this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
119 points (98.4% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17678 readers
38 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Found this blog post and found it had more insight into the issues around the dev and the toxicity in FOSS

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 month ago (12 children)

Calling an unspecified gender person anything other than "they" was until recently considered to be incorrect. "They" is plural but now is used to refer to singlar persons because writing "he or she" everywhere is too much. Calling a user "he" does not imply that users are male or can only be male. Not using "they" or "he/she" or obscure gender neutral pronouns does not make something inherently transphobic. Closing PRs that unnecessarily change pronouns as spam is not inherently transphobic, but the accompanying comment is not very inclusive.

The post talks about "white suppremacist language," but the proposed change did not remove white suppremacist language. It was just a generic anti "woke" message, possibly motivated by people brigading after the original PR to change "he" to "they." White suppremacists may use also use similar language, but you can't just pick things that a white suppremacist has done and decide that anyone else who does the same is a white suppremacist. He's not blameless, but people are intentionally provoking the developer and exagerating the responses for drama.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Singular "they" is older than singular "you." And note, of course, that the pronoun "you" is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

"You" was both singular and plural throughout the history of Middle English. Singular "they" emerged in Late Middle English around the 14th century.

load more comments (10 replies)