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Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

tylercipriani.com

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Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#11

Post by strken »

mdekkers wrote: post #5

I stopped contributing to Open Source in any meaningful way in 2004 due to the incredible amount of non-stop entitlement and toxicity. I am working on a project with a few other folks and the subject of “to open source or not” has come up a few times, and in principle I think we should open source, but in practice I can do without the meaningless drama in my life.

You can always go the SQLite way and refuse to accept patches: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html. Or go further and refuse to accept feature requests, or even turn down bug reports!

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#12

Post by ilyt »

personjerry wrote: post #4

One thing I learned from playing video games is that online, you can just ignore and block anyone. Seriously, everything is detached. What's the difference between a stranger on the internet yelling at you versus a crazy homeless man in San Francisco yelling at you? Absolutely none, their thoughts affect in you in 0 ways, feel free to ignore and carry on with your day. Edit, because a lot of replies are getting off-t…

Let me guess, MOBA player?

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#13

Post by ilyt »

jay-barronville wrote: post #6
personjerry wrote: post #4

One thing I learned from playing video games is that online, you can just ignore and block anyone. Seriously, everything is detached. What's the difference between a stranger on the internet yelling at you versus a crazy homeless man in San Francisco yelling at you? Absolutely none, their thoughts affect in you in 0 ways, feel free to ignore and carry on with your day. Edit, because a lot of replies are getting off-t…

Well, there’s actually one significant different. The IRL deranged person, if physically close enough, can actually cause you physical harm. Sure, ignore them, but remain observant and in tune with your surroundings.

Well the deranged clown in your online game can ruin the next 30 or however much minutes of the online match (as in MOBAs there is punishment for just leaving). Which is still mildly annoying

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#14

Post by doix »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #7
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Part of the dynamic is that companies have this sense of entitlement. They see the open source as a vendor. Employees have been told to use the tool, so the employees are frustrated. Because the employer has made it hard to contribute back, the employee is doubly frustrated, and feels stuck between unyielding corporate stance towards open source and unpaid volunteers that can’t support them. I’m not excusing the beha…

I would never excuse this sort of behaviour, but if you want to understand the corporate dynamic with open source, then you need to dig a little deeper than this imo: > the person commenting is often actually in a pretty crappy situation because of their employer has a shitty understanding that open source is about participating, not consuming. The most frustrating thing about using open source in a corporate environ…

> So far, this expectation has always held true, even with the more professional operations like Red Hat

This is different from my experience, this happened around 9 years ago, so I can't even remember the software. But there was some bug that was fixed in a later version of some software. The version in the redhat repo was severely out of date (and we were stuck on an old version of redhat anyway).

I tried to get the new version of the software to build, but all the dependencies were out of date as well, I'd basically be recompiling the entire userland at that point.

Since it wasn't my job, I complained to my manager who just said "why are you dealing with this? Just contact Redhat". They backported the bugfix and released a new version. I looked at the diffs, and it took some real development effort on their behalf. It wasn't just a case of cherry-picking some commits.

Maybe Redhat have gone to shit now, but they definitely used to provide proper support in the past.

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#15

Post by bitwize »

personjerry wrote: post #4

One thing I learned from playing video games is that online, you can just ignore and block anyone. Seriously, everything is detached. What's the difference between a stranger on the internet yelling at you versus a crazy homeless man in San Francisco yelling at you? Absolutely none, their thoughts affect in you in 0 ways, feel free to ignore and carry on with your day. Edit, because a lot of replies are getting off-t…

The crazy homeless man can shiv you for not giving him a handout.

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#16

Post by PragmaticPulp »

personjerry wrote: post #4

One thing I learned from playing video games is that online, you can just ignore and block anyone. Seriously, everything is detached. What's the difference between a stranger on the internet yelling at you versus a crazy homeless man in San Francisco yelling at you? Absolutely none, their thoughts affect in you in 0 ways, feel free to ignore and carry on with your day. Edit, because a lot of replies are getting off-t…

It is interesting to see the differences in how people handle negativity online. Some people have no problem ignoring negativity and moving on. Others get satisfaction in hitting the block button. Others can't let it go and will eventually let negativity consume them and burn them out.

Learning how to shrug it off is imperative for anyone who wants to post something online. If you can't ignore negative comments and move on without getting worked up, sharing anything from open source to social media isn't a good idea. Save yourself the stress.

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#17

Post by prash_ant »

2h wrote: post #9

I had a couple of popular repos. Eventually I just started charging for issues. No payment? Issue closed. Stress went way down. If I see an issue I want to fix, I will fix it, for free or otherwise. But the default is "pay me", which helps set expectations. The code is still available and free, support is not free.

I hope this method catches on.

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#18

Post by Klonoar »

personjerry wrote: post #4

One thing I learned from playing video games is that online, you can just ignore and block anyone. Seriously, everything is detached. What's the difference between a stranger on the internet yelling at you versus a crazy homeless man in San Francisco yelling at you? Absolutely none, their thoughts affect in you in 0 ways, feel free to ignore and carry on with your day. Edit, because a lot of replies are getting off-t…

Certainly we can expect open source work to not be on the same level, experience-wise, as online gaming. ;P

We're a community and we should show each other more respect.

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#19

Post by munificent »

personjerry wrote: post #4

One thing I learned from playing video games is that online, you can just ignore and block anyone. Seriously, everything is detached. What's the difference between a stranger on the internet yelling at you versus a crazy homeless man in San Francisco yelling at you? Absolutely none, their thoughts affect in you in 0 ways, feel free to ignore and carry on with your day. Edit, because a lot of replies are getting off-t…

It's not the simple.

Imagine owning a bar and working as the bartender. A dude comes in and starts acting crazy. Sure, maybe you can ignore him. But he's disturbing the other patrons and spoiling their experience of the bar that you're invested being successful.

So maybe you throw him out. But every single thing you do in this bar is streamed 24/7 onto YouTube and visible forever. People may see the clip of you kicking him out, but not the hours of footage of him bothering everyone. Maybe they decide you kicked him out because you're a tyrant, or because of his appearance.

Re: Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

#20

Post by koreth1 »

ddulaney wrote: post #10
mdekkers wrote: post #5

I stopped contributing to Open Source in any meaningful way in 2004 due to the incredible amount of non-stop entitlement and toxicity. I am working on a project with a few other folks and the subject of “to open source or not” has come up a few times, and in principle I think we should open source, but in practice I can do without the meaningless drama in my life.

You might consider a “source available” model a la SQLite. The maintainers there chose to make the code open and freely usable, and you’re welcome to fork it and use it for whatever you want, but they won’t take contributions back. It might be a good middle ground, depending on what your project looks like. https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

My team took this approach when we open-sourced our web app. Apache licensed and anyone is free to do with our code as they please, but GitHub issues and PRs are set to employees only.

But whether this approach makes sense really depends on what you're hoping to accomplish by making your code available. For us, the goals were mostly around transparency and assuring customers that if we went out of business, it'd be possible for someone else to operate our service. As a side effect, it's also nice for hiring since candidates can see exactly what our code base looks like, what kind of feedback we give each other in code reviews, etc.

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