"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this" • Hacker News Board

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#311

Post by Diederich » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #269

Diederich wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Linus (and others) choose to stay verbally abusive because there they exist in a community that both facilitates and defends that poor behaviour. There is a choice to be made. The choice stems from the basic mindset: am I fundamentally ok with verbally abusing people around me, or should I try to stop doing that? I don't know what's in Linus' mind. Perhaps he is utterly incapable of never resorting to verbal…

It is in part a cultural issue. Realise that this form of "abuse" does not carry much weight in a lot of cultures. A lot of the strongest criticism of Linus comes from a cultural background where people are hyper-sensitive to direct language.

Verbal abuse and direct language are unrelated.

Direct language, without verbal abuse:

"I am upset and angry that you keep making the same mistakes."

That's clearly communicating how he feels, without verbally abusing his audience.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#312

Post by teleclimber » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #70

As a data point and a side note: I've been participating in open source discussions for more than 15 years now. This issue seems to come up more and more, and it seems that many communities are deteriorating. Lennart is right about Linus setting a bad example. But not all is gloomy. As a positive example, the Clojure community has always impressed me with its maturity. People are incredibly nice and helpful, discussi…

Exactly. Project leaders have the power to set the tone of discussions within their communities. If abusive people are moderated, they don't propagate, and the community gets more welcoming.

However this does not address the inter-project nastiness that the OP refers to.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#313

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:42 PM UTC

inclemnet wrote: post #258

Mikeb85 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways. But none of those ways have anything to do with open source. You need to look no further than #gamergate to see that people act like assholes on the internet. > This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), and I can't honestly believe…

> But none of those ways have anything to do with open source More bad arguments! He didn't say that open source is unique. Perhaps he's simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in. > equating a concept with people I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a fairly well defined set of people, organi…

> Perhaps he's simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in.

Then he should have said 'The communities I'm involved in are awful'. And I'd agree. I didn't realize he made PulseAudio and Systemd (or was involved in some way). I personally don't mind either project (neither have harmed my Linux experience, Pulse is convenient for my uses), and I think both get a lot of unwarranted criticism. Not least for the fact that, with open source, you don't HAVE to be stuck with anything you don't want to be.

> I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a fairly well defined set of people, organisations and forums that isn't particularly controversial to refer to. I think you really are just using different words as everyone else to mean the same things.

See, this is the thing. I'm not part of that community. I could care less. But the reason why conversations like this aren't useful, is that you're equating a specific group of people with a concept, but criticizing the concept.

Posts like this find their way outside the community. They give fodder to those who would like to see all software be closed source. They aren't helpful.

Again, he should be far more explicit in what he's actually criticizing...

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#314

Post by tbrownaw » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #241

vidarh wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that sufficient exasperation makes it understandable whether or not it is justified. Linus is human. Humans are not flawless. > There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way. And a lot of people who "do not talk this way" are a lot worse by dealing with these kind of issues through backstabbing or veiled insults. While some are saint-like and nev…

I think Linus (and others) choose to stay verbally abusive because there they exist in a community that both facilitates and defends that poor behaviour. There is a choice to be made. The choice stems from the basic mindset: am I fundamentally ok with verbally abusing people around me, or should I try to stop doing that? I don't know what's in Linus' mind. Perhaps he is utterly incapable of never resorting to verbal…

Random theory time: People who are harmful to the project, should be removed from the project. If you're not a company but an "open" project that can't fire people, you pretty much have to do this my making them not want to say. So if someone causes enough trouble, just pile on the verbal abuse until they get fed up and leave.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#315

Post by teleclimber » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:46 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #254

I must be very lucky... because after many many years of writing open source, being involved with at least three communities (IT security with hping, Tcl language with Tcl/Jim-Interpreter, Databases with Redis) I still have to receive serious attacks. Actually the only attacks I can remember are about my vision on how diversity should be handled (I was accused of sexism for saying that people are all alike), and a fe…

Thanks for sharing. It's good to know that even when a project is large and popular like Redis, it's still possible to have mostly positive experiences.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#316

Post by yedava » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:50 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #46

chris_wot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I read Linus write: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F✦CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" https://lkml.or…

On the other hand, I don't consider this bad. Sure, it's offensive, but he has quite a good reason to be upset - reading one byte at a time will be really slow. Could he say it in a better way? Obviously. Could you interpret his words in a less literal way? Obviously. I don't know Linus, but he seems a good, selfless guy, with the best intentions at heart. If he's not politically correct, who the fuck cares? Sometime…

Whenever I hear complaints about Political Correctness, I'm reminded of this:

> Disdain for "political correctness" is often positioned as a concern that some important truth is not being spoken for fear of offending someone. But that concern is nothing but smoke and mirrors. To invoke "political correctness" is really to be concerned about loss of power and privilege. It is about disappointment that some "ism" that was ingrained in our society, so much that citizens of privilege could express the bias through word and deed without fear of reprisal, has been shaken loose. Charging "political correctness" generally means this: "I am comfortable with my privilege. I don't want to have to question it. I don't want to have to think before I speak or act. I certainly don't wish to inconvenience myself for the comfort of lesser people (whoever those people may be--women, people of color, people with disabilities, etc.)"

> http://www.whattamisaid.com/2010/02/conservatives-political-...

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#317

Post by pbhjpbhj » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

nanoscopic wrote: post #116

sii wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face. Really? My contributions to the open source world are certainly modest, but I get thank you emails perhaps once a month for applications I've released. People are quite pleasant.

Yes, for many years I intentionally did not release more open source due to only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you. Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more. The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the dis…

>only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you //

I wonder if in part this is due to solicitation - you [by which I mean 'one', a person, not specifically you] have a "support" forum for problems, you have a note asking for contacts with bugs but generally OSS projects don't have a "comment with thanks" or a tip jar or whatever.

Guestbooks used to be the way people could offer a quick comment of thanks.

But as you say this is more likely to work for frontend user-facing projects. Stars on github or similar will show at least that people appreciate your work if they've not explicitly thanked you.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#318

Post by r4pha » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

Huge egos and insults are things that have always bothered me in the OSS community. Just some days ago the Crockford vs. fat thread on github resurfaced and shocked a lot of people on HN [0]. It certainly has stopped from releasing stuff in the past. Lately, though, I've been having an awesome experience with a few of my really simple open source projects. I've been receiving a few emails with requests in the most polite way possible, some of them even thanking me for my small contribution. Recently I've even got a pull request from a guy who out of the blue designed an icon for my android app. These things are priceless to me, and certainly motivate me much more than the bad parts demotivate me.

[0] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5...

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#319

Post by Dewie » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

naner wrote: post #73

For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other. In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where…

> I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.

Unfortunately I was brought up with a terminal as my foster parent, takeaway pizza as my mother's milk and snarky technical email lists as my social milieu. So I haven't quite had that experience. :-/

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#320

Post by knz42 » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 4:54 PM UTC

nanoscopic wrote: post #32

I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don't agree with. I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing…

After doing some research on "I also got attacked by PHK" I did some research and found this:

- you sent 2 e-mails to the Varnish-misc mailing list in Feb 2011 about the ESI-related bug you found (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2... https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), which then remained unanswered

- but then you also tried to "help" another user in an unrelated thread "Lots of config" in March 2011 (starting here, https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), and PHK had a knee-jerk reaction (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...) to one of your "suggestions", a reaction that was indeed a bit vitriolic, but when read in the context of your other contributions to that thread, it makes a little bit of sense.