Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/11/16/bacon.html

Jono Bacon is currently being
criticized
for the manner in which
he launched
an initiative
called OpenRespect.Org. Much of
this criticism is unfair, and I decided to write briefly here in support
of Jono, because he’s a victim of a type of mistreatment that I’ve
experienced myself, so I have particularly strong empathy for his
situation.

To be clear, I’m not even a supporter of Jono’s OpenRespect.Org
initiative myself. I think there are others who are doing good work in
this area already (for
example, various
efforts
around getting women involved in Free Software have long recognized and
worked on the issue, since mutual respect is an essential part having a
more diverse community). Also, I felt that Jono’s initiative was
slanted toward encouraging people respect all actions by
companies, some of which don’t advance Free Software.
I commented
on Jono’s blog to share my criticisms of the initiative when he was
still formulating it. In short, I think the wording of the current
statement on OpenRespect.org seems to indicate people should accept
anyone else’s choice as equally moral. As someone who believes software
freedom as a moral issue, and thus view development and distribution of
proprietary software as an immoral act, I have a problem with such a
mandate, although I nevertheless strive to be respectful in pursuit of
that view. I would hate to be declared disrespectful merely because I
believe in the morality of software freedom.

Yet, despite the fact that I disagree with some of the details of
Jono’s initiative, I believe most of the criticisms have been unfair.
First and foremost, we should
take Jono at his word
that this initiative is his own and not one undertaken on behalf of
Canonical, Ltd. I doubt Jono would dispute that his work at Canonical,
Ltd. inspired him to think about these issues, but that doesn’t mean
that everything he does on his own time on his own website is a
Canonical, Ltd. activity.

Indeed, I’ve personally been similarly attacked for items I’ve said on
this blog of my own, which of course does not represent the views of any
of my employers (past nor present) nor any organizations with which I
have volunteer affiliations. When I have things to say on those topics,
I have other fora to post officially, as does Jono.

So, I’ve experienced first-hand what Jono is currently experiencing:
namely, that people ignore disclaimers precisely to attack someone who
has an opinion that they don’t like. By conflating your personal
opinions with those of your employer’s, people subtly discredit you
— for example, by using your employment relationship to put
inappropriate pressure on you to change your positions. I’m very sad to
see that this same thing I’ve been a victim of is now happening to Jono,
too. I couldn’t just watch it happen without making a statement of
solidarity and pointing out that such treatment is unfair.

Even if we don’t agree with the OpenRespect.org initiative (and I
don’t, for reasons stated above), there is no one to blame but Jono
himself, as he’s told us clearly this isn’t a Canonical initiative, and
I’ve seen no evidence that shows the situation is otherwise.

I do note that there are other criticisms raised, such as whether or
not Jono reached out in the best possible way to others during the
launch, or whether others thought they’d be involved when it turned out
to be a unilateral initiative. All of that, of course, is something
that’s reparable (as is my primary complaint above, too), so on those
fronts, we should just give our criticism and ask Jono to change it.
That’s what I did on my issue. He chose not to take my advice, which is
his prerogative. My response thereafter was simply to not support the
initiative.

To the extent we don’t have enough respect in the FLOSS community,
here’s an easy place to improve: we should take people at their word
until we have evidence to believe otherwise. Jono says OpenRespect.org
is his own thing; we should believe him. We shouldn’t insist that
everything someone says is on behalf of their employer, even if they
have a spokesperson role. People have a right to be something more
than automatons for their bosses.

Disclosure: I did not tell Jono I was going to write
this post, but after it was completely written, I gave him the chance to
make a binary decision about whether I posted it publicly or not. Since
you’re reading this, he obviously answered 1.