What Will We Use on June 30, 2011?

TRIGGER WARNING: Victims of violence or sexual assault may want to stop reading. (I’ll try to be as mild as possible.)

Today, Tuesday October 13, 2009 the character known as “mikeeUSA” has been removed from sourceforge.net as well as the projects in which he was the sole contributor.

For those who do not know, mikeeUSA is an Internet troll who advocates violence against women and believes that it is his God-given right as a man to do so. He gets his jollies out of threatening women open source developers, as he has recently bothered the co-editor of this blog, Mackenzie Morgan.

mikeeUSA considers himself a significant open source contributor and has used his commits to his “projects” on sourceforge as his justification as to why he merits more than the female open source contributors he has insulted or threatened. This is not a simple difference of opinion as to what is offensive. mikeeUSA has been removed from communities, most recently the sourceforge.net community, for the extensively violent nature of his language and descriptions.

Since mikeeUSA thinks his code was of substantial quality, I downloaded a few packages and took a look for myself. There was one full program which was a text based slot machine game which displayed messages encouraging the denial of women’s rights. He also developed game add-ons, levels, and maps for already existing GPL-ed games. At best, these game components would include comments that would promote his agenda. At worst, the components would engage the player with his hateful themes. Sometimes variable names and function calls included evidence of hate-speech. Even if one were to ignore the politics of mikeeUSA, the product is not very good: low quality, dysfunctional, and not fun. The Nexuiz gaming community has repeatedly rejected his submissions. The reality is, just because you include a copy of GPLv2, it does not make you an open source rockstar. mikeeUSA’s claims of being a renowned open source contributor are unfounded. Now that the mikeeusa’s account has been disabled, it is unlikely that mikeeusa will be able to release anything with opportunity of claiming major open source contribution under a world-wide distribution ever again.

No one has the right to harass or threaten another human being. I don’t care who you think you are. If you have encountered mikeeUSA, do not be ashamed. As a community we will stand together to ensure safety in the open source neighborhood for all.

I am Beth Lynn Eicher, a director of the Ohio LinuxFest. As a concerned citizen of the open source neighborhood, I submitted a code review to sourceforge.net for and recommended removal of mikeeusa.  This was unpleasant reading but it had to be done in the name of neighborhood safety. The unfortunate content was the responsibility of mikeeusa’s alone. Sourceforge has over 230,000 projects they host. There two million users who release responsible high quality content that benefits the global society via sourceforge.net. Users who creates content that is against the terms of use are subject to review for potential removal. The volume prohibits them from verifying every project that they host, yet they are receptive to community feedback. Thanks to the reviewers at their legal team who also had to read mikeeusa’s vile code, my request for removal was approved.

I am incredibly grateful to sourceforge.net as they have proven themselves valuable parts  of the open source community by fulfilling the removal request. If you are in need of assistance, I suggest you contact sourceforge.net with the specifics. Alternatively, you can email me if you are shy at bethlynn AT ohiolinux DOT org.

To my fellow open source citizens, do keep vigilant for aggressive activity. I am not afraid to fight for the open source neighborhood to be safe and family environment.

Update: October 19, 2009

As an American, I see the “Noboby gets fired for buying Microsoft”
continuing to the the commonplace. Microsoft’s products have a habit of forcing institutions to deploy more of their products and upgrade their products. Take this example of how SharePoint 2007 is such a drag with Office XP or 2003 that customers cave and upgrade to Office 2007. Don’t they know that there are outstanding patent issues with Word 2007? Well, at least Motorola got the memo.

Well, Toronto Mayor, David Miller did get the memo. As Mr. Miller wrote in a proclamation:

“Through Open Source, communities, cities and nations around the world are presented with the opportunity to promote and actively nurture an environment of learning, collaboration and innovation.”

Apparently, Mr. Miller was so impressed by Open Source that he named this last week in October “Open Source Week.” On October 24, 2009, to kickoff the celebration for what Open Source has done for Canadians and the world, the Ontario LinuxFest has planned quite the speaker lineup: starting with a keynote from Zonker on how the Linux community can make the year of the Linux desktop a reality.

An inherent trust in Microsoft’s products seems to be an American theme. Outside the Untied States, it might be a different story. I am going to the Ontario LinuxFest to investigate.

Microsoft will lose majority market share: June 30, 2011.