite debate.

This all resulted in the OpenRespect website and the OpenRespect declaration with which I mostly agree. To support his cause you can stick a button on your website:

To be clear: I don’t agree with everything Canonical and the people from Ubuntu do. I don’t believe in copyright assignments and think it’s best to not diversify the GNU/Linux default desktops too much so we can share the effort and focus our attention. On the flip side I believe they’re doing much good for GNU/Linux and Free Software in general. They might not place the emphasize on Free Software I’d prefer, but I think they’re doing a wonderful job, and until their actions proof otherwise I will keep believing that! I’ve used Ubuntu for years and I’m using Trisquel GNU/Linux (which is based on Ubuntu) right now so I actually own them a debt of gratitude.

I hope the thoughts behind OpenRespect may have its effect and many people realize the importance of being respectful towards others you strongly disagree with.

post scriptum: In an earlier version of this post i said “To counter these tendencies Ubuntu’s community manager Jono Bacon with help from Fedora’s project leader Jared K. Smith and Debians project leader Stefano Zacchiroli launched”. This is however not right, Jareds and Stefano’s involvement is not what I reported. You can read Stefano’s comment for more information!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 16:41 and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “OpenRespect”

  1. Stefano Zacchiroli Says:
    November 10th, 2010 at 17:17

    I need to point out that what you report here is not correct.
    The initiative has been launched by Jono Bacon, who *shared* the idea before an actual statement was even drafted with myself and Jared.

    Unfortunately, the statement has not been written collaboratively at all and both myself and Jared got asked, only *after* the website was launched, whether we wanted to support the statement ex-post.

    No matter the content of the statement, this is not a brilliant example of collaboration.

    An accounting of what happened from Fedora point of view is at
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-11-08#OpenRespect.org
    a comment on mine is on Jono’s blog at http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/11/05/making-our-world-more-respectful/comment-page-2/#comment-163279 (currently in wait of moderation).

  2. jelle Says:
    November 10th, 2010 at 18:28

    @Stefano Thanks for the notice. I changed it immediately!

  3. Michael "notriddle" Howell Says:
    November 11th, 2010 at 01:10

    Comment #3 is SPAM, Jelle.

  4. jelle Says:
    November 11th, 2010 at 08:56

    @notriddle Time to turn off automatic approval of comments. It seems your comment is now referring to itself, although only after processing it once, letting the spine of your recursive spam comment unwind 1 level making it a new kind of higher level spam :-)

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