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Date:      Sat, 21 Mar 2020 13:26:09 +0100
From:      Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD asking contributors to fix their opinions - is it official?
Message-ID:  <20200321122609.GB5709@schmorp.de>

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Hi!

This is a request to clarify official policy of the FreeBSD project with
regards to regulating opinions - if this list is not the right list to
ask this question, I would be extremely happy if people could direct me
ot a more appropriate forum - I didn't find anything that seemed more
appropriate, so I am posting to this list. Apologies if this was wrong.

Moving along, today, I received a mail[1] by some adamw@freebsd.org,
asking me to remove what "FreeBSD" perceives to be personal opinions from
my perl module, Canary::Stability[2].

His mail is a bit hard to read, as it makes many claims and practically
gives no evidence for them (and most are hard to believe for me, tpo be
honest). The only remotely actionably thing seesm to be that I really need
to remove these personal opinions.

Since he writes as "@freebsd.org" and he claims that...

   I'd like to strongly urge you to retire Canary::Stability. [...]

   FreeBSD has had to go to lengths to fix Canary::Stability. If you
   really are married to the module, can you please [...] remove the
   personal opinions?

If I read this correctly, he is acting in a capacity officially
representing FreeBSD in that matter and seems to indicate that the FreeBSD
project needs to police what it perceives as personal opinions. In fact,
it seems to be the most urgent and pressing matter, as nothing else of
substance was written.

If true, I would perosnally find this a very sad thing, as I had the
utmost respect for the FreeBSD project, always trying my best to make my
modules portable to it and using it as one of the platforms I test all my
releases on, and Canary::Stability hopefully makes it clear that I take
stability very seriously.

To me, this sounds rather orwellian, thought police and all, and while I
am maybe a bit too sensitive to these things, I don't consider that a bad
thing at all in these times of ever decreasing civil liberty.

So my questions are:

a) Is this (policing opinions and suppressing undesirable opinions)
   the official stance of the FreeBSD project?
b) If yes, is this written down somewhere? I.e. is there a list of rules
   that projects must fulfill so they don't need any "opinion fixing" by
   FreeBSD?
c) If no, is the FreeBSD project fine with adam going around and asking
   upstream contributors to police their personal opinions in the name of
   the project?

Thanks a lot for any clarification!

[1] http://lists.schmorp.de/pipermail/perl/2020q1/000036.html
[2] http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/Canary-Stability.html

-- 
                The choice of a       Deliantra, the free code+content MORPG
      -----==-     _GNU_              http://www.deliantra.net
      ----==-- _       generation
      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __      Marc Lehmann
      --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ /      schmorp@schmorp.de
      -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\



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