Behavioral standards in the free software community [LWN.net]

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 3:23 UTC (Thu) by dang (subscriber, #310)
Parent article: Behavioral standards in the free software community

Some other thoughts:

One huge key really involves the ability of people to work together and to *want* to help people. I can think of some prominent developers in important projects who gleefully rip people and code in pretty salty terms, but who clearly rip their goofs just as hard, clearly bend over backward to help people, and who do enough heavy lifing in general so that everyone knows that they can bark and sometimes even bite, but they are treasured anyway. Part of the read is "what are they trying to say when they flame?"

On the flip side, a steady stream of even small flames can just wear you down after a while. It is sad when prominent developers just drop off project because life is too short to slog through the crap.

Even for a project where contributers are generally polite and discuss the merits of code not coders, things really can heat up when people are talking past one another or when people are advocating mutually exclusive solutions. In both cases, it helps a lot if someone mediates or makes the call in a way that respects all contributors. Managing frustration levels wins as much as does basic decency.

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Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 5:11 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

One huge key really involves the ability of people to work together

I was just thinking that another prominent example (besides the GCC case) involved Linus + various folks (e.g., I believe one of the IDE subsystem developers two or three years ago). It's not necessarily a matter of conduct in the sense of rudeness (although that may well be/have been part of it), and neither is it necessarily a matter of getting booted off LKML. But it is about conduct in some broader sense, and insofar as it's direct access to Linus, it's the next best thing to LKML exile...

Greg

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 5:43 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

This is kind of off-topic, my quite subjective view is that problem which
occurred with Andre Hedrick, who you refer to indirectly, is that he just
couldn't communicate very well with the other LKML developers. It wasn't
really a matter of hostility, just that it was very very difficult to
pass information in or out of Andre. My perception was that he wasn't
really in very strong command of certain issues that ended up being his
achilles heel, but I really couldn't say because every conversation I had
with him ended up with us both agreeing to give up trying to pass
information back and forth.

So there was _a_ problem there, but I don't think it was communication
style, not conduct.

Andre, if you read this and disagree, please do correct me. This is
_very_ subjective.