As a resident of Germany I take great offense at the word Nazi and bristle when I hear accusations thrown. The corollary of Godwin’s Law is that the first person to accuse the other of being a Nazi is universally accepted as having lost the argument.

What I can’t stand on the internet is once-useful forums which have gotten bogged down in useless chatter and pointless bickering between the regulars. The Lonely Planet Thorn Tree had a politics section which got so bad, they shut it down, so the regulars hived themselves off to a separate server and are still there, engaged in their silly cross-talk and blabber. It makes you wonder how much these people actually accomplish in any given day.

That said, let them go at it. No censorship!

Keeping my cool? I’m rubbish at it! Best I can do is to realise how comic I must appear. The other, difficult thing is the interrogation of my anger – not why am I angry in the sense of a cause but why am I angry in the sense of what is it in me that needs to be angry about this? And why that? Usually it’s fear of some kind. But that’s just me.

- A lot of people work on open source stuff in their spare time. Just the development alone is all they can muster.

- Many of the better open source projects have excellent support/community – many people quietly go about the work of maintaining FAQs, mailing lists, software, organizing user groups and conferences, etc..

- Most Sourceforge projects never get anywhere and there’s nothing to really support. I’m always amazed at how many people apparently think they can singlehandedly create a 3D MMORPG comparable to Everquest or World of Warcraft. WoW took like 3 years to develop, and that was with a fairly large, top-notch team of game development pros!

- Plenty of proprietary software gets abandoned as well. The biggest one I can think of is Visual Basic 6.

- A lot of people who work on free software in their spare time love programming far more than creating software products.

To be clear, I know the pain (better than most people, I think) of using great free software that’s rough around the edges (a concrete example: getting the software in question to work on Windows means 5-30 minutes of fucking around with Cygwin and Visual C++, and much of the documentation is non-English).

Now…ironically, you slightly over-reacted on a post where I talk about communities over-reacting.

“Don’t do open source, do open development.”

What the fuck?

People in Germany with a yahoo.de account are not given the option to click through the safety filter to see the images. This apparently is because German law is much more strict about these sorts of things, and Yahoo Germany have done this apparently to operate within the laws of that country. (I have no idea about German law, so can’t comment on this).

I’ve been watching with growing horror at the proliferation of these sorts of protest images across the flickr landscape.

Even among contacts and friends that I like and respect… they have jumped on the bandwagon. I suspect many people do not even understand the technicalities of the issues. They have just joined the crowd because, well, everyone must be against censorship, mustn’t they?

A couple of contacts of mine who dared to speak out in opposition – asking people to think and understand the issues first – were verbally attacked in their photostreams. One of these contacts just made all his images friends-only so that he would no longer be attacked.

I find your post extremely helpful in contextualising and understanding the behaviour that is going on.

For me personally, I am by nature quiet and introspective, and suspicious of this kind of mass frenzy, so tend to step back and think before (and if) making any sort of response one way or the other in these situations.