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What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

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Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#91
The open source zealots have been like this for years. 5 or 6 years ago, I forked a project and started charging for it. I was completely within my rights to do so as I followed the license (GNU) specifically and also gave out the full source code.

This didn't stop the death threats, taunts, and aggression I got from the general community. This and things like the recent word press theme debacle have put a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to open source.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#92
post #82

What the fuck. (And I rarely say that word.) We've got to grow up. This is 9th grade all over again. You know, those weird people that do things that you don't understand? They're the ones that grow up and make big impacts on the world. Why can't we get over our negativity? We can't stop ourselves from thinking horrible things, or even saying them out loud to people around us, but surely we can restrain ourselves fro…

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a strong undercurrent of misogyny involved here, motivating their incivility and rudeness.

It's the reverse - a lack of civility among those alpha-nerd types leads to the general acceptance of misogyny (and racism, for that matter) among them.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#93
Seeing this sort of negative behavior, both in groups online and off and coding and not, affected me greatly, even when I wasn't the target. On one hand, it gave me pause to consider and critique my own work, enhancing the final product. On the other hand, it made me go into over-perfectionist overdrive and too scared to release stuff lest "everyone" hates it. This fear, however irrational, has gripped me for many years. Stories, scripts and projects being left in folders partially because I wasn't sure where to go with them, but I believe in part that I was too scared to see it through and be rejected (The McFly effect, if you will.) I'm only now just coming to terms with it and learning how to, excusing the french, not give a fuck what others think. If I'm happy with it, that's a great start.

It's like with improv comedy: Denying the other person doesn't go anywhere and typically ruins the whole scene. Working with the other person in a positive light,though, goes miles and miles.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#96

I get a fair amount of ridicule any time anything I write makes it into sites like reddit, and a small amount (depending on topic) when it makes it onto HN. When one of my posts hit the front page yesterday, I decided to re-read "How to Disagree": http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Having done that, I can now just privately laugh at anyone who fails to come up with an adequate refutation of my central point. Peo…

It's disappointing that someone like you who is trying to share information and learn together would be attacked like that. People are awful.

I have a new policy of not responding to any comment that includes any form of ad hominem argumentation or any continued argument that is full of logical fallacies. It's just not worth the time to be arguing with people on Reddit or HN.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#97

> Steve Klabnik ‏@steveklabnik > @harthvader @zeeg nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding This message [1] in particular is absolutely disgusting. Someone hacked together a script that met their needs, and threw it up onto GitHub in case anyone else found it useful? Yes, let's take the opportunity to condescendingly insult their mental…

Here's the thing, when someone like Linus Torvald says things like that, we applaud him for it.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#98
I don't know Steve Klabnik or Corey Haines (or any of the other people mentioned in the post), but I just lost a lot of respect for them.

If I do come across them (in a forum, in person etc), I'll remember more about how they tend to make disparaging comments about people on the internet rather than any code on github.

Lastly, kudos to you for writing code, solving a problem and putting it out there. I think is great what you're doing and you should ignore non-constructive criticism.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#99

For years I have been terrified about putting my code on Github for fear of rage and retribution from the programmer community. This is a real problem for us amateur coders who enjoy hacking but don't necessarily have the chops to go head-to-head with the serious guys.

In a way, it gets worse as you get better. Once people start thinking you're awesome, you start worrying that, if you make your code public, they'll realize how much you suck.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#100

For years I have been terrified about putting my code on Github for fear of rage and retribution from the programmer community. This is a real problem for us amateur coders who enjoy hacking but don't necessarily have the chops to go head-to-head with the serious guys.

Likewise. I finally gathered the courage to start open sourcing code recently, I figure that if the code I'm writing is shit then it's going to be shit whether it's on my hard drive or on github and the advantages of having code out there are worth the potential ridicule... but still I find myself prefacing everything with a disclaimer, "I was tired when I wrote this" or "This isn't the best code" just to give myself…

A completely agree here. Even though I get complimented at work about code quality, I just feel like the open source community is somehow "more serious". Like, what if I'm doing this whole coding thing completely wrong?
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