[cookie_monsta]

Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place.

> I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.

Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there.

But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.

[phonon]

I dare you to read all through this, and think those were the words of comfort Ruth deserved.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lightandmomentary

[cookie_monsta]

All I get is "You do not have permission to access this content. (#418)"

[phonon]

Oh. It's the newsletter his wife sent out, as he was dying, and she was taking care of him.

You can watch some videos she put up for the Thanksgiving event they held 9 months after the funeral. https://vimeo.com/user97457269

[cookie_monsta]

Man, I'm not saying that his wife didn't love him. I'm not saying that his death wasn't tragic for her and many other people. I'm not even saying that I'd heard of any of these people before today. But without any other context, I just can't see "incredibly rude and grotesque" in there.

What I am saying is that he was a divisive character, and he knew that, accepted it, apparently tried to modify it a bit but basically carried on with it in an organisation that he knew was at least mildly hostile to his beliefs.

And the depth of emotion that he inspired (deserved or not) could have lead to a very ugly pile on after his death. Maybe that happened anyway. Instead of taking it as cheap sniping, a better-faith reading of Mitchell's eulogy would be as a call for peace - acknowledge the critics but also point out the valuable contributions that the guy made in the hope that all the emotions surrounding his death don't spill over onto twitter or somesuch stupidity.

[phonon]

I'll leave with this...how someone who disagreed with his religious values can still write a meaningful obit.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html

[wbl]

Nihil nisi bonum. Imagine how his widow would feel reading it.

[cookie_monsta]

It's entirely impossible to say. One possibility would be "proud that the man she married stood up for what he believed in"

[cookiecaper]

Baker's post is utterly dehumanizing. She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.

Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.

So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies.

Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here."

I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.

[cookie_monsta]

> She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years

"Gerv’s work life was interspersed with a series of surgeries and radiation as new tumors appeared. Gerv would methodically inform everyone he would be away for a few weeks, and we would know he had some sort of major treatment coming up."

> or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.

"Gerv was a wildly active and effective contributor almost from the moment he chose Mozilla as his university-era open source project. He started as a volunteer in January 2000, doing QA for early Gecko builds in return for plushies, including an early program called the Gecko BugAThon. (With gratitude to the Internet Archive for its work archiving digital history and making it publicly available.)

Gerv had many roles over the years, from volunteer to mostly-volunteer to part-time, to full-time, and back again. When he went back to student life to attend Bible College, he worked a few hours a week, and many more during breaks. In 2009 or so, he became a full time employee and remained one until early 2018 when it became clear his cancer was entering a new and final stage.

Gerv’s work varied over the years. After his start in QA, Gerv did trademark work, a ton of FLOSS licensing work, supported Thunderbird, supported Bugzilla, Certificate Authority work, policy work and set up the MOSS grant program, to name a few areas. Gerv had a remarkable ability to get things done. In the early years, Gerv was also an active ambassador for Mozilla, and many Mozillians found their way into the project during this period because of Gerv... As Gerv put it, he’s gone home now, leaving untold memories around the FLOSS world."

> Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity

"He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me."

> she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.

Where does it say this?

> I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.

I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.

[cookiecaper]

> I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.

I read the whole post.

The parts you've quoted are rote recitations of assignments and employment history. They could've been derived from an HR file.

A list of assignments is not a discussion about how his work product helped move the platform forward.

Stating that Gerv had to go to the doctor sometimes and that he was good about giving notice is not talking about the resilience inherent in maintaining a productive career and an apparently-happy family while simultaneously battling a terminal illness for 18 years.

> Where does it say this?

You quoted the last sentence of the paragraph above. Here:

> > Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.

Baker lists 5 things Gerv did and you quoted only the last one. 3 of the things are definitively negative: "challenged", "infuriated", and "enraged". One is neutral: "surprised". The only positive one is "impressed", but she immediately explains that she was impressed re: his "greater ability to work with ambiguity", which she had mentioned "work[ing] with him to ... better appreciate" two sentences earlier, i.e., she's impressed that some small portion of it appeared to finally stick.

Then, in the next paragraph, she immediately caveats her impression over his improved grasp of ambiguity with: "Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw." and "He was adamant that his interpretation was correct[.]" At least to my ears, that sounds a lot like "So I just said I was impressed, but I wasn't that impressed; he just wasn't smart enough to grasp the ambiguity that would've made it obvious that his personal beliefs were invalid".