Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/12/oscon-no-politics-allowed.html

If you’re one of the people in the software freedom community who is
attending O’Reilly’s Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) next week here
in Portland, you may have seen debate about O’Reilly and Associates
(ORA)’s surreptitious Code of Conduct change (and quick revocation thereof)
to name “political affiliation” as a protected class. If
you’re going to OSCON or plan to go to an OSCON or ORA event in the future,
I suggest that you familiarize yourself with this issue and the political
historical context in which these events of the last few days take
place.

First, OSCON has always been political: software freedom is
inherently a political struggle for the rights of computer users, so any
conference including that topic is necessarily political. Additionally,
O’Reilly himself had stated his political positions many times at OSCON, so
it’s strange that, in
his response this morning, O’Reilly admits that he and his staff tried to
require via agreements that speakers … refrain from all political
speech. OSCON can’t possibly be a software freedom community event if
ORA’s intent … [is] to make sure that conferences put on for the
exchange of technical information aren’t politicized (as O’Reilly stated
today). OTOH, I’m not surprised by this tack, because O’Reilly, in large
part via OSCON, often pushes forward political views that O’Reilly likes, and
marginalizes those he doesn’t.

Second, I must strongly disagree with ORA’s new (as of this morning)
position that Codes of Conduct should only include “protected
classes” that the laws of a particular country currently recognize.
Codes of Conduct exist in our community not only as mechanism to assure the
rights of protected classes, but also to assure that everyone feels safe
and free of harassment and hate speech. In fact, most Codes of Conduct in
our community have “including but not limited to” language
alongside any list of protected classes, and IMO all of them should.

More than that, ORA has missed a key opportunity to delineate hate
speech and political speech in a manner that is sorely needed here in the
USA and in the software freedom community. We live in a political climate
where our Politician-in-Chief governs via Twitter and smoothly co-mingles
political positioning with statements that would violate the Code of
Conduct at most conferences. In other words, in a political climate where
the party-ticket-headline candidate is exposed for celebrating his own
sexual harassing behavior and gets elected anyway, we are culturally going
to have trouble nationwide distinguishing between political speech and hate
speech. Furthermore, political manipulators now use that confusion to
their own ends, and we must be ever-vigilant in efforts to assure that
political speech is free, but that it is delineated from hate speech, and,
most importantly, that our policy on the latter is zero-tolerance.

In this climate, I’m disturbed to see that O’Reilly, who is certainly
politically savvy enough to fully understand these delineations, is
ignoring them completely. The rancor in our current politics — which
is not just at the national level but has also trickled down into the
software freedom community — is fueled by bad actors who will gladly
conflate their own hate speech and political speech, and (in the irony that
only post-fact politics can bring), those same people will also
accuse the other side of hate speech, primarily by accusing intolerance of
the original “political speech” (which is of course was, from
the start, a mix of hate speech and political speech). (Examples of this
abound, but one example that comes to mind is Donald Trump’s public
back-and-forth with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.) None of ORA’s
policy proposals, nor O’Reilly’s public response, address this nuance.
ORA’s detractors are legitimately concerned, because blanketly adding
“political affiliation” to a protected class, married with a outright ban on
political speech, creates an environment where selective enforcement favors
the powerful, and furthermore allows the Code of Conduct to more easily
become a political weapon by those who engage in the conflation practice I
described.

However, it’s no surprise that O’Reilly is taking this tack, either.
OSCON (in particular) has a long history — on political issues of
software freedom — of promoting (and even facilitating) certain
political speech, even while squelching other political speech. Given that
history (examples of which I include below), O’Reilly shouldn’t be
surprised that many in our community are legitimately skeptical about why
ORA made these two changes without community discussion, only to quickly
backpedal when exposed. I too am left wondering what political game
O’Reilly is up to, since I recall well
that Morozov
documented O’Reilly’s track record of political manipulation in his
article, The Meme Hustler. I thus encourage everyone who
attends ORA events to follow this political game with a careful eye and a
good sense of OSCON history to figure out what’s really going on. I’ve
been watching for years, and OSCON is often a master class in achieving
what Chomsky critically called “manufacturing consent” in
politics.

For example, back in 2001, when OSCON was already in its third year,
Microsoft executives went on the political attack against copyleft (calling
it unAmerican and a “cancer”). O’Reilly, long unfriendly to
copyleft himself, personally invited Craig Mundie of Microsoft to have a
“Great Debate” keynote at the next OSCON — where Mundie
would “debate” with “Open Source leaders” about the
value of Open Source. In reality, O’Reilly put on stage lots of Open
Source people with Mundie, but among them was no one who
supported the strategy of copyleft, the primary component of Microsoft’s
political attacks. The “debate” was artfully framed to have
only one “logical” conclusion: “we all love Open Source
— even Microsoft (!) — it’s just copyleft that can be
problematic and which we should avoid”. It was no debate at all;
only carefully crafted messaging that left out much of the picture.

That wasn’t an isolated incident; both subtle and overt examples of
crafted political messaging at OSCON became annual events after that. As
another example, ten years later, O’Reilly did almost the same playbook
again: he invited the GitHub CEO to give a very political
and completely anti-copyleft keynote. After years of watching how
O’Reilly carefully framed the political issue of copyleft at OSCON, I am
definitely concerned about how other political issues might be framed.

And, not all political issues are equal. I follow copyleft politics
because it’s my been my day job for two decades. But, I admit there are
stakes even higher with other political topics, and having watched how ORA
has handled the politics of copyleft for decades, I’m fearful that ORA is (at
best) ill-equipped to handle political issues that can cause real harm
— such as the current political climate that permits hate speech, and
even racist speech (think of Trump calling Elizabeth Warren
“Pocahontas”), as standard political fare. The stakes of
contemporary politics now leave people feeling unsafe. Since
OSCON is a political event, ORA should face this directly
rather than pretending OSCON is merely a series of technical lectures.

The most insidious part of ORA’s response to this issue is that, until the
issue was called out, it seems that all political speech (particularly that
in opposition to the status quo) violated OSCON’s policies by default.
We’ve successfully gotten ORA to back down from that position, but not
without a fight. My biggest concern is that ORA nearly ran OSCON this year
with the problematic combination of banning political speech in the speaker
agreement, while treating “political affiliation” as a
protected class in the Code of Conduct. Regardless of intent, confusing
and unclear rules like that are gamed primarily by bad actors, and O’Reilly
knows that. Indeed, just days later, O’Reilly admits that both items were
serious errors, yet still asks for voluntary compliance with the
“spirit” of those confusing rules.

How could it be that an organization that’s been running the same event
for two decades only just began to realize that these are complex
issues? Paradoxically, I’m both baffled and not surprised that ORA has
handled this issue so poorly. They still have no improved solution for the
original problem that O’Reilly states they wanted to address (i.e.,
preventing hate speech). Meanwhile, they’ve cycled through a series of
failed (and alarming) solutions without community input. Would it have
really been
that hard for them to publicly ask first: “We want to
welcome all political views at OSCON, but we also detest hate speech that
is sometimes joined with political speech. Does anyone want to join a
committee to work on improvements to our policies to address this
issue?” I think if they’d handled this issue in that (Open Source)
way, the outcome would have not be the fiasco it’s become.