removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote:
> That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude
> their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> driven dissenters into silence.

The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the dissenting
side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" --
and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because we
don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day are
coming from the pro-forking side.

Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' opinions
were as valid as contributor's opinions. For a project like a compiler which
exists solely to enable other projects to exist, it seems like the only users
who are deemed worthy of representation in the 'room where it happens' now
are the major Corporations with the ability to sponsor a contributor on their
behalf. It's becoming very difficult to engage in good faith against this
kind of overt hostility to the grassroots users.

> Violent emotional responses is what trolls of all alignments aim for.
> Let's not give them that. Let's not give them reasons to denounce
> censorship either. Let's dissent politely and kindly, without calling
> them names, whether trolls or jerks or crazy. Ad troll[i]um is a very
> popular fallacious argument these days, but it's just as logically
> unsound as other fallacies.

I've only seen one or two genuine 'trolls' in the discussion, as in, people
who are just here to fish for a reaction who don't have an actual vested
interest in the outcome. All of them have sent a couple of messages and then
left. Completely agree with you that 'ad trollum' is being deployed here to
conflate the legitimate voices of concerned free software advocates with
childish trolling, much to the detriment of the level of conversation.

> It's true that negotiating and settling with wildly different opinions
> requires more effort than having despotic powers to dictate the right
> answer. The community has made it clear what political model it
> prefers, so let's put that in practice, shall we?

I think there's a fundamental disagreement here where we're defining 'the
community' broadly -- to include contributors, users, and pretty much the
whole free software and GNU community -- and certain people on the pro-
fork side are taking a more corporate view that only 'the firm' should get
any input into 'internal business'. This is not the free software community
that I recognize.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<