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.