Sex Gor & Open Source
2017-03-28 16:23:21.539705+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Some of you may be aware of the dust-up that's been happening in the Drupal community. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert asked Larry Garfield to leave the community. Garfield responded publicly with TMI about me:
I am involved in two such communities, specifically the BDSM community and the Gorean (Gor) community. The former is by far the larger of the two and more varied, although I spend more of my time and activity in the Gorean community. It's a small community, and sadly much of what is found online about it is utter crap, just as most in the BDSM community find the "50 Shades" representation of BDSM to be harmfully misleading. The Gorean subculture is inspired by a science-fiction book series written from the 1960s onward to today, and predicated on a strong sense of personal honor, integrity, and community. It also practices consensual Master/slave relationships, and has a strong gender bias toward male-Dom/female-sub relationships, but that is not the cornerstone of Gorean culture. There are other groups that are biased the other way, or have no gender bias. There are even groups in Chicago (where I live) that have regular "fem-dom" parties. To each their own.
There has been much back and forth on this, with the Drupal board being very cagey, and on the other side a number of people wondering how long it was going to be before followers of the various Abrahamic religions started to get kicked out.
I've got complex feelings on this, on the one hand I didn't shed too many tears when Brendan Eich got outed for having donated to the Prop 8 campaign, an outing which led to his ouster from Mozilla, but I'm also very much in the "if it's consensual, what happens in Garfield's home is none of my business". And then, of course, we get into sub-discussions about what "consent" means in BDSM relationships...
Anyway, I've read a bunch of think-pieces on this, but not the one that Shadow sent me today, and I think this one is good: Jon Evans on TechCrunch: Sex and Gor and open source