I don't know the first thing about him, but maybe we could honor his contributions while not giving a blanket approval of everything he ever said and did?

Or is that, like, too subtle and nuanced a concept nowadays.

One can also highlight both the good and the bad. Although my experiences with him were not as extreme as these examples, I did stop using Mutt a decade ago partially because of his behavior - he had been a liability to Mutt development for years at that point.

How do you celebrate one’s accomplishments while ignoring one’s behavior in the process of making those accomplishments?

Or rather, is it actually too nuanced to think the ends don’t justify the means?

In situations like this, I think of the sentiment: "May the good he created stretch on, and the evil be buried with him."

And maybe there should be something more than a couple of tweets from random persons without ANY proofs? That’s just so wrong.

The commenter knew him personally, and is attesting to his behavior.

Especially if the accusations are true, there should be something more than just these tweets and a comment from a person who allegedly knew him.

Yeah, alas that seems to be the case. A few unsubstantiated tweets seem to make some folks wanting to "undo everything".

Obits are not meant to be honest. They are meant solely to make the people that are still alive feel better.

If we had to stop and think about death, we would have to consider our own mortality. If we had to stop and think about the poor life choices of a dead person, we would have to stop and think about our own poor life choices. We might have to consider whether we owe some kind of penance; whether our own misdeeds outweigh our good; whether someone might dig up our own past when we pass. And that's terrifying.

So obits must only say good things about the dead. We mustn't consider the true nature of a life filled with bad and good and in-between. We must instead shroud ourselves in the comforting blanket of pure nostalgia. This way we don't have to face pain, or truth, or conflict, and we can just feel a benign sad pleasure, to more easily slip back into comforting ignorance.

As an aside: Twitter is a hellscape of negativity. It could be that he also saved drowning toddlers from a river or some shit, but that isn't going to make it through the typical barrage of snide tweets. So just as much as we should consider the negative, we should consider that there's also positive. The fact that all humans are fundamentally flawed does not invalidate their good deeds, nor validate the bad. And if we try really hard, we might conclude that there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" person, but just "a person", the culmination of which cannot be put neatly into a box. Maybe then we could stop reacting so strongly to discovering that humans are indeed flawed, and that there is no shame in considering all of one's deeds, for that's where the truth of life lies.

Not condoning his behavior if these tweets are true but I think acknowledging his contributions to VIM is entirely orthogonal.

Some will think this is the same as "making it OK to be a harasser if you are l33t/important/rich/etc" but it's really not.

VIM is a community project that he dedicated significant time and effort to at his own expense. It's just like a rich donor to some hospital and getting a wing named after them, it doesn't erase their sins but it acknowledges the good that person has done in that act.

A person is more than their faults and trying to take everything good away from their memory after their death because of those faults doesn't sit right with me.

You have as a point of pride many problematic friends (which I think is great), but you shit on their memory online the day after they die?

I'm very much with you that just because someone has died doesn't mean we should whitewash their flaws and pretend they don't exist, but you've really caused me to face the full force of that opinion today :-)

If I am shitting on anything, it is the decision by people currently alive to explicitly endorse his presence in the f/oss community, which is a very poor decision in my view, given Sven's conduct within it.

Telling the truth is always appropriate.

TFA claims that "He was a good person." I do not believe that to be accurate.

I think we have diverging definitions of what the word 'friend' means.

It's possible to be someone's friend, acknowledge their wrongs and not draw attention to those wrongs in their obituary. It's one of those things that have historically been agreed upon as the proper way, in dutch we've formalized it in a proverb "Over de doden niets dan goeds.". "Nothing but good about the dead.". Simply because it is bad form to shit all over someone who isn't there to defend themselves (especially when you call them a friend) and because you never know who is going to read your writings, they might already be having a very hard day. I realize that this is too much to ask for some, but his friends should know better.

This article isn't an obit, though. Guckes is being elevated by a unique dedication for a prominent FOSS project, and such honors express the values of FOSS culture.

It serves as one because it communicates the fact of his death to a large number of people who probably were not aware of that, and I suspect this is the main reason it got posted here in the first place.

>Telling the truth is always appropriate.

the truth is that Sven was a prolific foss contributor with a complicated history with regards to other people.

you can acknowledge both contributions & faults, erasing his history of foss contributions wouldn't be the truth -- much like labeling him as nothing more than a predator wouldn't be the truth, either.

I'm not sure what you're advocating in this memoriam thread, to be honest -- total erasure of person and non-response from the projects they were involved with?

Isn't that a similar kind of non-whole truth that you're railing against all together?

>but you shit on their memory online the day after they die

It's a compromise, attention for the suffering of the victims, no consequences for the perpetrator.

What do you mean, "I stop caring for people who do something like this?" Like literally you don't care that he died because someone on Twitter accused him of something gross? Or you don't care about his contributions to free software that improve the lives of millions of people? I'm not trying to challenge or straw-man you, I really want to understand what you mean.

I have no idea if he is guilty or not, but even still I think humans are much, much more complicated than that. If all of us are summed up and judged as "worth caring about" based on the worst things we've done (assuming he is guilty of the twitter accusation, which I have no reason to doubt but also don't accept purely on faith), I think most (all?) people will be judged worthless. I'm not trying to make the "but Hitler built the Autobahn" argument, I guess I'm more trying to understand why "hate the sin but love the sinner" has gone so out of fashion.

The phrase "something gross" is a wholly inadequate characterization of repeated written and physical sexual harassment (which is what is alleged). Minimizing it in such a way is illustrative of why the resentment is so fierce, that someone years after the fact, when they see their transgressor being honored and lionized, might be driven to stand up despite hurricane winds of opprobrium and speak out.

> I guess I'm more trying to understand why "hate the sin but love the sinner" has gone so out of fashion.

It's challenging for just about any victim to forgive their transgressor, and it's not necessarily even something we should expect and encourage. Should we insist that mugging victims hate the mugging but love the mugger? Even if the mugging dramatically changed the course of their life?

Besides, the institutional and social consequences for these "sins" are nowhere near adequate, to the extent that the environment around them greatly contributes to drumming women out of the tech industry.

It's a shame that a man's memory is being tarnished, but it will keep happening until the tech industry gets much much better at both punishing and preventing harassment — ideally stopping it before it starts.

Sven was always welcome in our hackerspace. We never had any reason to find fault with him.

Having known him, I can certainly imagine him hurting for companionship and being awkward about it. Surprise, Sven was an imperfect human, just like everybody else.

Personally though I've NEVER observed him behaving in this way and being on the watch for such things, I would surely have talked to him about it.

Despite the problems he had to deal with (or choose to ignore ;->) (not talking about the stuff above), he dedicated his life to improve things around him the best way he could see fit.

If you had a problem with Sven and were happy enough to not speak up when he was alive, why raise this issue only now that he is dead? We are honouring Sven's contributions so others are inspired to be similarly helpful. It truth this is somewhat independent of Sven as a whole. But by dragging the person he was through the mud, you are not helping anybody or achieving anything for society.

Can you share a translation for the first two - auf Englisch?

Deborah's first tweet:

He only harassed me inappropriately, via text and a few times physically, many years ago in #CCCB Glad that won't happen again.

Reply:

Sven Guckes was one of the great evangelists of the German open source scene. During his lifetime, there were good reasons why people wanted to dislike, shun or sometimes kick him out, but he really didn't deserve such a reaction to the obituary tweet. Take care, Sven.

Her reply:

but I deserved to be harassed as a woman, by a +20 years older guy in whom I NEVER showed interest...? To just sit on my legs at the movie Sunday, to force cuddling, although I had ignored [his] advances for months - BÄH how disgusting.

> Sven was my friend. I knew him well.

You are a wonderful friend.

Let's not underestimate the impact that certain kinds of being "inappropriate" can have on people — the sense of powerlessness it instills, especially when the offense is dismissed and minimized by elements of the wider society. It's sad but not surprising to see this sort of response (EDIT: her response).

Your reply is not very relevant to my comment though. Also I might be much more sensitive than you think and you are sad and unsurprised for nothing.

EDIT: I' m sorry, I misunderstood you.

I'm at fault for a lack of clarity. This is a difficult and unfortunate discussion, and let's try to appreciate all of us as whole people today in the fullness of all our experiences and lives lived.

> happy that the person died

That's simply a lie. Her words support that she is happy about him not harassing anyone anymore, but not about his death per se. Which she explicitly emphasizes down the thread again.

Curious if the same people getting upset about her words were similarly upset when Richard Stallman said after hearing of Steve Job's death "I'm not glad he's dead but I'm glad he's gone".