Vaxry did nothing wrong

2024-04-09

Alright, so today I'd like to talk about a conflict between Hyprland developer Vaxry and freedesktop.org, specifically Lyude from the Code of Conduct team over there. I just want to give you my thoughts on the whole thing.

What happened?

I will quickly go over what happened, but if you're interested, you should definitely read his blog post, along with the email conversation attached and the followup blog post. There's some information there that I won't go over here, for sure.

In short, however, this individual by the name of Lyude from Freedesktop's Code of Conduct team wants to ban Vaxry, for breaching the Freedesktop Code of Conduct in Vaxry's own Discord server. You heard that right. Freedesktop thinks they have the power to enforce a Code of Conduct in a community that they do not own. In my opinion, that's egregious, and abuse of power. And, as you can read in the followup blog post, they did end up banning Vaxry later on, after he published the first blog post, likely in retaliation.

My thoughts

As you know if you read my blog, I believe free speech is humanity's most important privilege, one that in a perfect world would be a right, one that some people take for granted, one that we're slowly being stripped of and one that some people have never had. And in the free software space, this is a step backwards in that regard. I've written about this topic several times in the past, most recently in my blog post titled 'The achievement matters, not the achiever', and much of what I said in that blog post applies here. If you're interested, definitely check that blog post out.

From reading the blog post and the email conversation, I get the sense that Lyude strongly dislikes Vaxry on a personal level, but because they have to act professional, given that they're part of Freedesktop's Code of Conduct team, they chose to keep that to themselves. The email was intended to be a middle finger to Vaxry, without being so blatant that Red Hat would notice and take action. Lyude presents themselves as a person who does not care about the project, and keeping the project civil. Rather, they want to take down anyone who doesn't participate in the inclusivity activism. I hate to involve politics, but if we're honest with ourselves, this is a political matter. The core idea, the goal is to take down those who have different opinions and views. Lyude saw that Hyprland was a project that is rising in popularity, and also saw an opportunity to take action against its maintainer, Vaxry.

As is also outlined in Vaxry's blog post, Lyude is a hypocrite, and frankly, I wouldn't expect anything less. On Mastodon, Lyude says:

> If you really says LGB instead of LGBTQ I'm going to straight up bully you, swirly wedgy and all

They literally admitted that they were going to bully people. So, Vaxry breached the Code of Conduct, but this doesn't constitute as a breach of the Code of Conduct? If this isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is. And when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Lyude has since deleted that post, likely knowing how damaging it really is.

As I previously stated, upon publishing the initial blog post, Lyude decided to ban Vaxry. I believe this is in retaliation, the timing just lines up. The blog post painted Lyude in a negative light. Lyude was likely aware of this, and because of this, they decided to carry out the ban, despite letting Vaxry go with a warning.

Conclusion

That's really just what I wanted to say. I support Vaxry here, not only because I don't think he has done anything wrong, but because I don't want an internet where you aren't free to speak your mind. I absolutely understand that rules in one community apply to that community. But it can only stretch so far. The rules in one community should not carry over to another community, especially when that other community is your own community. Vaxry was punished for his actions in his own community. Don't you see how stupid that sounds? Inclusivity activists are bullies, and in my opinion it is time they face the consequences of their actions.

Freedesktop does not care about your freedom, they do not care about freedom of speech when it doesn't benefit their moderator team's values and ideas. The only thing that's free about Freedesktop is their software, and who knows for how much longer that will be.

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