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Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

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Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#4

Post by Karunamon »

A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or buggy, and so on.

I'm going to come right out and say this: Some people should not contribute to a FOSS project. Whether that's because they can't deal with other people or because they're not willing to put in even a modicum of effort to work effectively with other people. If you go up to a group of people who are used to doing things according to procedure X and you blithely ignore it, you really should not be surprised when your efforts are met with derision at best and hostility at worst.

While I understand the point the author is trying to make here, and even sympathize to a point, the mindset isn't going to change, nor should it. The bar to entry is a part of what make high quality projects high quality.

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#5

Post by bryanh »

I've not seen this at all.

In my experience, most open source project leaders are very congenial and gracious that you're spending time on their project. I did some poking around and couldn't find any OSS leads that disparaged their contributors.

Not sure if the lack of examples was an attempt to not "name and blame" or if there aren't many good ones. OP, to be clear, this isn't merely leads saying "this code/feature/suggestion is inappropriate" to pull requests, but honest malice?

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#9

Post by tinco »

I've never seen an opensource leader make fun of an honest attempt at contribution. What I have seen is a lot of ignoring and rejecting attempts.

Miguel de Icaza had a blog post on this I think. The problem with large opensource projects is that they have a lot to do, and simply don't have time to thoroughly follow up on all the small contributions that are ridden with naieve errors and plain formatting issues. Not to mention the big ones that come with architectural changes without explanations.

I think it's unfair to call these charity workers jerks, just because they are trying to make light of a dire situation.

Yes it can hurt if your contribution is coldly cast aside, and yes it would be much better if they warmly took you in and taught you in their ways, but if the OSS project leaders don't keep up the constant stream of contributions, improving the project all the time the project will die and all work will have been in vain.

On a side note: which project will you be contributing to this christmas? It is charity time after all and a bunch of hem could use a commit or two from your hands :) just be sure to read their code-style documents ;)

Re: Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

#10

Post by steele »

Karunamon wrote: post #4

A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or…

FOSS isn't exclusively "hacker culture", and that behavior isn't correlated with high quality.

If that is the accepted behavior of the maintainers/contributors, then be 'open' about that too.

"If you have questions, RTF(src|wiki|docs|issues|blog|groups) then come join us in #herpderp on freenode where our chamber of @ cloaked elders will determine your fate; aid you, ignore you, berate you, or remove you."

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