I posted a version of the following as a comment to this entry on Eric S. Raymond's blog, where he attempts to defend the "right" of MikeeUSA to post hatefully and violently misogynistic content to SourceForge.
This is a bad call Eric has made. He is expecting SourceForge to be responsible for protecting a “werewolf”’s “free speech” rights, but that’s not SourceForge’s place. SourceForge exists for the sake of the community, and in order to properly serve the community, it has clear Terms of Use.
Specifically, under those terms of use, which every user or potential user of SourceForge should read and understand, content that “endorse[s] or promote[s] racism, bigotry, hatred, or physical harm of any kind against another group or individual” or which “discriminate[s], incite[s] harassment or advocate[s] harassment of any group or individual” is unacceptable. MikeeUSA’s contributions fall squarely into that category, I doubt there can be any disagreement with that.
That being the case, SourceForge is entirely within its rights to “restrict access to or the availability of material that SourceForge, in its sole discretion, considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable”. Note that this is an agreement which SourceForge users enter into of their own free will, without any duress on anyone’s part.
If one doesn’t like the Terms of Use, then one should find some other accommodation than SourceForge. If one decides to use SourceForge, and then fails to adhere to the Terms of Use, one has no right whatsoever to complain if SourceForge keeps their side of the bargain.
SourceForge has no obligation to “protect” anyone’s “enemy”, nor should it. SourceForge has an obligation to protect and serve the community as a whole, and those who don’t operate under the clearly laid out terms and conditions which are the “price of admission” should get no protection at all. Eric would, however, seem to prefer that SourceForge ignore its own Terms of Use so as to avoid a completely dubious and misdefined (as he admits) sort of quasi-”censorship”.
Eric worries about drawing the line one way; by refusing to do so, he cuts the legs out from under the Terms of Use. After all, if MikeeUSA’s “contributions” deserve protection, why shouldn’t pedophilic content, equally in violation of the terms of use, enjoy equal protection?
Anyone can put up a web site or an SVN server. No one is entitled to a web site or an SVN server. If MikeeUSA is determined to “contribute” his content, such as it is, let him pay his own way. SourceForge is in no way obligated to foot the bill for him, nor should it be.
By attempting to turn this into a sort of “thin end of the wedge” argument, Eric runs the risk of allowing the “werewolves” to effectively dominate the community at the expense of the worthwhile contributors. There’s a Gresham’s Law that applies to community as well: bad “contributors” can certainly drive out good ones. While the choice that Ms. Eicher made is amusing, it’s fairly irrelevant to the question of whether SourceForge was or wasn’t justified in removing MikeeUSA’s content: clearly they had every justification under the sun.
Let’s keep that “rough meritocracy” in mind. Contributions that are without merit—as MikeeUSA’s clearly are—should get short shrift. A contribution to SourceForge is not “public speech”. If MikeeUSA wants to speak publicly, there are plenty of ways he can do that without SourceForge’s support and assistance.
