1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees.
2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.
For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
They're literally responding to:
> Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.
So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
Would you break out 'problematic' to describe that? How small is the circle of non problematic people?
Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).
I think 'problematic' when discussing legal terms of a license is a lot less loaded than 'problematic' about a person, or personal behavior if we want to narrow that down.
It raises questions of who gets first right to be alienated. And do we credit their alienation. If I said I feel alienated by the constant social justice signalling, do I get credit for my alienation? Or do I get the stinkeye and maybe fired?
It's really difficult to continue this conversation if you view the concept of justice to be alienating, what is open source if not a means to deliver code to large groups of people who would otherwise be alienated from working with that code? I don't understand. If you're not interested to help customers and be fair and just to them, I would think you would have a hard time working at any company. What is your real goal?
If you conducted a gallup poll, what % of Americans do you think self-identify as "I find justice alienating"?
Most reasonable people are for justice and caring, and the vast majority aren't out to find people they can label as 'problematic' and chase them off the island.
To me that it always the problem that has faced any minority groups anywhere -- it's never obvious to the majority what the alienating behavior is. So they have to painstakingly explain it, and of course some of them will always get accused of overreacting and attacking the majority. What else can be done?
There's no consistency, which really ruins the label 'justice' for me. Conservative star wars lady compares conservatives being criticized to the holocaust? Fired. How dare you disrespect the dead. Basecamp people bring the holocaust into an equally stupid argument? They're heroes, everyone else is problematic.
Oscar Wilde had a quote about how patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.. maybe we should update it to "calling people toxic is the last refuge of the antisocial". Not that sincere patriots and activists don't exist, of course.
Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.