[LGM] should LGM or its site have something to say about Charlie Hebdo?

[Louis Desjardins]

2015-01-13 21:48 GMT-05:00 Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com>:

> Hello list,
>
> This issue came up among those involved in the communication team for LGM.
>
> In short, should we have something on the site which says either "Je
> suis Charlie" or maybe "Nous sommes Charlie"?
>
> There has been differences of opinion on this, but what seemed to be
> tacitly agreed on was that the smaller group of the communications team
> should not unilaterally do this without some wider discussion involving
> those who take part in LGM.
>

Hello all!

Since I initially raised the issue among the communication team, here is a
summary of what brought me to suggest it was important to add our voice to
the statement about free speech.

We are into the freedom of speech principle. I can agree, or disagree.
Nonetheless, I am not threatened and moreover, I don’t feel threatened.

This principle is at the heart of our Code of Conduct. Freedom of speech is
one of the basic principles in democracy. One other is the state of rights,
which means nobody can make justice of oneself, including people in power,
among other things.

The whole point here is about "freedom of speech", not opinions expressed
because of the existence of that freedom. Freedom of speech is also about
disagreeing, otherwise it would be clearly pointless. We can agree or not
about the editorial line of this magazine. Moreover, the editorial line of
Charlie Hebdo has already been challenged in French court and in the end
the court decided there was no offense. If there would have been, that
would have ended the discussion.

So, clearly, what’s at stake here and why people are in the streets in so
many countries and cities and why heads of governments have been walking
hand in hand despite their disagreements on so many other subjects, is what
is at the root of democracies, freedom of speech. That freedom cannot go
beyond certain rules but within those rules people have the right to
express their views. They have the right to express their views without
fearing the very worst, without being threatened, without thinking that
their mouths will be shut by bullets.

I hope this clarifies a bit.

By the way, I am not a reader of Charlier Hebdo but again, I don’t think
this is the point here.

The discussion is overhead.

I am back to my initial thoughts: the principle that is the base for all
our discussions, including software development and globally democracy and
"state of rights" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat) is freedom of
speech. Without it, no ideas can circulate easily. Without it, sharing and
expressing ideas can expose to threat.

Threat can be death as we’ve seen, completely out of any kind of state of
rights. But threat can also be abusive justice prosecution — a new form of
threat used by large organizations on citizens that don’t have massive
money to defend themselves and are thus shut up and denied their freedom of
speech. Within the state of rights and because of freedom of speech, people
were able to address this new threat by a new law that create an obstacle
to abusive justice prosecution, in the name of freedom of speech.

I think that Free/Libre and Open Source Software and GPL can only occur
under the umbrella of freedom of speech.

For my part, I was under the impression that this would be a spontaneous
call from the community, considering what’s at stake.

Cheers!

Louis



>
> We have traditionally been apolitical, yet maybe there is something
> special about this incident involving free speech in the graphics and
> publishing world.
>
> Greg
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>
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