Community faults [LWN.net]

Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 8:53 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Community faults by peace
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Besides, I have seen the conventions here and I think I fit right in.

The conventions I referred to, in case it is not obvious, are called "grammar" and "orthography" (or "spelling"). Some people stick to them more strictly than you do (not me, though).

As long as someone has a point, in the end, thats what matters.

Well said. Contrast this with what you said before about code contributions:

"If your submitting to a project and can't get something as trivial as coding style right than you probably deserve to be ridiculed".

People might paraphrase your latter contribution: "As long as someone has good ideas, in the end, that is what matters. Not everyone is going to fit the code conventions you prefer", and it would still be reasonable. Code is the expression of an idea, just as common language.

What we are requesting is the same level of civility in development mailing lists as on LWN. There is no reason to behave differently.

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Community faults

Posted Sep 27, 2007 14:49 UTC (Thu) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link]

What I'm getting at is this: is Free software going to be able to include the grungy dirty smelly realities of humanity or is it going to require a certain esoteric social etiquette defined largely by the dominant main stream culture, likely all white and docile. Technology was largely driven by social out casts of all flavors. Now that it's main stream are we only going to accept bathed vanilla?

man_ls, I've been responding to several of your posts here, please don't think I'm picking on your handle :). You may be referring to very specific instances of abusive behavior or even a certain class of abuse and I would likely agree that those cases were unfortunate.

I *am* responding more generally to a certain trend of gentrification of the tech ghetto you might say. I don't really have it fully worked out but I do know that geek, hacker and nerd do not mean what they used to.

If you have any foll up thoughts I'd appreciate reading them. I'm going to give this thread a rest, though... I'm sure we'll meet again, muhaha!

Kind Regards