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On boots and assholesOn boots and assholesPosted Jun 20, 2012 22:16 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785)In reply to: On boots and assholes by mdz@debian.org Parent article: On mocking
> If the kernel development community didn't tolerate assholes, would they still be able to produce a booting kernel?
> I want to believe that the answer is yes.
That's not an interesting question, the answer is of course yes but the interesting question is what would be the price (in development speed)?
The answer is: a **huge** price given than Linus himself has his "assholish moment" (and he is not the only one).
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On boots and assholes Posted Jun 20, 2012 23:38 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
There is a great difference between 'ban people who are assholes' (which has no enforcement mechanism and would never fly, though occasionally projects are forked or semi-forked for exactly this reason) and 'try not to be an asshole yourself because it puts other people off and creates a generally hostile atmosphere.'
The former is impractical and probably undesirable. The latter is just a matter of common courtesy. Everyone is grumpy sometimes -- but imagine what LWN would be like if the grumpy editor was *always* grumpy, rather than being his usual charming approachable self most of the time.
On boots and assholes Posted Jun 21, 2012 1:14 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
It all really comes down to the Postel Principle - doesn't it?
Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.
It works for people as well as computers.
Of course there is a limit to liberality - protocol violations are still protocol violations. But we can be conservative in the error messages that we return.
On boots and assholes Posted Jun 21, 2012 19:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Yeah, except that this is a situation in which potential receivers can also choose to silently disappear without the sender knowing, because they dislike the protocol violations that they see. And if we value actual receivers, that's a bad thing.
On boots and assholes Posted Jun 21, 2012 8:33 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
Mailing-lists have a problem: They give everyone, and every post, a similar voice. As individuals, we can killfile consistently annoying posters, but that doesn't scale very well, and it gives false positives as well as false negatives. (consistently annoying people sometimes post good stuff - usually constructive people sometimes post annoying stuff)
Allowing people to moderate, and allowing (but not enforcing) people to give more visibility to higher moderated posts, help the signal-noise ratio a lot. If there's enough contributors, that is needed because reading it all is simply impractical, or even impossible.
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