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Community faultsCommunity faultsPosted Sep 27, 2007 4:01 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: Community faults by peace Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)
You may not be put off by this sort of thing, but to suggest that others shouldn't be is suggesting that they fit a mold if they want to participate. I see it in a more straightforward manner. By and large, people have a choice as to whether they want to be offensive. People have much less choice over whether something is going to upset or offend them. With no terribly good argument for why the offensive guys are going to be better programmers, I'd prefer that the people with the choice modify their behaviour so the people with less choice get to participate as well.
Of course, if you want to behave in a way that reduces the number of potential developers, feel free. You'll have to convince people as to why the community as a whole will benefit from that, of course.
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Community faults Posted Sep 27, 2007 17:59 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] > By and large, people have a choice as to whether they want to be offensive. People have much less choice over whether something is going to upset or offend them.
You left out the third part:
"People also have little control whether something is going to upset or offend someone else"
Some people are very easily offended.
Community faults Posted Sep 27, 2007 18:21 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] Indeed. Some people are excessively easily offended. That doesn't imply that everyone who is offended by something is over-sensitive.
In any case, the same basic argument still stands. Your first interaction with someone may offend them. That gives you a better understanding of where their thresholds are, and you can choose to modify your behaviour to reduce the probability of offending them in future. It may be that the compromises you'd have to make are excessive (if "You're failing to acquire this lock before modifying this data structure, which could lead to unexpected behaviour" ends up offending them, for instance), in which case it's probably better to just tell them that and avoid interacting with them in future.
Not everyone is able to accept constructive criticism, and those who aren't are unlikely to make especially useful contributions to the free software world. But that's not the same set of people as the ones who can accept constructive criticism but are put off by hostility. Losing the latter because you don't think we should deal with the former isn't a sensible tradeoff.
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