Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 487 posts

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

#51

Post by bad_user »

This doesn't pertain to "Open Source" in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definitely an exception and is being punished in general.

A comment like "How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" is only tolerated if you're Linus Torvalds or somebody like him that has contributed a lot and that is tolerated in spite of his character. And yes, the world is full of jerks that want to copy Linus Torvalds, or Theo de Raadt, or Richard Stallman, or Steve Jobs, or David Heinemeier Hansson, or whatever else ruthless leader with strong opinions that happened in this industry, but without the track record to back up their strong thoughts. Open Source is only special because the discussions are often public for anybody to see.

I do find Linus' behavior regrettable, as he's a very public person in this industry, his opinions do have legs and he is a role model for others. And I'm personally against PC talk, for example I think usage of the word "fuck" is totally legitimate because it implies passion, it implies that you care, but I think critiques should never be ad-hominem and people breaking this rule should get social punishment, including Linus.

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

#52

Post by _delirium »

forca wrote: post #17

I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several r…

Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the OpenBSD community is not that: there are many good things about de Raadt, but the tone he sets is more one of combative-and-right than pleasant-and-professional (and he's not the only one in the community with that tone). He's no less prone to flamage than Torvalds, anyway. The only really friendly BSD developer community I've encountered is the NetBSD one, which seems to make an active effort at cultivating a certain ethos. FreeBSD is maybe somewhere in between, though I think trending friendlier compared to some years ago. Some sub-communities are also quite pleasant, like the ZFS one (which lives a bit more in Illumos-land, but has a lot of BSD contributors as well).

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

#53

Post by doe88 »

For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I've come to study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it's more important than degrees and schools.

For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it was mostly a closed source world.

Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. I can't fathom how painful it must be for current Swift developers to develop in a young (so far) closed project where you can't see nothing and bang your head against every walls to find your way.

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

#54

Post by mike_hearn »

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…

The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor. It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy to get into a downward spiral where behaviour gets more and more extreme as people try to make their opinions stand out amongst the crowd.

What's worse, the fact that this scares off contributors is hard to spot, because you by definition cannot easily measure contributions that would have happened but didn't because of a community problem.

If you look at non-technical forums like Facebook, newspaper comment sections etc there's usually some form of moderation that imposes house rules like "be civil". This sort of thing can clean up individual forums but the wider problem remains: some people are just nasty and they often believe they can influence the development of their favourite project by being sufficiently nasty to developers they disagree with. If they can't do that in the project's own forums they'll do it elsewhere.

The Bitcoin community has pretty severe problems with this too, it's not just a Linux thing.

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

#55

Post by PaulHoule »

bad_user wrote: post #51

This doesn't pertain to " Open Source " in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definit…

I think if you're involved in a closed-source company and you act like an ass too many times you'll get fired.

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

#56

Post by musesum »

A psychologist friend mentioned that invoking 2nd person (you) often escalates conflict. I wonder what it would take to write a thread parser that bounces comments with "you" as the focal point?

Sentiment analysis probably has some utility if bad commits are clustered around a particular contributor. Would it be more product to represent sentiment as a graph? What would it look like?

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

#58

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

sergiosgc wrote: post #37
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…

Linus is great enough, and known enough, to be allowed some idiosyncrasies. If you follow LKML long enough you realize these hard language comments do not carry one tenth the negative message a primary read would convey. Note that this happens because you can read it with knowledge of the writer's personality. If it were an anonymous author, your impression would be perfectly correct. No, I know that the standard rep…

"Oh you can advocate murder for people you don't like as long as your technical chops are in order" --you

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

#59

Post by mahouse »

liveoneggs wrote: post #28

Maybe these strong reactions from core linux engineers have meaning. Maybe strong reactions from large parts of the user base have meaning. Maybe one reaps what one sows.

Exactly. If there are some guys that tell you that what you do is wrong, you may be right. If everybody tells you you are wrong, maybe, well, you are wrong.

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

#60

Post by pekk »

I don't think it is fair to generalize this to all of Open Source. The Linux kernel and the Systemd controversy in particular do not represent all of Open Source. That said, I do think Lennart has very valid and important points about the Linux kernel and the Linux community and specifically the Systemd controversy. It's too bad.

But switching to Mac OS doesn't fix this, if we wanted to talk about that then there is a whole set of separate issues there.

Post reply on HN