Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 13, 2010 12:37 UTC (Thu) by Lionel_Debroux (subscriber, #30014)
Parent article: Of hall monitors and slippery slopes

When reading "Kofler is loudly, and repetitively, ... [making some controversial point]", I thought for a split second "hey, that's a pretty spot-on analysis of Kevin's behaviour (and people in reaction to Kevin's repetitive behaviour) in the TI calculators developer communities for years. Yet another person has realized that".
But just about immediately, I realized that the article is talking about Kevin in Fedora...

Before Kevin made the headlines multiple times recently for e.g. the Mozilla trademarks controversy, posting a self-important open letter, and/or making various controversial points in the Fedora project, he became the most hated person in the TI communities, due to his two faceted-personality:
* the "technically capable, and usually motivated, person who helps newcomers" facet, which enables him to raise in the hierarchy and make friends in the beginning;
* the "notorious troll with very dogmatic, often black xor white and unreasonably unbalanced opinions, chronically incapable of understanding diverging opinions and a number of tradeoffs, and spamming everyone with his ramblings about e.g. Fedora being the best and the rest being crap" facet.
That second facet disgusts pretty much everyone from such madness in the long run. And that's even despite his least friendly ramblings being outside of public sight, in his closely guarded IRC chan, from which excerpting even a single word (without authorization, that is, but he won't give it) is punished with a !kb...

We other members of the TI calculators developer communities are not perfect - but it's a fact we have far less trouble cooperating among ourselves than Kevin has cooperating with pretty much anybody of the community in the long run, so we're definitely not the only culprits there.
Kevin's frequent statements along the lines of "I really do not understand why not to do X"/"Je ne comprends vraiment pas pourquoi ne pas faire X" and "X is totally useless"/"X ne sert strictement à rien", not to mention various kinds of programs and ideas being "crap", are powerful deterrents.

We have tried to make him understand why his behaviour was lowering the mood and giving other people an awful opinion about him, and how to change it for his own good, the good of the TI community and the good of communities that he could attend later - to no avail.
So we gave up, and while somebody mentioned the possibility, we didn't destroy his reputation in the Fedora community - after all, even if we doubted that he'd behave differently in another community, we left him a chance to. And sure enough, he screwed up in another, much larger, community, with consequences potentially a lot more wide-ranging...

Until he understands how destructive he is and fixes his behaviour (something I did myself - I used to be one of the persons siding with Kevin and I behaved nearly as badly as Kevin did against a group of persons, but back in 2004, I understood my wrongdoing and fixed my behaviour), Kevin might want to remain in the world of boolean Mathematics (where things are true xor false), and stay away of activities involving other human beings...

to post comments

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 14, 2010 18:55 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (8 responses)

Wait -- "I really do not understand why not to do X" is a deterrent to cooperation? Sounds like a polite invitation to me.

I agree that "X is totally useless" is obnoxious, but only because it's usually false -- a gross exaggeration -- and indicates the speaker's inability to see shades and perspectives.

"crap" is clearly deterrent, since it moves the discussion from objective criticism to a comparison of personal taste.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 14, 2010 19:12 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (7 responses)

I've been at the receiving end of repeated "I don't understand why..." -- and yes, it's an effective deterrent. Initially, I thought I had not made myself clear, but when it continued year after year I learned that all it meant was "I don't want to understand". It is very hard, even impossible to make yourself understood to someone who starts, at the beginning of reading your argument, with composing a reply in his head that begins "I don't understand". It's rhetoric -- and it's effective. It's also completely false, and often the hallmark of poisonous people in a project.

In other words, telling someone you didn't understand them is not polite: it's telling them they are too stupid to make themselves clear. Though that might be a cultural thing, of course.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 15, 2010 12:15 UTC (Sat) by Lionel_Debroux (subscriber, #30014) [Link] (6 responses)

Indeed, there's a /major/ difference between a) once-in-a-while "I don't see/understand why [...]" and b) years of repeated "I don't see/understand why" when replying to users and other developers who back their wishes (and sometimes even tentative patches) with arguments from the other side of the coin.
a) is polite (especially if explicitly followed by ~"please explain more / better / differently"), b) means "I don't want to understand".

Obstructive behaviour ("I don't want to understand", actively disregarding user input, tearing down a number of ideas and patches with "it's useless" - while the very fact that someone has spent the time to make changes to the code and submit them means that these changes _are_ useful to someone; etc.) is very bad when the person repeatedly writing such statements is one of the decision-makers of the community...
(Nowadays, it would be nearer from the facts to say that Kevin _was_ a decision-maker, given that he has done little in the way of productive changes for more than two years...)

I've been made aware of a number of occurrences of Kevin behaving in Fedora like he behaves in the TI-68k community, e.g.:
* trolling on redundant topics, which ended up getting him the CMake extremist and Sam the autotools extremist threatened twice with moderation (they disregarded the first warning): https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-Ju... , dozens of mails whose title contains "an update to automake-1.11?";
* flaming down using a destructive tone (the opinion itself is valid, but "completely braindead crap" is a terribly obnoxious choice of words): https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-Oc... . So did Ulrich Drepper ("for a problem that doesn't exist. I don't see why people even spend a second thinking about this.").

I have also been made aware that some people in the Fedora community have realized things about Kevin that many of us in the TI community have realized for years, e.g.:
* http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/... : Kevin's inability to accept wishes different from his (obviously, in the TI-68k community, it was more about e.g. "_nostub vs. kernel" and "size optimization vs. speed optimization" than "KDE vs. Gnome" or "Fedora vs. other distros"). The mail was complete with a useful suggestion on how to improve his behaviour for the common good.
* http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/... ("you seem to have no skills for actually promoting cooperation and understanding between different groups of people." !)

Among other persons, I have already explained Kevin multiple times how he could have worded some of his thoughts in a much more polite way, and I have also explained him one of the useful life lessons given by one of my schoolmates, about being predictable and being all too quick to react to trolling. All of this was to no avail, since it's abundantly clear that Kevin is mad enough to keep screwing up, both in the TI community and (that is a much more serious issue) in one of the highest profile FLOSS projects out there !
I just strongly hope, for his sake and for ours, that Kevin at last realizes how awful his behaviour is, and fixes it before it's too late (before even more people are severely unhappy with him in the Fedora community - but also before an ill-intentioned person exploits his high predictability and his inability to think differently to put him in an uneasy situation IRL). "Only time will tell".

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 16, 2010 22:14 UTC (Sun) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link] (5 responses)

I don't understand why you're using the LWN comments section to vent your frustrations with this individual. Please go do it elsewhere.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 17, 2010 13:32 UTC (Mon) by Lionel_Debroux (subscriber, #30014) [Link] (4 responses)

If the only thing you can see in my comments is "venting my frustrations", then you're missing the point and the issues raised - Kevin's style ;)

See, it's not out of sheer pleasure that I'm posting here. There's a goal. I'm doing this because for the common good of both of our communities, and for his own sake, there _needs_ to be a change in Kevin's behaviour. Kevin needs to be taught many lessons about human behaviour, respect and cooperativeness. Not to mention common sense - he complains about the FESCo lacking common sense, but well...
Drawing lines between people, trolling on redundant topics and thought exercises not backed by significant facts (here, what would happen if Fedora's update process became more conservative or less conservative) is no good. We're talking about FLOSS here, a model where federating people towards a common goal is important. Kevin _needs_ to use his time and skills (as I already wrote, he _is_ capable) in a much more useful way. Adam Miller, too, wrote him something along those lines.
But given that nearly 10 years of conflicts (with, once in a while, explanations on how to improve his behaviour coming from multiple persons, as I've stressed) in the TI communities haven't fixed Kevin's behaviour, and that he's using the same kind of ways in the Fedora community, I feel that remaining mute is at best inefficient, at worst damaging. We TI community left Kevin the chance of a fresh start with a different set of people - but was it the best thing we could have done, after all ?

I know first-hand what it takes to radically alter behaviour. As I mentioned above, I did it myself, after finding out about a number of facts (IRC chan logs, etc.) that shed a very different light about the respective behaviour of Kevin and the others (compared to the way Kevin presented, or hid, those facts). The results of acknowledging my errors and fixing my behaviour (working collaboratively with more people, being hated by many less persons, etc.) have been highly positive. Seriously.

I don't have such pride as thinking that my several posts in that thread will yield significant changes. But at least, I'll have _tried_ to open a few more eyes...
The thing is, we TI community know Kevin much better than you do. Kevin's bright side comes to sight first, but sooner or later comes the dark side. For one example, Kevin made the feat of getting banned from the main TI-68k French-speaking message board, due to severely impolite and insulting behaviour of publicly rejoicing about a database problem and wishing that the message board would not come back online. What made that disrespectful comment even more crazy was that he attended that message board a lot...
It's extremely hard to get banned from there, even polluting dozens of topics with redundant trolls doesn't make the cut. And needless to say, during his ban, which was lifted later, the tone on that message board was much more civil...

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 17, 2010 13:35 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

Whatever the point may be, I think you've more than made it by now. Maybe this would be a good time to stop?

Thanks.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 17, 2010 15:37 UTC (Mon) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (2 responses)

Are you hall-monitoring this discussion?

Why yes! I do like irony, don't you?

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 20, 2010 14:52 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (1 responses)

He also happens to be the owner of this particular website. What's ironic about encouraging decent behavior on your own turf?

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 20, 2010 15:45 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The article is about Fedora moderating some threads on its sites.

Same old story, only in a different community...

Posted May 18, 2010 15:48 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

He sounds like the classic poisonous person - perhaps that concept will provide ideas on how to deal with him.