Re: Ballot option: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

I mostly agree with the thrust of Bas's message, but there's one piece
here that I want to reword because I think there's an important principle
at stake.

Bas Wijnen <[email protected]> writes:

> If you break such an essential package, I think it is reasonable that
> people get angry. I do not expect that that they actually wanted the
> maintainer to die, but presumably they said that. I do not think that
> should be considered harassment, because it is not a threat. And in this
> context, I would give the victims of the breakage some space to express
> their anger in ways that may not be entirely appropriate.

I hear what you're saying, but also I expect better of people than this.

Death threats, even expressed as indirect wishes or other things that are
clearly not true threats, are *always* harassment. This is a red line. I
know some people (myself included!) who have been on the Internet for a
very long time are mostly inured to them, but I can tell you from personal
experience that they still can have a psychological impact even if you
think you're successfully ignoring them. I also know that the Internet has
a tendency to turn every communication up to an extreme, but this is *bad*
and we should try to fight this!

I come from a country that is very proud of its (violent!) revolution and
its (violent!) civil war, so I'm not going to make some sweeping statement
about how it is never appropriate to wish someone dead or even to work
towards killing them. There are some things in this world that are worth
that.

A broken rsync release is not one of those things.

This is not okay. Period. No matter how upset someone is, this is not
okay. There has to be a circuit breaker somewhere in people's brains
between the flash of hot anger because you were inconvenienced or even
harmed by a piece of software breaking, and the point at which you reach
out to the author and personally express a death wish. You can get angry,
but that is not how adults deal with anger. It should be completely
socially unacceptable, and was before the constant nasty confrontations on
the Internet eroded our good sense.

I suspect you weren't meaning to defend this quite to the degree that it
came across, and I absolutely understand the rest of your point and agree
with it. I will always argue for keeping in mind that unless you have a
maintenance contract, a free software maintainer does not owe you
anything, including working releases, but yes, if one puts out a broken
release, some people will be mad and that's to be expected. Being a
package maintainer is a position of trust and that trust is complicated
and sometimes parasocial and sometimes not very healthy, but there is
trust and it can be broken and broken trust makes people mad.

But we have to, *have to*, deal with that anger in some more productive
and reasonable way than death threats or even wishes. That is the express
train to having *no* rsync maintainer and *no* further releases of rsync.
And, far beyond any practical concerns like that, it's simply morally
wrong. This is not who we should strive to be as human beings living in
society with other human beings. People should have space to express their
anger, but absolutely not as death wishes!