[[!tag debian]]

I retired from Debian as a developer a year ago. I said then that it was because Debian wasn't fun anymore, but I didn't unpack that much. It's been long enough that I feel I can do that. I should've done it back then, but I wasn't strong enough.

A big part of Debian not being fun is that there's so much hatred in the project. There's people attacking others for who they are, be it women or trans or non-binary. There's people standing up to defend the attackers. Debian is just now going through another bout of that. It's sad and it's disgusting. And it reaffirms that I made the right decision getting out.

People denying other people their humanity, their very right to exist, is something Debian should not tolerate. I think Debian should exclude people who do that from the project. Likewise, people defending the right to deny others their humanity should equally unacceptable.

De-humanizing rhetoric isn't the only reason Debian stopped being fun. Everything else seems irrelevant, though. If people don't want others to even exist, there's no point in discussing minor points like improving a consensus building culture, paying off at least a noticeable part of the technical debt Debian carries from the past quarter century, or smoothing away some of the worst sources of friction in the development process of the project.

Stop the hatred. The good will follow.