FreeBSD asking contributors to fix their opinions - is it official?

[Ottavio Caruso]

On Sat, 21 Mar 2020 at 12:26, Marc Lehmann <schmorp at schmorp.de> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> This is a request to clarify official policy of the FreeBSD project with
> regards to regulating opinions - if this list is not the right list to
> ask this question, I would be extremely happy if people could direct me
> ot a more appropriate forum - I didn't find anything that seemed more
> appropriate, so I am posting to this list. Apologies if this was wrong.
>
> Moving along, today, I received a mail[1] by some adamw at freebsd.org,
> asking me to remove what "FreeBSD" perceives to be personal opinions from
> my perl module, Canary::Stability[2].
>
> His mail is a bit hard to read, as it makes many claims and practically
> gives no evidence for them (and most are hard to believe for me, tpo be
> honest). The only remotely actionably thing seesm to be that I really need
> to remove these personal opinions.
>
> Since he writes as "@freebsd.org" and he claims that...
>
>    I'd like to strongly urge you to retire Canary::Stability. [...]
>
>    FreeBSD has had to go to lengths to fix Canary::Stability. If you
>    really are married to the module, can you please [...] remove the
>    personal opinions?
>
> If I read this correctly, he is acting in a capacity officially
> representing FreeBSD in that matter and seems to indicate that the FreeBSD
> project needs to police what it perceives as personal opinions. In fact,
> it seems to be the most urgent and pressing matter, as nothing else of
> substance was written.
>
> If true, I would perosnally find this a very sad thing, as I had the
> utmost respect for the FreeBSD project, always trying my best to make my
> modules portable to it and using it as one of the platforms I test all my
> releases on, and Canary::Stability hopefully makes it clear that I take
> stability very seriously.
>
> To me, this sounds rather orwellian, thought police and all, and while I
> am maybe a bit too sensitive to these things, I don't consider that a bad
> thing at all in these times of ever decreasing civil liberty.
>
> So my questions are:
>
> a) Is this (policing opinions and suppressing undesirable opinions)
>    the official stance of the FreeBSD project?
> b) If yes, is this written down somewhere? I.e. is there a list of rules
>    that projects must fulfill so they don't need any "opinion fixing" by
>    FreeBSD?
> c) If no, is the FreeBSD project fine with adam going around and asking
>    upstream contributors to police their personal opinions in the name of
>    the project?
>
> Thanks a lot for any clarification!
>
> [1] http://lists.schmorp.de/pipermail/perl/2020q1/000036.html
> [2] http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/Canary-Stability.html

I'm not affiliated to FreeBSD, but I see nothing wrong in a developer
from another project posting onto a public mailing list of another
project and voicing his concerns about a particular issue and I see
nothing wrong in you posting here and asking for feedback, but at the
same time I think you are taking it a bit too personal. I've read [1]
and I see nothing that induces to thinking he was speaking on behalf
of the whole of FreeBSD.

-- 
Ottavio Caruso