Just putting this here cause I found it a good overview of a pretty confusing situation I had no prior knowledge about
Why does everything have to be a video these days ffs. What’s the tl;dr?
Cast:
- Vaxry: Hypr, Hyprland creator, contributes to wlroots and Freedesktop
- Lyude: member of X.org board, Freedesktop.org, Red Hat employee
- Drew DeVault: Sway and Hare creator, self-proclaimed Zig hater
- FDO: FreeDesktop Organisation(?)
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:
- How Freedesktop/RedHat harass other projects into submission
- Freedesktop/RedHat’s CoC team is worse than you thought
- Inclusive community activists are harming FOSS
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.
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.
Trying to remain unbias, the super TLDR;
- FDO decided that they didn’t like vaxry’s community and told him to fix or action will be taken against him (Banning from FDO) for violating their (FDO’s)
- Vaxry said, This is my community, It’s not an FDO project, and is not under control of FDO, Doesn’t fall under purview of FDO’s COC, I will not be bullied. And posted the interaction.
- FDO’s COC committy didn’t like that and banned vaxry from FDO.
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.
I’ve been in the discord and on github for a while
Oh a real life member of the hyprland community, let’s see if the rumors are true.
has a bit of a “personality”, as many good developers have. Nothing wrong with that.
Well, that’s some first-grade bigot apologia. I guess that discord really is bigot central.
Let’s hope this thing blows over quickly.
Is it because your little clubhouse is drawing too much negative attention?
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.
