A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS Drupal, asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and long-time member of..
A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS Drupal , asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and long-time member of the Drupal community, “to leave the Drupal project.” Why did he do this? He refuses to say. A huge furor has erupted in response — not least because the reason clearly has much to do with Garfield’s unconventional sex life.
More specifically, Garfield is into BDSM. Even more specifically, he’s a member of the Gor community, an outré subculture of an outré subculture, one built around a series of thirty-odd books by John Norman which are, basically, “John Carter of Mars” meets “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Essentially–as I understand it–a community who are interested in, and/or participate in, elaborate (consensual!) sexual subjugation fantasies, in which men are inherently superior to women. I know all this because of Garfield’s lengthy public response to his ouster, self-deprecatingly titled “ TMI about me “:
Buytaert (who is also co-founder and CTO of Acquia , a Drupal platform which has raised ~$175 million over the years and has been struggling to IPO for a few years now) retorts :
Sigh. This sad mess is something of a perfect storm of Code of Conduct conflicts. It is one which raises a number of interesting questions. It also raises several quite boring ones, so let’s get them out of the way:
These questions are boring not because they are unimportant, but because the answers are so obvious: yes (no) , hell no , and hell no.
I’ll unpack the first: open-source communities/projects are crucially important to many people’s careers and professional lives — cf “the cornerstone of my career” — so who they allow and deny membership to, and how their codes of conduct are constructed and followed, is highly consequential.
I really, really hope I don’t have to unpack the two hell no s. But in case I do, let me quote this excellent blog post from Nadia Eghbal:
Which is brilliantly put and I hope settles the previous questions. However. The Garfield Situation also raises two questions which are far more complex and interesting:
Obviously sometimes organizational decisions have to be made based on information that must remain confidential, for legal or ethical reasons.
