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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

#41

Post by TillE »

carlisle_ wrote: post #25

I have to wonder how many people see Linus Torvald's behavior and think what he does is OK. Linus walks a VERY fine line, and his insults and demeaning comments are usually directed at people who "know better." I have had a few drinks so it's hard to properly articulate what I mean, but maybe somebody else knows what I'm talking about.

No, you're right. While I don't think Linus himself is a bully, he does seem to be one of the reasons that jerkitude is not only tolerated, but respected and aspired to in open source / hacker communities.

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

#42

Post by to3m »

Karunamon wrote: post #13
mion wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not talking about lowering the bar to entry, he's just saying you don't need to humiliate others when they are just trying to help you. You could at least dismiss them in a friendly/neutral way. "Sorry, can't accept this: check out procedure X in the docs."

Hence the "sympathize" part, but then again, I also sympathize with people who are human and eventually want to start inflicting bodily harm on people who can't be arsed to read the FAQ before A'ing the same Q again. Part of the "bar to entry" is that mindset. You don't get a pat on the back and warm encouragement for submitting crap code. You get told your code is crap with the expectation you'll improve before wast…

HELLO RETARD YOU'RE SITTING IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER

COPY AND FUCKING PASTE DO YOU SPEAK IT

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

#43

Post by akkartik »

whatshisface wrote: post #39
bryanh wrote: post #5

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…

>I've not seen this at all. Well, there is always everyone's favorite grumpy uncle Linus. :) I think it ends up being 'ok' for him to do it because nobody questions the importance of a kernel being perfect.

Linus being flame-y is not the same thing at all. He's not telling people to RTFM afaics.

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

#44

Post by shrikant »

potatolicious wrote: post #34
debacle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.

When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be. If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxy…

> When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out.

For some reason, this reminded me of The Racist Tree. http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzx6xxNlXV1qi049to1_1280.j...

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

#45

Post by mindcrime »

I couldn't agree more. I've seen this type of attitude from F/OSS "leaders" over the past couple of decades, and it always galls me to no end.

This is why I commit (no pun intended) to try my best to not be like that with any of my projects. Now, to be fair, none of the Fogbeam projects have a lot of outside contributions to date, but every time someone has contacted me, I've tried to respond in a polite, reasonable and appropriate manner.

One thing to consider, when interacting with people you don't know, is that you don't know what you're possibly getting. We got a request once, for permission to take our code, make it work with MySql, and use it for some academic research. Now that was already allowed by the license anyway, but I took the time to respond to the guy, and had a few chat/email interactions with him as worked on his project, even though I had no idea who he was, how important the project was, or if anything would ever come of it. A year or so later, I get an email saying "Hey, here's a pre-print of the paper we published, it's being presented at $PRESTIGIOUS_CONFERENCE, and we mention your project in the paper". That turns out to be a nice "feather in the bonnet" for us and helped get the project some visibility it would not have gotten otherwise.

Honestly, I don't see any value in being dismissive, insulting or demeaning towards anyone, just because they aren't already an expert in your project.

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

#46

Post by akkartik »

bryanh wrote: post #5

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…

Yeah, the article is lacking in real examples.

In my experience the leaders of successful projects are nice because of the straightforward selection pressure for projects that don't alienate their users. Sadly it's the followers[1] that are often jerks, and they face no selection pressure (except that they gradually pollute the well for projects they support).

[1] Guys like Karunamon in this thread.

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

#48

Post by saosebastiao »

The worst behavior I have ever seen comes from a commercial open source project. I know they aren't paying customers...but they are bug finders and bug reporters, user experience testers, and even feature-expanding code contributors. I would be appalled if I employed the guy.

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

#49

Post by pfortuny »

ajross wrote: post #38
gav wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the opinion that the best thing for large projects is new blood. If large OSS projects rotated people through triage and new contributor on-boarding, e.g. how to make a patch, how to get it approved, and so on, then in the long-run the number of contributors will grow.

But how do you do that without occasionally handing over the maintainership of some important piece of infrastructure to someone who clearly can't handle it? The people at the top of the ladder right now are there because (and sure, there are exceptions) they are (1) very good at it, and (2) willing to do it. And they have employers who have made bets on those two facts. Those employers aren't really interested in so…

There is a very very simple but quite useful technique which should be easily automated: send an e-mail thanking the contributor for the pull request and telling him with courtesy that it may be left to oblivion due to lack of time.

Honestly, for any OSS project leader this should be easy.

All of us know the difference after sending a CV anywhere between:

-1) destroying answer (do not send us your CV anymore)

a) NO answer

b) Automated answer without politeness intent

c) Polite automated answer

d) Personalized, human-written answer

You cannot do d) always but you should certainly do c).

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

#50

Post by adekok »

shadowfiend wrote: post #18
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…

There is literally nothing that you gain from being derisive that you can't also gain from being polite. And the tone you set for your community is vastly different. Derision of stupidity is probably one of the worst characteristics of hacker culture, because “stupidity” tends to be shorthand for “disagreement with my point of view”. I have trouble making a cogent argument around the derision of stupidity because der…

> There is literally nothing that you gain from being derisive that you can't also gain from being polite.

As maintainer of a large open source project, this isn't entirely true. I would agree that derision is bad. But being blunt is good. Many people confuse bluntness with rudeness.

There is every benefit to being blunt with stupid people. The people who intentionally and wilfully ignore the documentation, who demand that bugs get fixed NOW, who refuse to follow instructions when they ask questions.

The benefit is that they go away. Rude people are toxic to a community. Stupid, rude people.. doubly so.

My personal approach has evolved over the past ~15 years doing this. I no longer try to educate them. Once they've made it clear they're intentionally stupid, they get told "shape up, or be banned from the mailing list / forum". Many do.

Others reply with hostility, curses, private emails denigrating my mental health, paternity, etc. They get banned permanently.

Banning toxic people is good.

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