Re: proposed speaker guidelines

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> wrote:
>
> The proposed speaker guidelines have a serious problem.  Since they
> prohibit anything that makes someone uncomfortable, regardless of why,
> and since criticism of one's actions tends to make many people
> uncomfortable, the consequence is to prohibit serious criticism of any
> practice that is followed by someone in the audience.

This is true, maybe we should be a little more clear about what it
means to make somebody uncomfortable in the context of these
guidelines.  I don't think the guidelines refer to making the audience
uncomfortable with your technical or legal opinion.

> For instance, when I asserted that use of C# was risky, someone in the
> audience objected, claiming that this was unfair to the C# language.
> Apparently that person felt uncomfortable with what I said about C#.
> It seems that these proposed guidelines would prohibit any statement
> that GNOME needs to avoid a certain practice lest it cause a serious
> problem.

Richard, I'm fairly certain these guidelines are more about not making
the audience uncomfortable when prominent speakers make sexist
remarks, or remarks critical of religion, etc etc, especially when
these remarks are completely off-topic.

I don't think they are meant to prevent you from making critical
statements on relevant subject matter based on technical or legal
arguments.

When viewing these guidelines as a reaction to your own GUADEC
keynote, I think you might be thinking of the wrong "uncomfortable"
statements.

Sandy