Comment by jphoward
2 days ago
At the bottom it references a GitHub where people have previously added signatures against Jon Pretty - and now the maintainer says "NOTE: This repo is closed. Do not open issues; they will be summarily closed and ignored." - i.e. telling people they shouldn't even TRY to amend their signatures.
Regardless of what you think of Jon Pretty, how is this justifiable? Telling people they can't unsupport something because you're not open to issues, but also not removing it?!
> Telling people they can't unsupport something
Yes.
I have no involvement in this drama (it's the first I've heard of it actually), but signing your name to something matters.
Choose carefully what/who you support.
A repo owner is not obligated to accept contributions.
All of those people are free to create their own repo, post on social media, or write an article recanting their support if they choose to do so.
They should smear the OP of the letter for not accepting retractions.
He's not "obligated" to do anything but it's still immoral to abandon maintenence of something like that. If he can't be bothered to maintain it, then he should delete it.
I don’t know if the allegations against Jon Pretty were valid or not, but those who piled on against him can’t escape accountability for mob behavior (assuming Pretty was innocent) if it becomes embarrassing. At most they can say “I supported this but no longer do”, not expunge all traces.
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> If he can't be bothered to maintain it, then he should delete it.
Not necessarily, plenty of projects have been put in an archive state because they are 'finished', superseded, forked, etc. This isn't code nor a living document, it was a one-off operation.
> He's not "obligated" to do anything but it's still immoral to abandon maintenence of something like that. If he can't be bothered to maintain it, then he should delete it.
Morality is subjective (that's why we have courts; which don't respect the individual and differing moralities of the parties involved, it has its own moral bar, for better or worse).
In this case, I feel it is more moral to record all the members of the mob. Maybe this would cause them to think twice before joining the next mob.
I mean, if we are going to have witch-hunt mobs, then the lesser evil is to not allow anonymous mobbers.
It's interesting looking at the messages of recent commits of people removing their names:
- Upon reflection, I don't think this letter was the right approach for this situation. Although I cannot retract my initial decision to sign it, I would appreciate having my signature removed from the document.
- We had good intentions and reasons for concern, but there was no due process, and the consequences of that can be awful. Please accept my withdrawal.
- The goal of providing safe spaces is laudable and necessary, but I expected to see further process outcomes from this effort. Perhaps some sort of SIP or scalarum iustitiae processus.
- I no longer believe the way this letter was the right way of dealing with the situation. And while I cannot undo signing it, I would like to request removing my signature.
FWIW that statement (“do not open issues”) was added over one year ago, but the owner has also approved pull requests removing names as recently as 8 months ago.
So I think pull requests are still accepted, but issues are not.
It seems pretty justifiable to me so that people can't erase their misdeeds.
Good apologies require more than memory-holing an injurious attack.
Yeah but because it's a GitHub repo is has an inherent audit trail for that, so it's not really erasing misdeeds... indeed it highlights those people in diffs!
It says don't open issues, not don't send pull requests.