"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"

#61

Post by _delirium » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:09 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #54

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…

They're smaller communities, but I've been on a few developer lists that are fairly strict about the dev list being only for developers. That doesn't solve the "dev who's a jerk" problem, but it does raise the barrier to entry by excluding people who want to only argue and not develop: if you subscribe and immediately start arguing, without having contributed anything, you get booted.

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

#62

Post by qwerta » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:09 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…

I find it (mo/i)ronic that you reference people with full name "XYZ attacked me", only for verification of course, but you forgot to include your own name.

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

#63

Post by Mikeb85 » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

Open source is not awful. It's perhaps the most important thing to happen to computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to code is easier than ever.

Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...

Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good. Well, a little more than that, but that's the basic gist.

I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. The few times I've found a bug I sent a bug report, the maintainer was super friendly (maybe because I wasn't a whiny douche-bag complaining about something that I got for free), and fixed it in an absurdly short amount of time (less than a day). Even if it wasn't fixed for a month I'd have been more than happy.

Anyhow, the open source community is much like the world at large. Many very nice, friendly people, and a few assholes. Same thing if you step outside. It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions, but rather as a sharing philosophy in the same way free markets are an economic philosophy.

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

#64

Post by Niksko » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:12 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #55

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.

The difference is that in a corporate setting, if you're fired that's the end of it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, in an open source setting, if you act like an asshat you can still contribute and discuss and continue to be an asshat. And then other people ignore you. So you convince people that they're the asshat. And people believe you because you're still there.

I'm not sure it's really a flaw. It's just the way it is. I feel as if it's simply one of the tradeoffs that you make with an open source project. People can hang around and be annoying and abusive and there isn't all that much you can do to totally get rid of them if they're determined. On the other hand, you can get brilliant programmers who come out of nowhere and have no qualifications that would never get past the interview stage in a large company.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:12 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…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by sii » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:12 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…

> 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.

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

#67

Post by kibwen » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:12 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…

I don't think "political correctness" has anything to do with suggesting that someone is so braindead that they ought to have starved to death. Rather, you appear to be using it as a strawman to discredit the notion that we should treat people like decent human beings.

As for his "passion", I don't think that resorting to public humiliation is any way to lead a project. Rather, it sounds like an item out of that "How To Minimize Employee Retention" article that made the rounds last week.

Linus certainly has many good qualities that have contributed to the success of Linux. He's diligent, he's technical, and he's great at solving problems. But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them.

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

#68

Post by kazinator » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #54

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…

You cannot moderate mailing lists because they are not centralized. When you hit "reply all" in a mailing list, the replies go directly to everyone who is on the To: or Cc: list. The list robot is just one of those parties. And of course, private replies are possible that the list robot doesn't even see.

Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken.

About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent web archive.

[Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century, and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can be configured.]

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

#69

Post by sergiosgc » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #58

sergiosgc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"You can yell bloody murder as long as people know you aren't serious about it"-- really me

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

#70

Post by jwr » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

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, discussions are constructive. Bad tone is immediately struck down. And it is true that a lot depends on the leader — Rich Hickey sets the example here and people follow.