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

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

#381

Post by Diederich »

bronson wrote: post #375
mcantor wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate exists on a spectrum of gray areas, but I'm pretty sure "you should be retroactively aborted" crosses the line from "shaking someone's cage" to "flagrantly excessive verbal abuse", if for no other reason than it equate's the target's worth as a human being with their skill as a developer, which is obviously not a healthy viewpoint.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here but, despite your quote marks, Linus never said that. My interpretation of that email chain reads: anyone who is stupid enough to continue reading byte-by-byte after being told that it's a bad idea should be retroactively aborted. The implied subject makes a big difference. (I still think it's over the line but I understand that everyone makes mistakes in the heat of the moment)

WRT what specifically Linus did and didn't say, that's a fair reading.

And everybody, myself included, says things out of frustration, in the heat of the moment. That's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about how many (most?) open source technical communities are very much ok with language that is abusive. Indeed, many take pride in that fact.

When I say something that's inappropriate, I'll make a point of retracting it later on when I'm calm.

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

#382

Post by mcantor »

oldmanjay wrote: post #331
pikachu_is_cool wrote: post #215

Fourteen year old kids were telling me that they were going to skullfuck my grandmother with a rake over Xbox Live, a decade ago, just because I killed them once or twice in Halo 2. Internet insults have always been ridiculously over the top, it's nothing new. Nobody is actually going to rape or kill her over this, you're a massive idiot if you think for even a split second that they would.

It does seem like there's an awful lot of energy being expended on stopping 14 year old boys from being assholes. I suspect it's about as likely to work as efforts to stop teenagers from having sex. At least quixotic quests are entertaining from the sidelines.

This post was about grown men, not fourteen-year-olds. Grown men... as in, people who should know better.

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

#383

Post by oscargrouch »

chris_wot wrote: post #9
freehunter wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real shame because it's really true and really needs to be addressed. We've had these conversations about gamers, about startups, about tech in general, but when it comes to Linux (and related open source projects) it's somehow impossible to talk about. The community just isn't friendly and isn't inclusive, and that bad behavior goes far enough as to shut down any talk of the bad behavior.

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…

Wait.. but what the guy did (whoever is) is really stupid; of the unbelievable type..

Now i imagine that Linus suffer a tremendous pressure to not let any bug pass, cause everybody in the world would eat his liver if there's a smallest security hole in the Kernel

Millions of lines of C code, that run in every gadget we can think of, the guy is stressed out; and you have a "code terrorist" do deal with?!

Also Linus has a strong personality, everybody knows that; so i dont see this as something bad as its being painted here; And we have to take the cultural background into account; i prefer the German/Nordic tought/transparent way than the hypocrisy/"you are great, but i will stab you when you turn your back" kind of culture (and im from a relaxed kind of culture)

I Think this is more of a cultural clash

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

#384

Post by mcantor »

Diederich wrote: post #374
mcantor wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate exists on a spectrum of gray areas, but I'm pretty sure "you should be retroactively aborted" crosses the line from "shaking someone's cage" to "flagrantly excessive verbal abuse", if for no other reason than it equate's the target's worth as a human being with their skill as a developer, which is obviously not a healthy viewpoint.

I'm a big believer in 'spectrum of gray areas'. This particular quote from Linus is particularly bad. What I want to firmly point out is the general community's level of acceptance of verbally abusive language. There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess. What I'd love to see is the community acknowledge that using and even encouraging such lan…

I agree with you. The problem I'm seeing in this thread relates to this point:

> There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess.

Right now, a lot of people simply do not make the distinction between verbal abuse and direct language. In other words, they are arguing that we should not bother discouraging verbal abuse because it "shouldn't" affect targets any more adversely than direct but non-abusive language.

I guess it's a debate one can approach from many angles. But maybe you're right, perhaps focusing on highlighting why one thing constitutes verbal abuse and others don't is too semantic of an argument, and it's more productive to focus on the fact that just because one person has never been truly bothered by verbal abuse doesn't mean that should be the universal expectation.

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

#385

Post by pyre »

tomp wrote: post #302
pyre wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on the "all bullshit" part then because it comes across as saying that there isn't any point to being civil with people.

No. You seem to deliberately want to misunderstand me. Many != all.

It wasn't deliberate. I wasn't grokking what you were saying. I was reading:

  Many people talk nice, but [niceties are] all bullshit.
Instead of:

  Many people talk nice, but [their talk is] all bullshit.
The ambiguity of that 'it' is really what this stemmed from.

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

#386

Post by EdwardDiego »

vidarh wrote: post #89
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…

> (p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?) Linus is fully capable of writing "fuck", as evidenced by e.g. [1]. If he stars it out, assume it is a stylistic choice for that particular message. > then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML. If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well. Note the context (though I can…

> If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well.

Such conduct is not tolerated in workplaces, where people are paid to contribute, why do you consider it acceptable in an environment where people contribute for free?

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

#387

Post by rbanffy »

rbanffy wrote: post #296
freehunter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Saying "you're wrong" isn't the issue here. Saying "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is the issue. I don't think people in cultures where losing face is a big issue much care if they're told they're wrong. They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed.…

Maybe, just maybe, "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is just an overly elaborated form of saying you are wrong and should not be taken literally. > They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the world. Nobody is wrong enough to warrant that. I see the "elaborate insult" thing can get out o…

Hint: downvoting is not a good way to provide constructive criticism.

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

#388

Post by forgottenpass »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #129

This reminded me of the "This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet celebrity" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And "everybody" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated than that. The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into s…

That video is generally OK, but some of the explanations it offers aren't the only interpretation, or are a stretch that seems a bit too convenient. Occasionally the stretches seemed like just telling a particular segment of the games industry and games press exactly what they wanted to hear.

I watched it a few months ago, and may re-watch it tonight when I have more time to make a clear argument about specific ideas presented there. But probably won't for the same reason I never bothered posting a criticism of that video online when it was new. The twitter crowd that likes Fish and games press cliques that are friendly with him wouldn't respond well to the agitation.

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

#389

Post by owenversteeg »

Ehh, you just have to look past the arguments and inane people. I run a small-to-medium open source project (the Min CSS framework, http://mincss.com) and I get plenty of inane comments, criticism, and personal attacks. However, I also get plenty of nice comments that make it all worthwile. For a project as large as systemd, I imagine that this is many orders of magnitude more extreme.

As with any group of people, the assholes are the loudest, and if you're writing software for a huge group of people a bunch of them are going to be really loud assholes.

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

#390

Post by vezzy-fnord »

grandinj wrote: post #377
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is one of his more infamous statements: http://lwn.net/Articles/430699/ "What I actually suggested in that interview was not so much that the BSDs should adopt the Linux APIs, but instead that people should just forget about the BSDs. Full stop." He's also been an annoyance in Steve Langasek (Upstart developer)'s Google+ feed, and his post regarding the inseparability of systemd-logind as a main argument for why…

So his technical opinions warrant personal vitroilic responses? That's a rather .... interesting position.

None of them are purely technical or even at all concerning his denouncement of BSD.
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