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I think anyone working in serious open source projects just need to learn to ignore those users. I definitely would have the attitude of "I'm perfectly fine if no one uses my product" and have a lot of fun banning entitled users left and right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maintaining the Linux kernel is all about gatekeeping. How else do you keep out bad code?
What does social media have to do with bad code, though?
Nothing. That's why this was said:
>> *There's a deeper issue* in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.
It's separate gatekeeping.
I entertained getting involved in the kernel for about 3 days, in college. The process is so complex, I just went on to do other fun things. The drama will turn off others. Organizational apathy is much worse, imo. I have quit jobs for this reason and that was when I got paid to stay.
> But then also came the entitled users. This time, it wasn’t about stealing games, it was about features. “When is Thunderbolt coming?” “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” (nobody ever complained when compared to x86 laptops…) “I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one). This sounds so rough. I can't imagine pouring your…
The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority".
You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment you do your users become your opponent. None of those requests are entitled, the author has clearly already reached a point where they are antagonistic towards requests.
I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.
"spreading awareness about a position" isn't a very accurate way to describe what happened. This is the guy who said he wanted to use social media to create a "hall of shame" for kernel developers. Of course Linus told him to knock it off, that's ridiculously unprofessional behavior.
The fact is, you need buy in from other devs and if a dev won't buy in you need to work out a way to avoid them or avoid conflict. It sucks, it slows things down, but frankly making it a "them vs us" is a sure fire way to make them oppose any change you want to make.
Public shaming even more disastrous as there's no better way to entrench someone in a position.
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"Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities."
Always funny to me to read something like that. HN has high moderation, one of the highest I've seen on modern fora, only a few steps below r/AskHistorians for example. I don't see this "abuse, bigotry, and nastiness" here and even if there are comments like that, they are quickly downvoted and dead.
Definitely a shame. I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac. It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them.
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Maintaining the Linux kernel is all about gatekeeping. How else do you keep out bad code?
From what I've seen this is excellent code, some people just really don't like Rust.
Do the demigods of the Linux kernel - Linus and the core maintainers - personally want the kind of code Asahi is developing to be merged into the kernel? The author writes as if part of his drive was that Linus himself showed enthusiasm for getting Linux on Apple Silicon.
If there is interest in the work Asahi has done, then the Linux team needs to describe what they see as the gap between today's code quality and support model and what they want to see before upstreaming.
It sounds like the Linux team has been wishy-washy and needs to draw a line in the sand on their needs rather than handwaving about being part of the "community".
It would be fair to say "we don't like your attitude or trust you to work with us kindly over the years and don't want to deal with you", if that's the case. Just don't dance around it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always funny to me to read something like that. HN has high moderation, one of the highest I've seen on modern fora, only a few steps below r/AskHistorians for example. I don't see this "abuse, bigotry, and nastiness" here and even if there are comments like that, they are quickly downvoted and dead.
But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.