- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
geteilt von: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19377025
[…] I announce that our move off of wlroots is now complete and MR 6608 is now merged.
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Imagine having to rebase your entire project because you’re a piece of shit.
This is the first I’ve heard of it. What’s the deal?
Vaxry, the main dev of Hyprland, got banned from all aspects of freedesktop.org for multiple CoC violations.
Does this have something to do with the author being banned from freedesktop?
Partially, it also had strong technical motivations.
Yes
People keep saying this happened only because vaxry got banned from the FDO, completely forgetting the fact that hyprland has used their own modified fork of wlroots for ages now. They’ve wanted to get away from wlroots even before this whole fiasco, it really just tipped the needle for them to finally pull the trigger.
Mind you also, the ban in no way prevents hyprland from using wlroots still. The only thing the ban did was prevent vaxry from contributing to wlroots upstream, which is damn unfortunate if you ask me.
It’s free software guys, who gives a fuck about personalities🥱? GFY with pronouns, anger issues, egoistic management…etc
It’s the fucking code that determines which makes better software.💪
Hyprland looks cool af🔥, but having a fork of wlroots tied to a wm is not cool.🙄
Fuck Hyprland, its developers, and its asshole community. Context: https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html
Vaxry (head honcho of hyprland) responds here to Drew’s referenced shoutout. Sharing for completeness sake. https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity
And his response to the FreeDesktop stuff. https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat
It seems like the guy is being genuine here. Or was that pure PR?
He is some sort of a sociopath. I remember having the same feelings reading his Blogposts. But after rethinking and checking the facts it came to me how awful his own reaction was.
If you use an infrastructure as the project did, the host is allowed to define rules. In his reaction everything was framed like she as a woman would just fire against his project because of she likes to have power. The mailing list told a totally different story. After I realised his framing was again hateful and misleading, I stepped away from the project and till now all news about that.
The development of a dedicated backend is most probably because of technical reasons since wlroots caused some problems, though.
Damn, had no idea about this.
Damn why does all the software I want to use end up being developed by bigoted assholes. First nix now this.
I whole-heartedly agree with this one and I am genuinely not surprised about the behaviour of Vaxry.
To give some context around this, ThatOneCalculator (aka Kainoa, the person behind Firefish) and I maintained the AUR package for hyprland-git back in 2022. When I initially made the AUR package file, it wasn’t great (and there were a lot of points to improve these packages) but it worked mostly. Of course there were edge cases where building broke, especially this was my first bigger AUR package to maintain. With it being a -git package in the AUR, breakage is to be expected.
Fast forward about a month, a month and a half. Hyprland rolled out some big changes which caused some build errors. But because my personal life got in the way, Kainoa got sick (IIRC) and I had troubles getting the build scripts working again, so it took a few days to get this resolved.
Vaxry came complaining to comment section of the AUR package “when are you gonna get of your lazy ass and fix this shit” (or something similar to that meaning, I can’t find the original comment anymore). After that, I promptly disowned the package and let Vaxry handle it himself.
Because fuck that shit, as package maintainer, I refused to be treated like this. If you think it takes too long, sure, fine, ask if I need help, offer support, anything. But just don’t be an asshole towards people, that offer your software to a wider audience.
This was a Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago.
Hyprland is incredible and hopefully there won’t be any more trouble like this
This was a Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago.
Right, but the original mail from FDO basically said “we know about these examples of bad behavior, we want to notify you that they are definitely unacceptable and we expect to never see something like it again”. And Vaxry had a meltdown over that. Among other things, he doesn’t get why he should be held accountable for behaviors outside FDO. He has also rejected and commented negatively on the idea of any code of conduct at all for his project. Vaxry is making it as clear as possible that he will make zero commitment to oppose toxicity in his community and people took his word for it. The idea that he was punished solely for a couple of comments that happened years ago and are definitely “fixed” is Vaxry’s own misleading interpretation.
I don’t know, man. I read Vaxry’s response and I think that he has a point. There was an incident, and it was dealt with.
Then someone from redhat (because they e-mailed him with from RedHat address) told him “hey we saw improvements on you moderating your community. Great! But if you break our CoC again, we’ll ban you!” To which he replied “Uh, we don’t have a CoC, we don’t belong to your organization, what’s is this about?” And the person replied “This is not a RedHat position. And again, we’ll ban you!”
He explained this in a blogpost and posted the full e-mail conversation.
He also said that the misrepresentation got to such point that a another transgender coder made a contribution to Vaxry’s project, expecting that it would be rejected, and got surprised that her PR got merged.
I’ve also read Vaxry’s response and it’s complete nonsense. It’s even apparent in your condensed version.
Uh, we don’t have a CoC
Exactly. This is more than “an incident” as you put it. It’s a long-lasting pattern of Vaxry refusing to commit to any standards of behavior. He explicitly calls “upholding any value” nothing but an inconvenience. His only reaction to his community ridiculing the concept of a CoC is to say “nice one”.
What’s funny is that the person who opened the issue said “Instead of attacking the post, could you provide some evidence against it? (e.g. say “Trans rights are human rights”)” and it was completely ignored. See, the CoC is not about the text itself. It’s about taking an open stance against bigotry. Vaxry can cry all day about how this one incident is misrepresented and how moderation has become more strict now, but nowhere in this discussion or the FDO emails or his own blog about the issue have I seen him take an actual moral stance on the issue.
we don’t belong to your organization
What does this have to do with anything? FDO, a space that aims to be LGBTQ+ friendly, banned a bigoted person from participating, as they should. It’s such a stupid childish argument to say “but I didn’t out myself as a bigot in a commit message I submitted to you, checkmate!”. No-one cares. You can’t leave your “fuck trans people, lol” sign at the door and walk in, mate. You’re still a toxic asshole and you’re still a threat to the LBGTQ+ people we want to participate in our community.
He also said that the misrepresentation got to such point that a another transgender coder made a contribution to Vaxry’s project, expecting that it would be rejected, and got surprised that her PR got merged.
This is just so funny to hear from Vaxry himself. After people have repeatedly tried to explain to him that not enforcing any code of conduct on a toxic community is going to make it an unsafe space for LGBTQ+ people, Vaxry is shocked to find that LGBTQ+ people are afraid of being discriminated against!
Oh, but no, you see it’s because of the “misrepresentation”! Vaxry’s had made it so clear through his words and actions that trans rights are human rights and that bigotry is unacceptable, so it can’t possibly be on him. Even as he’s posting pictures this conversation where he’s accused of being a transphobe, and a trans person is expecting to get rejected, does he point out how he’s not a transphobe and how he respects all human rights? Nope, he only says that he only cares about the code.
But that’s just me picking apart his comments in a few specific discussions. What if he has in fact taken a moral stance, but just not in these particular discussions where’s he’s felt attacked and pressured into making a statement?
He did post this in one of his blog posts:
With that, I believe that every human’s opinion is valuable and important, and most crucially, equal. There is no point in having some people’s opinions be more important than others. That is the essence of discrimination.
Hey, that’s not bad. There’s mention of equality here and he seems against discrimination! Now let’s read the rest of this Inclusive community activists are harming FOSS blog post and see what it’s really about! Oh no, the above statement was only to set the stage for accusing SJWs of not understanding that not everyone agrees with them and how they shouldn’t “cancel” us for “saying bad words”. So he does think to talk about equality and discrimination, just not in any of the above discussions. But he’ll do it here to defense people acting like assholes on the internet!
And then he says this:
if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server
that is inclusivity
So there you have it. Vaxry will literally accept Hilter into his community, just casually interacting with Jewish people (presumably he doesn’t ban them from participating). It’s all fine, just as long as the gassing happens outside his own platform. Gosh, I wonder why people are feeling unwelcome in his community. Surely it is the misrepresentation of his views.
Here’s an archive link for the above article just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20240511145845/https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists
I think you’re attributing malice to something else. Bear with me while I point out these two things:
First, The tomatoes quote is a consequence of something he mentioned later:
I firmly believe that FOSS is literally for everyone.
And second, he goes on to write this:
It’s important to note that there are many people who disagree on topics like religion, economic systems, LGBT issues, geopolitics, and other. For whatever reasons they may, we still should not ostracize them as long as they can interact with the FOSS community in a respectful manner, without arguing about those issues in places not meant for such discussions.
Here’s what I think: The dude is dogmatically dense. Not a literal nazi or transphobe. His response about moderation is part of that. “Ugh, I just want to code, not to babysit. If no one is spewing hate in my turf, they are welcome.” And even though I don’t agree with his stance, I still think he has a point: extremes are bad. And if the far-right is bad (“you’re either with us or against us; death to you!”), the far-left is bad too (“you’re either with us or against us; cancelled!”)
I’ve been there. Even after explaining that I was a transgender rights ally and supporter, and asked a question about sports - a question, as in I was trying to get myself informed, this one mod lashed out at me as if I was the devil, simply because my views didn’t perfectly align with hers before getting answers. It really caught me off guard. And she wouldn’t budge. It’s either her view or “pure unadulterated transphobia,” which I found ridiculous. That’s extreme.
But I’m capable of trying to reach to a middleground, whereas Vaxry stays firm - and that’s fine. Don’t like it? Don’t participate in his community! But don’t demonize him for some imaginary intentions you’re placing on him.
This was a Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago.
Because Vaxry didn’t like the public backlash, not because he had any moral problems with the conduct. In fact, he doesn’t mind genocide:
I think he was trying to have a philosophical point here but took the headass approach to it.
20 years ish old, living in Poland, and perma online does things to a man. Weird though to have a take like that when Polish people in particular were significant victims in Auschwitz
Aw, man. I think Vaxry’s got entrapped here.
He is saying that if nothing can sway you from an opinion, then it is a belief, including being 100% opposed to genocide.
(Please note: I don’t side with genocide!!! But I understand his point. Read on.)
I think he’s the positions armchair arguing type, not necessarily the evil type.
I can totally see him say “If a group of people’s solely reason to exist is to exterminate the rest of the human race, if that’s all they think about, if all they do is to accomplish that - induce terror, kill babies, spew propaganda, castrate humans of all races; then it’s safe to say that that group of people should not exist and it should be exterminated.”
That’s an extremely wild scenario, of course! But I think that’s what this guy is saying. We may find genocide in general heinous, but he won’t say that all genocides are bad because of thought examples like the above one.
Then the other party takes that personally, and extrapolates that Vaxry is in favor of exterminating all trans people - something he didn’t say or mean.
My two cents.
That discussion didn’t come out of the blue, though. It was in the aftermath of behavior on his Discord where his position was “I didn’t say the things and I can’t moderate”. Also, as a person of Polish descent who follows Polish politics probably a bit closer than the average person, I see a pattern of PiS party ideology / common behavior by PiS supporters of being at the far right and the claiming ignorance when their behavior leads to bad press.
I also frequent the discord server often for help with configuring, I have not seen/experienced any of this hatred talked about so much. The worst I’ve seen is bluntness in delivering a solution or just being ignored because I someone didn’t RTFM.
Hyprland is a wonderful piece of technology and I hope it continues to persist.
All of these people are just reaching lol. I also don’t understand how any of this would do benefit. Most of the people here cheering have not contributed 1℅ of what varxy did.
That drewvault guy lectures all day instead of maintaining his own projects. Why are we acting as if we are in abundance of open source devs/maintainers.
Well I was going to try Hyprland this weekend, but I think instead I will very much not do that.
I hope someone forks it from a good commit just before they replaced wlroots. I don’t know the specifics of compositor code at all, but I bet It’s going to cost them quite a bit of velocity to maintain their replacement.
I’d say, read Hyprland’s responses linked elsewhere in this thread before making any hasty decisions.
It seems (but I’m not sure, to be clear), that it was a situation that got solved, and people are still hung up on it.
It’s like that “but you fuck one sheep” joke.
Damn. I only discovered this project a few weeks ago and just started building a config.
Time to
yay -Rcs hyprland.I’d recommend river to anyone looking for an alternative wayland dynamic tiling wm.
The bread and butter for anyone wanting a TLDR:
The FDO team is right that Hyprland’s community reflects poorly on the Linux desktop community as a whole. Vaxry [the Hyprland Dev] has created a foothold for hate, transphobia, homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the Linux desktop community. We are right to take action to correct this problem.
And on that note, I condemn in the harshest terms the response from communities like /r/linux on the subject. The vile harassment and hate directed at the FDO officer in question is obscene and completely unjustifiable. I don’t care what window manager or desktop environment you use – this kind of behavior is completely uncalled for. I expect better.
Oh wow. That community is just hateful
And now in the r/linux thread about these news people are defending Vaxry, misrepresenting what the ban was about, and hating FDO.
Indicatively, this blatantly wrong comment chain is upvoted:
Is this the project where some red Hat dev started dropping legal threats from their corporate account over offline activities by third parties in unrelated communities years past?
Sort of. You got some details wrong but essentially, yes.
But this is downvoted and has replies telling them they’re wrong:
Congratulations to the hyprland project, but I definitely will not be using or contributing to the project as long as it’s an exclusionary and intolerant space.
My opinion: let’s separate the software and the people making it. If it’s great tool and FOSS why not use it? You use software, not people.
EDIT: I know that FOSS heavily relies on community but also that’s the point. I don’t see how toxic comminity can progress further while more open minded and kind fork will be a better choice of the same software base.
What if you need to file a bug? What if you have a question on the config that’s not easily answered by the docs? If you never, ever find bugs and never, ever have questions, then sure, separate the two. There are genuinely people like that, but they’re not common. If you’re one of them, then I’m genuinely glad for you.
My opinion is this: You use software. You don’t use people, but you sure as hell rely on them.
Yeah that’s a better opinion than mine.
Just do them how you would do with any other project. You really acting like it’s some alt right group. It’s just a edgy chronically online 20 yr old dude lol. The community is pretty normal. Only weird things you would see is edgy messages in announcements channel.
Which is why you should only care about the personal opinion of those people when it actually relates to that reliability.
I don’t care whether Linus Torvalds likes disrespecting whichever company or people he might want to give the middle finger to, or throw rants in the mailing list or mastodon to attack any particular individual, so long as he continues doing a good job maintaining the kernel and accepting contributions from those same people when they provide quality code, regardless of whatever feelings he might have about whatever opinions they might hold.
You rely on the performance of the software, the clarity of the docs, the efficiency of their bug tracking… but the opinions of the people running those things don’t matter so long as they keep being reliable.
If it’s great tool and FOSS why not use it? You use software, not people.
I didn’t write about its user base, I wrote about its community – the cesspool that engages among each other. That said, the moment someone opens a bug report, there’s a real chance that person gets harassed.
Please note that many users of FOSS are also developers or contributors. Who wants to report a bug or send a patch if the community is worse?
Since this change is entirely a result of the bad behavior of the maintainer and would not have happened otherwise, this a perfect example of why we fundamentally cannot separate the work from the people who make it.
Even if you do not agree with the social backlash this person is getting, that backlash has real effects on the work.
I, for one, no longer trust that hyprland will remain a well-maintained piece of software given that the maintainer would rather increase their maintenance burden and diverge from using common tools instead of cooperating with the community.
Yeah the “organisation” stuff behind… To be honest anything can show negative or positive effects on the end product. I see it in my job, college and even the Unity or CrowdStrike can make such examples.
The thing about Foss is that it’s typically community oriented. You are not only able to contribute and participate, but you’re invited to do so.
And if you’re an asshole and your community is toxic then who cares if your code is good? There are other projects I’d rather participate in. Cuz you’re not that good.
“Let’s remove the social element of our social movement”
Great so what’s left at that point, the free value FOSS provides to corporations?
In other words, Vaxry is so unwilling to compromise or learn from others that he would rather isolate his project from the broader FOSS community. That says a lot about him and the people who support him, especially since this conflict with freedesktop.org started over Vaxry condoning hateful trolling of trans people within the Hyprland community.
This is a problem for me as a Hyprland user because if I share some rice I made or make suggestions for other users, I’m leading people into a community that may be actively hateful towards them. It utterly extinguishes any enthusiasm I have for the project. I like the software but I’d rather be part of a project and a community that I can feel good and excited about. Maybe time to find a new tiling Wayland compositor.
Wrong. This was originally technically motivated as hyprland had been limited by wlroots in the past and often had different update cycles from sway causing packaging issues.
Vaxry never condoned hateful trolling of trans people. In fact, he publicly acknowledged, and apologized for the lack of moderation that lead to the incident, said he would do better, DID better, and THEN after everything had blown over FDO tried to ego butt into his server even more.
I’ll quote Vaxry from his blog:
“Obviously, the fact that I am banned from contributing to Freedesktop - and by extension wlroots, is another big factor, and probably the one that finally tipped the scales, because I am no longer allowed to participate in discussion or contribute code to wlroots.”
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-wlrootsRewrite
“I definitely am not a fan of how seemingly weak people online, especially teenagers, have become. Words are just words. Someone calling another person a “retard” shouldn’t really be a big deal.”
"I said:
if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server
that is inclusivity
Which I definitely stand by."
He’s completely right about everything there.
Unless he is selectively banning trans people, not making a tech discord server about those discussions is perfectly fine.
Thanks for sharing this. I will install hyperland.
is another big factor, and probably the one that finally tipped the scales
means that it is not the sole motivating factor.
which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server
Literally means that if they go around spewing crap, they get dealt with. This is not condoning hateful trolling at all. He is on the free speech side of things, but that doesn’t mean he condones it at all. If you start posting bad crap, you get dealt with. Minor slights, are as the name implies, minor. Those are allowed but within strict limitations, if you start going full blown idiot, you get dealt with.
if I share some rice I made
FYI: rice is derived from a racist pejorative term. A lot of people in the desktop theming community have stopped using it.
Languages evolve over time. The term “to serve” is derived from the Latin word for “slave”. That does not mean it’s somehow offensive to use the term to describe the job of soldiers.
The modern day “riced” comes from “R.I.C.E” which stands for “race inspired car enhancement”. If you rice a car, it means you put components that look like race car components but are actually just cosmetic. Fake vents, huge spoilers on family cars, exhausts that are optically bigger, etc. The orange Japanese car in the linked article is an example of that. 70s Japan had renown ricing culture so I guess that’s where the R.I.C.E and the racist “rice burner” split.
Nowadays people who use the term “riced” don’t even know that at some point in time it had something to do with Asian cars or bikes. It’s even common to jokingly associate it with the food with the same name to spite other car nerds because you can “um actually” bait someone to correct you that it has nothing to do with food. Which is obviously not true according to the article but if 99 % of people don’t know the racist origin, it’s not an issue at all to use the word.
It’s so ironic how many downvotes this is getting in the context of this thread.
Mostly because the “reddit mentality” has already established in this community, where the downvote exists solely as a self-validation/“dopamine fix” feature rather than flagging a post as bad and irrelevant.
Very nice, this comes with a lot of advantages for Hyprland, and I wholeheartedly congratulate Vaxry on separating from the rubbish that is FDO’s management.
But why?
Because Vaxry (the lead dev) got banned from contributing to wlroots or any other FDO projects.
As for why he was banned, this is the only thing I’ve read about the whole thing: https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html
Basically, he violated the FDO Code of Conduct when being told that a particular thing he said/enabled in a Discord community would not be acceptable if it was seen in spaces covered by said CoC.
This appears to be his response.
What would be the advantages of using this over, say i3? (Does it summarize to X vs Wayland)
The equivalent of i3 on Wayland is Sway; it’s even compatible with i3 config files, it’s a true successor. Hyprland is popular because of the eye candy and its rapid adoption of features which patch over some of the gaps in Wayland functionality. However I think those advantages have become fewer and farther, I personally use sway and if I wanted the visuals I’d use the swayfx fork
For everyone shitting about Vaxry, I recommend reading both sides of the equation, not only FDO/Drew’s.
The only defense of Vaxry ever presented was that he was a bigot on his own discord and not freedesktop’s. He’s a shit bag and he can take his i3 for fascists elsewhere.
Reading his side of it only made me dislike him him more…
