Why does everything have to be a video these days ffs. What’s the tl;dr?
Cast:
Warning: Not lore accurate
TL:DR;
Vaxry's Discord server for Hyprland was filled with edgy kids, calling each other LGBTQ+ related slurs - maybe they were from the community themselves, maybe it was a boy's locker room. It was toxic.
From what Vaxry said, a trans user was misgendering his mod staff, so their pronoun was changed to "who/cares". That was two years ago. Drew DeVault wrote a blog about it, Vaxry was pissed, shit happened. They discuss but could not come to an agreement; however there were a few changes. Vaxry apologized later about the incident, but he was not in agreement with political correctness.
Vaxry's policy according to him is that he does not discriminate PR on the basis of people. He also created a CoC (mentioned earlier), but not many were happy about it being vague. But then, he also made a blog against inclusivity in FOSS, and calls them SJWs as a pejorative.
Vaxry lost his marbles when he got a mail from Lyude. Lyude used a Redhat mail, which was seen as unprofessional, and tried enforcing FDO's CoC on Hyprland and other related project.
He sent back a passive-aggressive mail, which said "fuck off" in short. He also share Lyude's toots in the blog about how Lyude supports bullying people for missing T in LGB, as a justification that Lyude tried bringing their past unnecessarily. Lyude sent another mail. Vaxry said that they don't care, basically another formal "fuck off". Finally, FDO yeeted Vaxry.
That's it. Maybe I've missed a few details here and there. I did not read other's blog, but Vaxrys'. And it isn't looking good. In a way, this is also the abuse of power by Lyude, but looking at Vaxrys' indifference, yeah, I wouldn't have a positive attitude about that.
Source:
Extras:
Edit: After watching Nico's video, I'm convinced that Vaxry is a living, breathing turd. He crossed every limit. Good on him for getting banned.
I'm looking forward to when the Linux community, and society at large, has forgotten about noninclusive Transphobic assholes like this fuck.
I honestly don't care if the work you've done saves the planet and proves you're the smartest human to ever live. If Vaxry can't understand why being sympathetic to the LGBTQ+ community by adhering to their conventions around identifying pronouns is a good thing, then he's simply chosen to align himself with those who don't care, i.e. Transphobic hate groups.
That's the company he keeps now, and it might as well be who he is.
don't care if the work you've done saves the planet
It's not even that in this case. It's a Wayland compositor not the cure for cancer. You have to be very socially tone-deaf to imagine people will overlook you being an asshole because of that. You have to be a billionaire for that to happen.
I agree, I'm just not one of those people. I'm personally very unforgiving of Nazis, Trump supporters, White Nationalists, homophobes, and transphobes, etc. etc. All the lefty wokisms right wing assholes like to dunk on you can apply to me (I don't care, come at me bro).
And when people say, why use their products then? Like this whole boycotting of Hyprland shit. No, use Hyprland, AND make such a big deal about it on their discord server that the toxic community is shouted down. Is told THEY are not welcome. And if you lose, then you straight up call them a Transphobic right wing community. That's what they will have become at that point. That is who they will have proven themselves to be should they be willing to turn a blind eye to hateful rhetoric.
Ignoring hate speech is endorsing hate speech. I invite anyone to prove me wrong.
Vaxry lost his marbles when he got a mail from Lyude. Lyude used a Redhat mail, which was seen as unprofessional, and tried enforcing FDO's CoC on Hyprland and other related project.
Given that the context was Hyprland possibly becoming a formal part of FDO, expecting Hyprland's developers to abide by the FDO CoC in that event was a completely reasonable expectation.
So basically a cancerous organization meets a toxic community?
Awesome entertainment for hours!
*grabs popcorn*
Trying to remain unbias, the super TLDR;
Time for my personal bias Im not sure how I can hide this other then spoiler, but ignore it if you don't want my very bias opinion;
spoiler
FDO for sure over stepped their bounds. FDO did wrongfully invoke their COC against hyprland's community, Their COC is extremely clear on it's "scope" https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeOfConduct/ under which hyprland absolutely doesn't fall under. That being said, OFC FDO retains the right to ban anyone from their services as they please (I'll explain why this is extremely bad below). But they invoked the COC which is extremely important here.
Vaxry absolutely acted unprofessionally in publicizing this, on the other hand, I'm really glad he did because it's insane that FDO is attacking the hyprland community in the first place, which is an extremely self isolating community. It's very much "what happens in the discord is a discord thing". Outside of the discord, hyprland community is perfectly fine. I've not seen a single "Hyprland fan" go around shitting on anything else (granted this is hard to judge since you need to be given context of someone shitting on something, to be a hyprland fan), on the contary, I have seen many people publically shittying on vaxry on multiple forums.
FDO was in their right to ban Vaxry for publicizing the emails, but I don't think it was a good idea at all. They essentially punished Vaxry for airing their dirty laundry. Proving him right in the end. It's important to note, that given context, Drew's articles on Vaxry are insanely biased against him, with the intent to drum up hate towards vaxry (going so far as to imply Vaxry would call people the N-Word when giving support to people by using extremely misleading and cherry picked context)
The original emails are best explained by vaxry himself so check out his blog.
In the end, Vaxry acted unprofessionally and got banned for it, but FDO acted equally unprofessionally, and their actions greatly overstepped the rights they had (as far as enforcing COC goes, their original email)
Now WHY is FDO banning vaxry so important? Pretty much everything that matters in terms of linux gui development is on FDO's services. Wayland protocol discussion, Mesa, Wlroots etc. by banning vaxry from these services, he is pretty much no longer able to directly interact with the wayland community. (At least not without ban evasion or someone else acting as a proxy)
EDIT: I forgot my conclusions.
I strongly feel like FDO is using their position as the people who control linux to push their politics unto others. Hence Vaxry's original blog post How Freedesktop/RedHat harass other projects into submission
From Vaxry's second blogpost:
However, it was brought to our attention apparently you have decided to take to posting about this to your blog.
I have full rights to do so, just like you apparently had the right to post it to your mailing list.
I didn't dug any deeper, but it seems like Lyude also published the communication between her an Vaxry, if I understand it correctly.
Thanks. A lot of drama then. I’ve been in the discord and on github for a while and from that I can tell vaxry has a bit of a “personality”, as many good developers have. Nothing wrong with that. I like Hyprland a lot, I have been using it daily for 2 years or so and any bugs I reported got fixed really fast. In the end it is a solid project and that’s what really matters.
Let’s hope this thing blows over quickly.
TLDW: read all the blog posts, all the discussions and make your own opinion. I lost 15 minutes of my life and didn't become any more informed or smarter.
Damn, I had no idea what a shithole the hyprland community was :c
I quite like the feel of the WM, but it seems like I'll be moving on
It's sad cuz the soft is good tho But I'll be moving from it as well
and it's too niche to have a reasonable chance of creating an active fork. but the stuff happening in their community is simply vile, and as a queer person I won't feel comfortable to use software developed by open bigots
Same
Wow is it this hard to not be an asshole
I absolutely love Hyprland but have no respect for Vaxry beyond his coding ability.
I really hope someone starts a good fork of it, I haven't found another wm I like as much but I hate to be seen as supporting that awful person.
It's FOSS, just don't donate to the project or promote it and keep using it anyway. That's the beauty of FOSS, the devs dumb opinions shouldn't effect your personal use of quality tools. Imagine if you stopped using hammers just because "communism", it'd be a pretty stupid self inflicted inconvenience.
If the project itself goes to shit and he starts using it to push his stupid agenda, then abandon it. But until then it's completely understandable to keep using it for your personal workflow. Everyone uses GNU utilits, that doesn't mean we agree with everything Richard Stallmen has ever said.
Hopefully Vaxry will learn and clean up his act.
nicco loves linux also apparently made a good video, I just saw this one first
Does this have any impact on the future viability of Hyprland as a project? Should it affect (on a technical level) whether users should start using Hyprland if they don't already?
I literally installed it for the first time yesterday to take a look, but don't want to get invested in something that may fizzle out...
Hyprland itself will still continue to work just fine. What it does affect is Hyprland's ability to propose changes to FreeDesktop specifications like Wayland. Although I think only the lead dev Vaxry has been banned so potentially they could just get some other dev to do that instead.
I have seen people describing the code base to be ugly. However, the project itself looks like it will sustain. But don't go to their discord server for support if you belong to any sort of minority group.
It is so stupid... Why make drama instead of making linux better as a whole. A sad thing to see in general.
It always baffles me why some people can't just fucking live and let live. If someone doesn't appreciate your "joke", then it should be a very clear indicator that you need to STFU, otherwise, it's obvious you're a dickhead.
Alright who is in the Discord and can tell us if it's actually 4chan or not
4Chan is obv worse, as was said in the video, but the discord can be pretty obnoxious. Just a lot of humor you'd expect from the average middle-schooler.
I've been there for like 2 weeks in 2023 and I'd say that 4chan is way worse
Great video from brodie, Regardless of where you stand on the issue, This video is an unbiased and decent take.
I honestly, but respectfully, disagree.
Brodie has been playing the apologist lately, and finding himself on the defensive when Nicco criticized Brodie for giving a floor to Lunduk, who is another example of a toxic individual within the Linux community. Brodie basically has played the card , "I'll hear out anybody because it's important to get both sides of the story."
But imho it shows he lacks spine to take a real stand. I get why, he needs to retain his audience which is a mix of people from different political and social backgrounds. I just don't respect it.
This latest video of his shows exactly his own reasoning. He says something along the lines of, if you take a position, you're going to lose a lot of your audience. He was talking specifically about the FDO iirc, but he might as well have been talking about himself.
I do have some sympathy for Brodie, I've been following him from almost his first video when he was still in Uni showing off his BSPWM configs, etc. And I don't think he ever thought his channel would become politicized nor do I think he ever wanted to address his own political leanings on his channel. But in my own life I've just noticed you can't avoid that, even in a public platform. Everything is political, and if you don't show people who you stand with, (like solidly, on one side or the other, you CANNOT have it both ways) then you just are saying you'll sit on the sidelines while the people you're supposedly advocating for (the Linux community) burn from within.
Until he's willing to have Danielle Fore (Trans Developer on the Elementary OS Distro) on his Tech Over Tea Podcast, I'm going to say he's giving a lot more attention and positive exposure to toxic people than not. And he's not exactly actually on Both Sides, like he wants us all to believe.
The vast majority of both-sideism is done by reactionaries trying to hide their reactionary politics from their audience. There's absolutely nothing about him that indicates he's anything but a generic techbro with the politics of a generic techbro. Just skimming the comment section of his Youtube video just has the usual people whining about politics, which is rich considering that FLOSS has always been political no matter how much the OS part of FLOSS try to pretend that it isn't so.
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