An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Jan Claeys]

Op dinsdag 22-05-2007 om 23:48 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Matthew
Garrett:
[...]
> The big problem is that it's not always easy to notice that you're 
> saying something offensive. With hindsight suggesting that a 
> configuration file being rewritten is as bad as rape is quite clearly 
> going to be interpreted as implying that rape isn't a big deal,

Like I said on that blog post, another meaning of the word rape (and
actually the *original* meaning, as derived from Latin), and of the
Dutch translation of it (the author is Dutch), has nothing specifically
to do with sexual harassment.  Even if it's mostly used in the last
meaning these days (especially in popular media & daily speech), there
is no reason for the Ubuntu project to try to change the English
language and extinguish the original _unoffensive_ meaning completely by
marking the word as "might possibly be interpreted as offensive by
someone".

[...]
> And it's not just women - there are many 
> different cultures that we can accidently discourage. Jokes about the 
> holocaust would probably be considered to be similarly poor taste.

To me such jokes are only of poor taste when told by someone who takes
them serious, but I can also see why some people will always be offended
by them (I hope those people never go see a Jewish comedian though).



I try to avoid offending people when I'm talking to someone personally
or in a small group, but when talking to a larger, unknown group (like
in a blog post) it's impossible to offend nobody.

Of course if people feel offended, they can tell me (and/or the whole
world) about that (or other people can do that in their place).  And if
they sound honest, I might apology.



BTW: It seems like some people in Asia consider the term "FLOSS" to
bring bad luck, who's going to remove the more than 1000 occurrences of
that from ubuntu.com, so that we don't offend those Asian people
anymore?  (Please don't!)


-- 
Jan Claeys