Removed Eric S. Raymond quote from the release notes

[KyeRussell]

Description

Forgive the political nature of this pull request because it's the last thing people want to deal with when maintaining an open-source package. To qualify this, I am a long-time and heavy Django REST Framework user and not a drive-by activist looking to cause controversy. I think the vast majority of people are sensible and will not turn this into a divisive issue.

There is a quote from Eric S. Raymond at the top of the release notes document. This quote is largely inconsequential to achieving the intent of the document, as is the style in DRF documentation generally. ESR has had an extremely long, public, and ongoing fall from grace, including ongoing comments of a racist, sexist, islamophobic.etc nature. I put forward the position that—given the inconsequential nature of the quote within the context of the release notes document—the better thing to do is to just remove the quote and let ESR sink further into irrelevancy.

Those that can separate the artist from their art can surely recognise ESR's large role in popularising Open Source, and the positives that has provided. However, I see no reason to give ESR any ongoing visibility.

[tomchristie]

Heya Kye,

Thanks for raising this, and for doing so in a measured way.

I've no problem at all bringing politics in where it's relevant. Yes, it is complex, and there might be a case for "acknowledge the work, rather than endorse the author".

I've looked into the context a little, and have reviewed Raymond's quotes directly, and there's enough of a problem here that I'd agree with your take here.

Raymond's continuing public stance that "If you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp." is a clincher. 🤮

[rpkilby]

Should we remove the quotes altogether? They're a nice touch, but I think this is the third or fourth instance we've ran into so far.

[tomchristie]

As far as I know it's the second. I'm okay with 'em as it stands, personally.

[KyeRussell]

I think that's more of an upstream issue that could be fixed if iconic tech industry people stopped doing terrible things. Though I am not sure where we could submit a PR for that...