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The case of the unwelcome attributionThe case of the unwelcome attributionPosted Sep 20, 2007 3:27 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: The case of the unwelcome attribution by jordanb Parent article: The case of the unwelcome attribution I went to grad school at Berkeley myself in the early 1990s (on the other side of the EE/CS divide, but I knew what was going on). I always found the BSD crowd to be a brilliant but also extremely unpleasant bunch, full of flame wars and personal attacks between developers, seeing conspiracy theories everywhere. This goes right back to the founding days, with the fights over 386bsd and BSDI. But then, I have a low tolerance for unpleasantness. I recently unsubscribed from my local LUG's mailing list because the level of personal attacks got to be too much for me. Others have thicker skins and might not care, but I find it actively painful to see good people flailing away at each other.
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The case of the unwelcome attribution Posted Sep 20, 2007 4:20 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] This goes right back to the founding days, with the fights over 386bsd and BSDI.Heh...for some of us, the "founding days" would be considered to have happened more than a decade earlier than that. ;-) Greg
The case of the unwelcome attribution Posted Sep 21, 2007 6:33 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Of course I'm aware of how old BSD is, since I had a summer job in a lab that was running 4.1BSD on a Vax before the transition to TCP/IP. Yes, I'm an old fart, I used the Internet when it was only one day old (the Arpanet and connected networks became the Internet once it switched protocols on Jan 1, 1982).I was talking about the founding days of completely free BSD; the Jolitzes did the first completely free BSD and BSDI did the first supposed USL-free but proprietary BSD.
The case of the unwelcome attribution Posted Sep 20, 2007 8:24 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Of course, watching some of the sausage get made on LKML, I'd say you'd have to have a pretty thick skin to be a heavy duty Linux kernel developer also.
The case of the unwelcome attribution Posted Sep 20, 2007 11:00 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] This definitely varies on a project-by-project basis. The GCC development community (by dint of conscious effort, and with one or two exceptions) is notably collegial, but even it pales before the welcoming nature of the TeX community. Other free software projects manage to be abrasive enough to drive people away.
I think it's a cultural thing, probably initially derived from the email habits of the founding developers, but adjustable over time. Also, though, it might be something to do with the software's complexity/popularity tradeoff: both GCC and TeX are arcane enough that they have to actively attract developers to some degree (GCC because it's fiendishly complex, TeX because it's simply arcane :) ), while most parts of OS kernels are much less complicated.
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