I was not planning to make a a clear statement about Wogue but the last video they have published was the the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can’t stand this anymore. I encourage heavily people to distance themselves from them. I’ll be going through incidents that I’ve personally witnessed.
The Cherokee incident
This is the first incident that I can remember. In the post, Wogue complains about this issue on the Fedora bug tracker to remove Cherokee’s offensive logo.
Additionally, I didn’t read every comment in the corresponding bug reports to have a better opinion about this issue, simply because I don’t care about these things in such a way.
Here, you can see that they are willingly staying ignorant of facts and simply wanted to have their voice heard over those that are affected by this issue.
- Destroy Leonardo Da Vinci paintings because they are considered sexist, and I am not even referring to religious issues.
- Expel all developers that have said offensive things to others
- Remove all applications like GNOME Videos or Games that include content that is considered offensive (and actually is!) in many countries and people
Here you can see a common case of whataboutism that you’ll often see right-wingers make because they don’t seem to understand power dynamics and like to exaggerate things to make actual issues into nothing more than jokes. Also, yes, do expel developers that say horrendous shit, it’s part of GNOME’s Code of conduct now at least.
I am trying to make a point through joking, because I really can’t be serious on these things.
Here you can see they think it’s okay to publicly make a “joke” about hurting and being unwelcoming to minorities. Very nice! It’s really not funny.
My personal opinion, is if you are calling something “racist” you’re also calling all the people behind it “racist”.
Well, yes but no. If the person is unwilling to listen to minorities after they complain about an issue then yes, I’d agree that this person is racist. However, if that issue was not made, I would simply say they are ignorant. In this case, however, I would agree to say that Cherokee’s developer is racist through their entitlement for an indegineous’ group’s name and then using a caricature of them as logo. It’s quite gross.
For reference on this. Alvaro (one of the developers on Cherokee) was told that someone of Cherokee heritage who works on Cherokee issues that it was “100% offensive”. Their response was :
It’s certainly sad that one has to choose inanimate objects as logo not to somehow be offensive to the somebody’s nobel feelings.
Entitlement to the end! How dare they find that appropriating and caricaturising their culture offensive?! Needless to say, this is terrible and indefensible.
I would expect “some” Fedorians to be more cautious, and not connect a project with politics and history.
This is wrong in many ways. First, Free Software, Open source and copyleft in general are political and have always been this way. Second, asking people to not be entitled racist pricks is not political, it’s just common sense. How many times does this claim have to be made? There were also calls about “censorship” because the logo was being removed. If not wanting to ship offensive content means “censoring” things then I guess I’m all for censorship. There are limits to free speech. Free speech absolutism never works. It simply derails to the bottom of the bin because of the paradox of intolerence. I might have to make blog posts about both of these issues (“Politcs in Free Software” and “Free speech absolutism being evil”).
Unfortunately anti-racism campaigns and communities of any kind, is what preserve and keep the racism alive.
No. I think a good analogy for this incredibly wrong statement would be “condoms and education about sex is what keeps unwanted pregnancies alive”.
There isn’t any kind of racism, other than the economical racism. And that was always the case.
This is blatantly, patently false. I don’t feel the need to explain why it’s false. Anyone with any knowledge of history or racism would know this.
Also, in this comment :
I think they are wrong. Not even Cherokee guys aren’t complaining. Without knowing that, I guess this software has been created from someone of the tribe.
Here you can see that they use the ignorance they gained to project misinformation too.
Blatant misoginy
This is the video that broke me. In this video “made for women”, Wogue says :
And so! We don’t want any women here!
If this wasn’t unwelcoming and great example of exactly what not to do, they go further :
You may get special treatment on other places! But not on baby Wogue World!
Oh yeah, because being an unwelcoming to women is clearly the appropriate thing to say in an industry which is primarly male. No, seriously, how do you just wake up one day and say this?
Oh, it gets worse! In a comment under the video :
testing various stuff, and one of them is like how many will unsubscribe after this!! not that i care, but still super curious :p
They perfectly know this isn’t acceptable behaviour and they’ll gladly move the dagger in the wound.
Abusive to developers
I have seen behaviour of them calling developers various insults in the past. I feel like that’s harder to comment on since these are personal stories and some might not want to make a public response but I’ll show two examples of this behaviour (at least that I could find rapidly because I don’t want to dig up his videos anymore).
This is the first instance where I saw someone speak up about the harm that Wogue commits with his videos. In “WOGUE is no friend of GNOME”, Richard explains that Wogue is trying to shame developers in a video (It’s far from the only video like this) as a way to make them work harder. However, this has the exact opposite effect. Reprimending and shaming people does not make them want to work harder, it simply sucks.
Wogue’s response was one of “It’s your opinion and it’s just one or two videos out of 500” while completely missing that fact that it’s not just this video and compliments don’t make things any less harmful.
There’s also this video which I find to be quite distasteful but I’m not sure how George feels about it so I won’t comment on it more than that.
I will probably edit this post later so if you want to tell me stories about Wogue which you think are worth mentioning, please send me a message, I’ll be there to listen. If a video is made by Wogue about this post, I won’t respond to it because I don’t want a needless back-and-forth.