> As such, if a peaceful protest were to take place during the talk in question, we will not take action, provided the protest is indeed peaceful and does not disrupt the proceedings.
However, the link you gave explicitly states: “Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk”.
I think I side with the FOSDEM organizers here; I am not OK with disrupting anyone’s talk. Protests are fine, actual disruptions are not.
Your rhetoric hinges on a wilful conflation of the two meanings of the word “disruption”. Also, who says I approve of bypassing labor laws, banking regulations, or copyright?
> Bypassing labor laws, banking regulations, copyright? All right! Making a fuss when they are talking? Uncivil, not OK, who do you think you are!
Many "tech thought leaders" are, for lack of a better word, clinically relevant narcissists. In their view, the world revolves around them and their ideas, everyone else has to stand aside for their grand plans, and god forbid you try and shine a spotlight on their bullshit - then you are the enemy.
That also explains the hard shift towards the (far-)right observed over the last weeks, with pledges of allegiance made in Florida. It's not just about the 47th threatening revenge against anyone not supporting him, it's more about the simple fact that the progressive/left doesn't provide the positive feedback that these "leaders" crave like nothing else.
Protesters do not have an untrammelled right to be disruptive; others in society do not have an obligation to facilitate or tolerate that disruption. If you want to stand outside the venue and shout, that's your prerogative. If you want to come inside the venue and cause disruption, then the organisers have the right to throw you out.
Strictly speaking, what we're discussing is direct action rather than protest. The aim of these protesters is not merely to make a public display of their disapproval, but to take active steps to prevent something from happening, i.e. to prevent a talk from taking place by "occupying" the stage. The participants in that action may feel morally justified and may indeed be morally justified, but that doesn't negate the consequences of their actions. Giving anyone impunity to break whatever rule they like if they feel it's justified is a very short path to anarchy.
>Protesters do not have an untrammelled right to be disruptive; others in society do not have an obligation to facilitate or tolerate that disruption
Go on then, polite member of society who doesn't understand the point of protests. I'm looking forward to your counter-protest that will not disrupt anything, will largely go unnoticed, be super polite but still be a huge success and change the status quo.
I'm not saying that protesters shouldn't be disruptive, I'm saying that they don't have a right to be disruptive. If you believe that your cause is just, then you have to accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Disrupting a conference may well be a more effective way to highlight your grievance, but you don't get to play the victim if the organisers throw you out or refuse you entry. You have a right to protest, but that right does not supersede the rights of other people to go about their lawful business. The alternative to that balancing of rights is nothing more than mob rule.
Yes, this is what modern protests do not understand. Of course they don't have the right to protest however they want. That's why Martin Luther King was arrested some 29 times. Many of the protesters I talked to in other movements all want to be protected from arrest or any harm to their well-being. In other words, they don't want to push their protest into civil disobedience.
People risk their livelihood and lives to protest because they think something is is wrong enough that it needs to be changed that desperately.
People today will complain all day about Amazon and Jeff bezos but ask them to cancel their Amazon prime subscription? No way!
Just look at what Sam Hussain and Max Blumenthal, the reporters, did the other day, and that should give people an idea of civil disobedience.
What FOSDEM is saying is that they don't want civil disobedience, only protests. And they want to set the rules for the protest. So FOSDEM is turning into the state.
You're missing the distinction. No society grants the right to unlimited protest.
The First Amendment protects your right to assemble and express your views through protest. However, police and other government officials are allowed to place certain narrow restrictions on the exercise of speech rights.
For example, I cannot walk into your house and protest what you're eating for dinner. Now I can stand outside on the street with a sign and protest it but if I enter your house I'll be arrested.
But I can enter your house and risk being arrested, and that's called civil disobedience, which is a step above protest.
All valid this isn't a trick question I'm truly curious if it was up to you how would civil rights leaders have gone about protesting? Or a group of people that just experienced genocide?
Because in your framework they would be disruptors so what is the right way to do things?
I was raised by a cult may be dead soon I dont't have any sense of agency anything I do feels wrong so I'm truly curious
Civil rights leaders both protested and engaged in civil disobedience. Protests and civil disobedience are not the same. Protest is allowed, civil disobedience will get you arrested.
When things are wrong there is no right way to do things. You just have to act with your morals and what you believe is right. If enough people agree with you then things change. Or you just ahead of your time and will be looked back on as a savant.
I'm sorry you grew up in a cult. One of my hobbies is investigating local cults. (Legacy Center in NC)
I don't know you're circumstances about your health or if there's a third to your life, but if I was going to be dead soon that would give me the more freedom of agency than if I had more to lose.
People think there is some magic planned to protesting, like you can protest or engage in civil disobedience and just the right way and this hinders people from doing any action.
If you see something wrong, do something. That's all there is to it. I stood up and screamed at representative David Price when he attended his speech at a local University at the beginning of the Iraq war. I just knew it was right, was it effective,? Hell no. Did it make me feel good? Hell yes.
FOSDEM is a conference for open source software, possibly one of the most functional demonstrations of anarchy working in the modern world. Seems only fitting to me.
Anarchy does not mean mob rule. Allowing protests to censor anyone from talking opens up a huge security hole: anyone can then organize a “protest” to censor anyone.
Anarchist here. Anarchy is the practice of establishing social order without central authority, coercion, or intimidation.
This is clearly an attempt by the minority of attendees to use coercion to limit the free speech of someone they dislike.
If a minority of people reject broad consensus and to prevent any person from peacefully speaking in an assigned time slot, they are not participating in anarchy. They are simply being dicks.
Adults respect the right of their enemies to speak peacefully. Quietly hold up signs, wear T-shirts, but respect peaceful free speech. Next year submit your own talk with an alternative prespective to try to form consensus on why billionaires and or companies with higher-than-x carbon emissions should be unwelcome, or propose an alternative method to gain broader community consensus on approving talks
IIUC, the word “anarchy”, when being used as a synonym for “chaos”, is a simple political slur; like calling some country a “Socialist Regime” in the context of state overreach. It implies a negative but does not state it, in hope of creating an associative link between the two concepts. The word “anarchy” is merely one such (very old) slur which really took hold, and most people now believe the word “anarchy” actually means chaos.
Civil disobedience is not synonymous with protesting and you can do the latter without the former. There are tradeoffs with everything and protests conducted with the tacit approval of the event organizers might be more convincing or more impactful than a disruptive protest that gets the protesters kicked out of the event.
... we do not object to the need for sponsors generally at FOSDEM ... we do object specifically to Jack Dorsey and Block, Inc. being selected as sponsors and especially as speakers.
... Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk, and only Dorsey’s talk ...
... His complicity, along with his present-day activities at Block, Inc. and the priorities of the company that he represents as CEO — its irresponsible climate policy, $120M in fines for enabling consumer fraud, and the layoffs of another 1,000 employees in 2024 despite posting record profits on $5B in revenue — are enough of a threat to our community and its ethos to raise alarm at his participation in FOSDEM.
"""
I'm a little at a loss for context. A shallow reading is that DeVault's contention is that Dorsey sold Twitter and is now involved in many cryptocurrency focused companies. Is this too reductive of a reading?
As far as I can tell, a significant portion of Block's codebase, as well as other sibling organizations, are FOSS.
"To maintain the peaceful nature of our protest and minimize the disruption to FOSDEM generally, we ask participants to strictly adhere to the following instructions:
Do not touch anyone else, or anyone else’s property, for any reason.
Do not engage in intimidation.
Remain quiet and peaceful throughout the demonstration.
When the protest ends, disperse peacefully and in a timely manner.
Oh, wow. I have come to expect nonsensical silliness from him but this is a new level of ridiculous posturing.
Disrupting a talk simply because you don’t like AI or fintech is, for lack of a better term, lame. A payment processor isn’t responsible for the climate emergency, and a company isn’t evil for having a wealthy founder or having to do layoffs.
The people who spend a significant amount of time (often in my experience
unpaid) arranging a conference have to mix and match and probably make
some unpopular compromises for reasons know best to them.
I do think one should get them the benefit of the doubt as to why.
Just dont attend the talk.
It is that easy.
The ultimate protest would be a nearly empty room.
That would be quite humiliating for the person giving the talk.
Read Bryan Cantrill on how unimpressive Dorsey is to anyone with a clue:
"I, like many people, have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As Adam and I regaled in a recent Twitter Space, it started when debugging the Twitter fail whale in the offices of Obvious in 2007, where I became thoroughly unimpressed with their self-important skipper, Jack Dorsey. In part because I thought he was such a fool, I refused to join Twitter out of principle."
It seems to me letting Dorsey speak and ridicule himself in front of an audience of technically savvy people would actually be the best way to discredit him.
That was more of a range rant on Musk than anything else.
Which is far as long as it goes.
I am surprised that such blog posts are done under the
dtrace.org banner.
I was wondering about this when I read the blog post,
so I checked out www.dtrace.org and from my point of view
its ambiguous.
The front page says:
"DTrace is a performance analysis and troubleshooting tool that is included by default with various operating systems, including Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. A Linux port is in development."
Heh. I hosted on a Joyent OpenSolaris zone for a long time (before you joined) and, ahem, enjoyed a period of instability as that useless site (Twitter, not DTrace.org), also hosted on Joyent, took off and had scaling troubles causing noisy-neighbor syndrome, circa 2007–2008 or so.
somehow this reminds me of the story of another internet personality when he met richard stallman for the first time because he was staging a silent protest at his talk. one of the observations was that the protesters were actually interested in the talk and there were more people in the room than expected because of it. it was mentioned or even discussed on HN but i can't find it now.
the key part: "At least half the questions (all technical) during and after the talk were from the protesters. [...] as a result of Stallman's ploy, my audience was about twice what it would have been."
> This special relationship and this special event can be destroyed by the actions from just a few.
That's so true.
At our university in the 00s student protestors (they were against some fees, I think) posed as the student council for electrotechnics and got PA equipment from the university administration. Which they used to disrupt some big welcoming ceremony for foreign guest academics.
Now the electrotechnics parties had no PA equipment anymore. Because the administrative employee pointed out that technically the equipment was never for such use. Over decades(!) he had always handed it out because why wouldn't you support a big student party and the organizers had always been very responsible with it and returned it in pristine condition.
But now the risk for him personally outweighed any goodwill. Tough luck!
Why would any event accept or welcome people who are there to sabotage it?
"Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk" then do it outside, that is where your Protest belongs and where you actually have a right to protest. Obviously anyone who comes to an event with the goal of disrupting that event needs to be removed or just not let in.
It seems extremely uncontroversial to ban everyone involved in the planned protest from attending.
My understanding is that FOSDEM is run by volunteers on a shoestring budget mainly thanks to the support of the ULB (a university). They don't have security, they don't have badges or registrations, you can just walk in and out as you please. I have my doubts this is going to last if people start to deliberately try to take a fat dump on it to elevate their own ego.
> if a peaceful protest were to take place during the talk in question, we will not take action, provided the protest is indeed peaceful and does not disrupt the proceedings
Would staging a sit-in explicitly intended to prevent the booked speaker from speaking be classed as “disrupting the proceedings”?
Whats going on with the special snowflakes trying to get attention? First the WordPress-guy, now this one. Maybe we should all acknowledge that we are much less important than we would like to. And thats OK.
It reminds me of something that often frustrates me. An allegation that someone said something (e.g. something offensive), but without quoting what they said (or providing context) so I cannot actually evaluate it for myself.
"It has also been pointed out that Dorsey does not bear sole responsibility for Twitter’s sale. However, he is complicit and he profited handsomely from the sale and all of its harmful consequences. The sale left the platform at the disposal of the far right, causing a sharp rise in hate speech and harassment and the layoffs of 3,700 of the Twitter employees that made it worth so much in the first place."
it’s not about reading opinions, it’s about the world’s richest man enabling nazis, pushing misogynistic views, and destabilizing the globe so he can make a buck and push his obsession with mars. oh and let’s not forget the anti-queer, anti-black stuff.
Context: Jack Dorsey is giving a talk and Drew DeVault is organizing a protest against that https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/20/2025-01-20-FOSDEM-protest...
Seems there is a conflict brewing. TFA says:
> As such, if a peaceful protest were to take place during the talk in question, we will not take action, provided the protest is indeed peaceful and does not disrupt the proceedings.
However, the link you gave explicitly states: “Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk”.
I think I side with the FOSDEM organizers here; I am not OK with disrupting anyone’s talk. Protests are fine, actual disruptions are not.
Funny how tech thought leaders always praise disruption, and suddenly it is not fine when they are the ones disrupted.
Bypassing labor laws, banking regulations, copyright? All right! Making a fuss when they are talking? Uncivil, not OK, who do you think you are!
Your rhetoric hinges on a wilful conflation of the two meanings of the word “disruption”. Also, who says I approve of bypassing labor laws, banking regulations, or copyright?
> Bypassing labor laws, banking regulations, copyright? All right! Making a fuss when they are talking? Uncivil, not OK, who do you think you are!
Many "tech thought leaders" are, for lack of a better word, clinically relevant narcissists. In their view, the world revolves around them and their ideas, everyone else has to stand aside for their grand plans, and god forbid you try and shine a spotlight on their bullshit - then you are the enemy.
That also explains the hard shift towards the (far-)right observed over the last weeks, with pledges of allegiance made in Florida. It's not just about the 47th threatening revenge against anyone not supporting him, it's more about the simple fact that the progressive/left doesn't provide the positive feedback that these "leaders" crave like nothing else.
Tangential but I can't wait until some startup starts working on mind reading AI so the brain becomes nothing more than an organ
Right. Because protests (however stupid they are) should be silent and easy to ignore, they should not disrupt anything or inconvenience anyone.
Protesters do not have an untrammelled right to be disruptive; others in society do not have an obligation to facilitate or tolerate that disruption. If you want to stand outside the venue and shout, that's your prerogative. If you want to come inside the venue and cause disruption, then the organisers have the right to throw you out.
Strictly speaking, what we're discussing is direct action rather than protest. The aim of these protesters is not merely to make a public display of their disapproval, but to take active steps to prevent something from happening, i.e. to prevent a talk from taking place by "occupying" the stage. The participants in that action may feel morally justified and may indeed be morally justified, but that doesn't negate the consequences of their actions. Giving anyone impunity to break whatever rule they like if they feel it's justified is a very short path to anarchy.
>Protesters do not have an untrammelled right to be disruptive; others in society do not have an obligation to facilitate or tolerate that disruption
Go on then, polite member of society who doesn't understand the point of protests. I'm looking forward to your counter-protest that will not disrupt anything, will largely go unnoticed, be super polite but still be a huge success and change the status quo.
I'm not saying that protesters shouldn't be disruptive, I'm saying that they don't have a right to be disruptive. If you believe that your cause is just, then you have to accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Disrupting a conference may well be a more effective way to highlight your grievance, but you don't get to play the victim if the organisers throw you out or refuse you entry. You have a right to protest, but that right does not supersede the rights of other people to go about their lawful business. The alternative to that balancing of rights is nothing more than mob rule.
Yes, this is what modern protests do not understand. Of course they don't have the right to protest however they want. That's why Martin Luther King was arrested some 29 times. Many of the protesters I talked to in other movements all want to be protected from arrest or any harm to their well-being. In other words, they don't want to push their protest into civil disobedience.
People risk their livelihood and lives to protest because they think something is is wrong enough that it needs to be changed that desperately.
People today will complain all day about Amazon and Jeff bezos but ask them to cancel their Amazon prime subscription? No way!
Just look at what Sam Hussain and Max Blumenthal, the reporters, did the other day, and that should give people an idea of civil disobedience.
What FOSDEM is saying is that they don't want civil disobedience, only protests. And they want to set the rules for the protest. So FOSDEM is turning into the state.
If it was up to you how would civil rights leaders gone about protesting? Truly curious
Or a group of people that just experienced genocide?
I am getting the sense releasing the dogs and waterhosing is morally right in this scenario
You're missing the distinction. No society grants the right to unlimited protest.
The First Amendment protects your right to assemble and express your views through protest. However, police and other government officials are allowed to place certain narrow restrictions on the exercise of speech rights.
For example, I cannot walk into your house and protest what you're eating for dinner. Now I can stand outside on the street with a sign and protest it but if I enter your house I'll be arrested.
But I can enter your house and risk being arrested, and that's called civil disobedience, which is a step above protest.
All valid this isn't a trick question I'm truly curious if it was up to you how would civil rights leaders have gone about protesting? Or a group of people that just experienced genocide?
Because in your framework they would be disruptors so what is the right way to do things?
I was raised by a cult may be dead soon I dont't have any sense of agency anything I do feels wrong so I'm truly curious
Civil rights leaders both protested and engaged in civil disobedience. Protests and civil disobedience are not the same. Protest is allowed, civil disobedience will get you arrested.
When things are wrong there is no right way to do things. You just have to act with your morals and what you believe is right. If enough people agree with you then things change. Or you just ahead of your time and will be looked back on as a savant.
I'm sorry you grew up in a cult. One of my hobbies is investigating local cults. (Legacy Center in NC)
I don't know you're circumstances about your health or if there's a third to your life, but if I was going to be dead soon that would give me the more freedom of agency than if I had more to lose.
People think there is some magic planned to protesting, like you can protest or engage in civil disobedience and just the right way and this hinders people from doing any action.
If you see something wrong, do something. That's all there is to it. I stood up and screamed at representative David Price when he attended his speech at a local University at the beginning of the Iraq war. I just knew it was right, was it effective,? Hell no. Did it make me feel good? Hell yes.
FOSDEM is a conference for open source software, possibly one of the most functional demonstrations of anarchy working in the modern world. Seems only fitting to me.
Anarchy does not mean mob rule. Allowing protests to censor anyone from talking opens up a huge security hole: anyone can then organize a “protest” to censor anyone.
Anarchist here. Anarchy is the practice of establishing social order without central authority, coercion, or intimidation.
This is clearly an attempt by the minority of attendees to use coercion to limit the free speech of someone they dislike.
If a minority of people reject broad consensus and to prevent any person from peacefully speaking in an assigned time slot, they are not participating in anarchy. They are simply being dicks.
Adults respect the right of their enemies to speak peacefully. Quietly hold up signs, wear T-shirts, but respect peaceful free speech. Next year submit your own talk with an alternative prespective to try to form consensus on why billionaires and or companies with higher-than-x carbon emissions should be unwelcome, or propose an alternative method to gain broader community consensus on approving talks
Finally an articulation of the difference between anarchy and chaos. (Not being ironic.) Thank you.
I don't agree with the position, but I appreciate the distinction.
IIUC, the word “anarchy”, when being used as a synonym for “chaos”, is a simple political slur; like calling some country a “Socialist Regime” in the context of state overreach. It implies a negative but does not state it, in hope of creating an associative link between the two concepts. The word “anarchy” is merely one such (very old) slur which really took hold, and most people now believe the word “anarchy” actually means chaos.
Protesting should be about raising awareness of disagreement on a topic. It does not have to be disruptive to reach that objective.
Sometimes it does, but that's when protest turns into civil disobedience.
Martin Luther King was arrested 29 times and then he was shot.
Allowing protests to escalate to disruptions is equivalent to allowing protests to censor anyone they don’t like.
Civil disobedience is not synonymous with protesting and you can do the latter without the former. There are tradeoffs with everything and protests conducted with the tacit approval of the event organizers might be more convincing or more impactful than a disruptive protest that gets the protesters kicked out of the event.
Guaranteeing freedom of speech and preventing a talk from happening seems contradictory.
Drew is just ridicolous. Dorsey is the least of our problems.
I'll be even there this year. But not interested in this event
In the words of my former manager "one of the good ones" there's levels to the barons
Some more information:
Jack Dorsey's slot at FOSDEM 25:
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4507-infu...
Block's GitHub:
https://github.com/block
Selections from Drew DeVault's post:
"""
... we do not object to the need for sponsors generally at FOSDEM ... we do object specifically to Jack Dorsey and Block, Inc. being selected as sponsors and especially as speakers.
... Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk, and only Dorsey’s talk ...
... His complicity, along with his present-day activities at Block, Inc. and the priorities of the company that he represents as CEO — its irresponsible climate policy, $120M in fines for enabling consumer fraud, and the layoffs of another 1,000 employees in 2024 despite posting record profits on $5B in revenue — are enough of a threat to our community and its ethos to raise alarm at his participation in FOSDEM.
"""
I'm a little at a loss for context. A shallow reading is that DeVault's contention is that Dorsey sold Twitter and is now involved in many cryptocurrency focused companies. Is this too reductive of a reading?
As far as I can tell, a significant portion of Block's codebase, as well as other sibling organizations, are FOSS.
His main objection seems to stem from the fact that Jack Dorsey's net worth is $5.6 billion.
His main objection is that FOSDEM is not CNBC. Should not be endorsing pretense of interviews, that are just marketing pitches.
> His main objection seems to stem from the fact that Jack Dorsey's net worth is $5.6 billion.
Fair. You do not become a billionaire without being a massive POS.
I thought this was a pithy remark but it looks like it's actually pretty close to the truth.
From a recent post by DeVault [0] titled "No billionaires at FOSDEM" (thanks to belter [1]):
"""
In my view, billionaires are not welcome at FOSDEM.
"""
[0] https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778478
Here’s the talk description: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4507-infu...
This is better to understand the context of the protest
""No billionaires at FOSDEM" - https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares...
Also these are the recommended actions:
"To maintain the peaceful nature of our protest and minimize the disruption to FOSDEM generally, we ask participants to strictly adhere to the following instructions:
Do not touch anyone else, or anyone else’s property, for any reason.
Do not engage in intimidation.
Remain quiet and peaceful throughout the demonstration.
When the protest ends, disperse peacefully and in a timely manner.
Leave the room the way you found it. "
Oh, wow. I have come to expect nonsensical silliness from him but this is a new level of ridiculous posturing.
Disrupting a talk simply because you don’t like AI or fintech is, for lack of a better term, lame. A payment processor isn’t responsible for the climate emergency, and a company isn’t evil for having a wealthy founder or having to do layoffs.
His upset is misplaced.
> a company isn’t evil for ... having to do layoffs
"have to" is carrying a lot of water for the fintech with >5 billion in revenue
Honestly it's past time we recognized a lot of open source orgs and participants have an adulting problem
That's not at all limited to open source orgs and participants I've found. Seems to be a large percentage of the world these days, really...
Sigh.
The people who spend a significant amount of time (often in my experience unpaid) arranging a conference have to mix and match and probably make some unpopular compromises for reasons know best to them. I do think one should get them the benefit of the doubt as to why.
Just dont attend the talk. It is that easy.
The ultimate protest would be a nearly empty room. That would be quite humiliating for the person giving the talk.
Read Bryan Cantrill on how unimpressive Dorsey is to anyone with a clue:
"I, like many people, have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As Adam and I regaled in a recent Twitter Space, it started when debugging the Twitter fail whale in the offices of Obvious in 2007, where I became thoroughly unimpressed with their self-important skipper, Jack Dorsey. In part because I thought he was such a fool, I refused to join Twitter out of principle."
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2022/11/05/twitter-when-the-wal...
It seems to me letting Dorsey speak and ridicule himself in front of an audience of technically savvy people would actually be the best way to discredit him.
That was more of a range rant on Musk than anything else. Which is far as long as it goes. I am surprised that such blog posts are done under the dtrace.org banner.
As it is apparently unclear: dtrace.org is (just) a collection of personal blogs, including my own. More details on the history can be found in [0].
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/11/16/blogging-through-the...
I was wondering about this when I read the blog post, so I checked out www.dtrace.org and from my point of view its ambiguous.
The front page says:
"DTrace is a performance analysis and troubleshooting tool that is included by default with various operating systems, including Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. A Linux port is in development."
Then it lists blogs.
¹https://d.pr/i/3DAB5x
Heh. I hosted on a Joyent OpenSolaris zone for a long time (before you joined) and, ahem, enjoyed a period of instability as that useless site (Twitter, not DTrace.org), also hosted on Joyent, took off and had scaling troubles causing noisy-neighbor syndrome, circa 2007–2008 or so.
somehow this reminds me of the story of another internet personality when he met richard stallman for the first time because he was staging a silent protest at his talk. one of the observations was that the protesters were actually interested in the talk and there were more people in the room than expected because of it. it was mentioned or even discussed on HN but i can't find it now.
I think I remember that; It was a talk by somebody from nVidia, as I recall.
don't know about nvidia, but it would not surprise me if omething like that happened more than once. i finally found the one i was referring to. it was rob pike: http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-cant-find-this-o...
some discussion of that post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607335 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3963456
the key part: "At least half the questions (all technical) during and after the talk were from the protesters. [...] as a result of Stallman's ploy, my audience was about twice what it would have been."
A nice reminder by Jan (who is not defending the selection committee) https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113862181623385975
(Drew's latest posts has similar reminders)
A bit downthread:
> This special relationship and this special event can be destroyed by the actions from just a few.
That's so true.
At our university in the 00s student protestors (they were against some fees, I think) posed as the student council for electrotechnics and got PA equipment from the university administration. Which they used to disrupt some big welcoming ceremony for foreign guest academics.
Now the electrotechnics parties had no PA equipment anymore. Because the administrative employee pointed out that technically the equipment was never for such use. Over decades(!) he had always handed it out because why wouldn't you support a big student party and the organizers had always been very responsible with it and returned it in pristine condition.
But now the risk for him personally outweighed any goodwill. Tough luck!
Why would any event accept or welcome people who are there to sabotage it?
"Our purpose is to peacefully disrupt Dorsey’s talk" then do it outside, that is where your Protest belongs and where you actually have a right to protest. Obviously anyone who comes to an event with the goal of disrupting that event needs to be removed or just not let in.
It seems extremely uncontroversial to ban everyone involved in the planned protest from attending.
It is not that easy.
From https://fosdem.org/2025/faq/#registration
> Q: I plan on visiting FOSDEM, where can I register?
> No registration is required.
> Q: How much does a entry ticket for FOSDEM cost?
> Attendance is free, including access to all talks and facilities.
Why? If he or anyone who announced that he is going to partake in disruptions tell them to leave, if they do not leave call the police.
My understanding is that FOSDEM is run by volunteers on a shoestring budget mainly thanks to the support of the ULB (a university). They don't have security, they don't have badges or registrations, you can just walk in and out as you please. I have my doubts this is going to last if people start to deliberately try to take a fat dump on it to elevate their own ego.
Telling someone not to come to your event is totally free, so is calling the police on them if they come anyways.
> if a peaceful protest were to take place during the talk in question, we will not take action, provided the protest is indeed peaceful and does not disrupt the proceedings
Would staging a sit-in explicitly intended to prevent the booked speaker from speaking be classed as “disrupting the proceedings”?
In my opinion, yes.
Related:
No Billionares at FOSDEM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725057
The post is flagged
So? That's still where the large discussion happened related to the topic. 5 days ago old now.
The Streisand effect is strong with this one.
Whats going on with the special snowflakes trying to get attention? First the WordPress-guy, now this one. Maybe we should all acknowledge that we are much less important than we would like to. And thats OK.
This doesn’t say anything about what the talk is, who is giving it, who is protesting it, or why.
I hate this style of press releases. It’s rude to assume your readership is hip deep in the scene drama.
Why would they provide name?
Their statement is a global reminder of the organization rules:
- they don't give preferential treatment to speakers
- they allow peaceful protest
It reminds me of something that often frustrates me. An allegation that someone said something (e.g. something offensive), but without quoting what they said (or providing context) so I cannot actually evaluate it for myself.
[flagged]
https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares...
"It has also been pointed out that Dorsey does not bear sole responsibility for Twitter’s sale. However, he is complicit and he profited handsomely from the sale and all of its harmful consequences. The sale left the platform at the disposal of the far right, causing a sharp rise in hate speech and harassment and the layoffs of 3,700 of the Twitter employees that made it worth so much in the first place."
https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/20/2025-01-20-FOSDEM-protest...
it’s not about reading opinions, it’s about the world’s richest man enabling nazis, pushing misogynistic views, and destabilizing the globe so he can make a buck and push his obsession with mars. oh and let’s not forget the anti-queer, anti-black stuff.