Re: proposed speaker guidelines

[Ruben Vermeersch <ruben savanne be>]

On za, 2010-03-27 at 18:49 -0400, Richard Stallman 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.
> 
> 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.

I don't think anyone has any objections against honest criticism against
the possible legal aspects of technologies. This is a very important
topic.

What made C# users uncomfortable was not this criticism about patents,
it was the way it was presented as an almost personal attack towards
mono developers. My feeling from the talk was that it was more aimed at
making us feel bad about using C# than presenting some constructive plan
on rectifying the situation (e.g. by working with Microsoft on the issue
instead of calling them the "avoid enemy" and the situation hopeless).

While the critic was correct, the way it was ushered led to alienation
of the people that are the most involved in the issue, rather than
encouraging them to work on a constructive solution.

There's a difference between making people uncomfortable because they
might be in danger (and offering help) and making people uncomfortable
through reprimands (and basically calling them collaborators with the
enemy).

In that sense, I agree with the guidelines. When you're speaking as a
representative of GNOME, you're fine to bring up any "uncomfortable"
topic, just keep in mind the viewpoints of the people in the audience
and keep it constructive.

   Ruben



PS: If you're the person that loves holding flamewars about this topic,
please don't reply.


-- 
Ruben Vermeersch (rubenv)
http://www.savanne.be/