On the sickness of our community
quite a sick place to be in". Much of what Lennart has to say in that article is well worth reading; there is a lot in our community that could be better. But we cannot fix our problems without facing them squarely, and it's not clear that Lennart's post has done that. Here are a few additional thoughts from your editor on this topic.
Lennart claims to be one of the favorite targets of the "assholes" in our community; there can be no doubt that this is true. For better or for worse, Lennart has become a sort of lightning rod for certain types of criticism — and worse. It is one thing to have one's code criticized; it's another to face death threats, abusive video postings, and more. Anybody who pays attention to what is happening in our communication channels cannot fail to see that Lennart is getting some special treatment.
There are those who will argue that Lennart has brought this experience upon himself, that his ways of dealing with the community have brought forth an ugly response. There is room to criticize how, say, the systemd project operates and how it interacts with the rest of the free software community. But there are limits to how far that criticism should legitimately go before it crosses the line. For the rest, the claim that Lennart has somehow caused the behavior we are seeing is a simple exercise in blaming the victim. Nobody should have to put up with that kind of attack, and we as a community should stand up against those attacks regardless of what we think of the person targeted.
It may be a fundamental mistake, though, to see those attacks as originating from inside our community. The people we develop code with are not the people who are creating that sort of grief. The net does not lack for vile idiots looking to make somebody's life miserable; they can be found far beyond the open-source community. Those are the people who are posting videos, making death threats, and assaulting our mailing lists with unpleasant sock-puppet posts. One should not confuse such people with our community! They hide in the dark corners of the net and invade our space to play their games, but they are not us.
For those wanting to understand just where this kind of harassment can go, an attentive reading of Kathy Sierra's experiences is a disturbing but informative experience.
What we need to do is to build our defenses against such people, rather than paint our whole community as being like them. Insisting on civil behavior within our community's boundaries is certainly a part of that, and a lot of progress has been made in that direction over the years. Yes, we can do better; hopefully the future will see more improvement. Unfortunately, there is little we can do about the larger mob of unpleasant people out there; in a world where free speech is protected, there will always be some unwelcome voices. We can disclaim them and, often, the best thing to do is to ignore them, but we can never suppress them entirely.
Another fundamental mistake, in your editor's view, is to blame this situation on Linus Torvalds. One should not underestimate the effect a leader can have on the tone of a development community — a visit to the OpenBSD lists is a good way to see that dynamic in action. By that measure, Linus should be judged (mostly) positively; the linux-kernel mailing list is far from the wild-west playpen that people would make it out to be. The volume on that list is approaching 1000 messages per day, yet one must look hard to find one that can be deemed abusive or intemperate. Yes, they exist — one will not gather thousands of people in one place without hearing some words occasionally — but the conversation is generally civil and technical. Linus's conversation included — with the occasional exception, granted.
There has been an interesting opportunity to watch the linux-kernel community in action recently, as a (presumably) well-meaning but incapable developer made repeated attempts to submit patches. These patches went to a large range of maintainers, and they were uniformly useless at best and, often, actively wrong. The person involved was wasting significant amounts of kernel developer time while contributing nothing of value.
A common response to such a person would be to flame them to a crisp in the hope that they simply go away. Some years ago, things would have probably gone just that way, but that is not what happened this time. Instead, the person involved was repeatedly told, in a polite manner, what was being done wrong and which steps to take to start learning how to do things right. This tutoring continued long past the point where it was clear that the message was not getting through. If a dozen (at a minimum) senior kernel developers can be nice (or at least civil) to such a person, things cannot be all bad.
Which, again, is not to say that things are perfect; there is a lot of room for improvement. But the kernel community is not the community that is harassing Lennart, and the people who are behaving that way are not taking their cue from Linus Torvalds. Those people have no need for a prominent leader who has a habit of going over the top with his email; they are going to set out to create grief anyway.
Your editor has been a part of the free software community for well over
two decades at this point. The experience has not always been pleasant; it
has included abuse, federal lawsuits, and, recently, threats by a prominent
developer to circulate fabricated quotes in an attempt to destroy
credibility. But overall, despite making a bad habit of being loudly wrong
on the net, your editor has found this community to be a rich and welcoming
place with a
lot to offer. We should not let our glaring problems detract from what we
have built over the years. Despite its many problems, our community is not
a sick place.