On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 6:16 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Here's a related blog from Aaron Seigo:
http://aseigo.blogspot.de/2014/10/four-paths.html

IMO it's more balanced, and doesn't deny that there are indeed problems.
IME (mostly from KDE and CMake) our (these) communities are not "a sick place", but almost always very nice, sometimes you get tough discussions, but I never experienced anything bad on a personal level.

Alex

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Yeah, well, sometimes these things can be self-proving.

On the G+ post associated with that very blog post, I noted that there were certain people whose projects I would avoid reporting bugs to and would attempt to avoid using until their leadership changed to people who came off as less unpleasant, and that of course I am not obliged to use their software, nor any software that disrupts my workflow (nor is anyone).

The response? A suggestion from someone with employer listed as RH that I 'get over [myself]' and the statement that 'If I were working for your project I wouldn't hesitate to knock you out before I resigned', which, tbh, I think I am not unjustified in interpreting as a threat of violence, even if a theoretical one: it certainly put me into a threat-response emotional state.

He did, at least, eventually apologise -- which is why I'm not identifying him here or linking the (easily found) G+ post -- but for goodness' sake, if this is what you get for the crime of saying that there are some projects you will not use (when nobody can use all software!) then, well, to me this community does not appear to have particularly healthy interpersonal dynamics. Lots of people, both developers and not, don't seem to realise that publically advocating that one piece of software be used over another is not a crime and not a thing deserving of retribution -- though if you don't say *why* you are advocating it, it's probably also not worth anyone's time listening to it. Neither is saying 'there are changes I will not accept, fork my software if you want to do that'.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 0:40 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (2 responses)

Looking at https://plus.google.com/+AaronSeigo/posts/j8DUYz3pMDw , I assume that the person you are speaking about is Michael Huff.

But I fail to draw the same conclusion regarding employer, mostly because I have access to more data par of my own employment, like a internal directory.

So either the internal RH directory is lying, or the name used on g+ is not the good one, or your conclusion is incorrect. I think that having a background on google plus of a linux distribution is not sufficient to deduce where someone work, but maybe I also misunderstood your reasoning.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 15, 2014 14:41 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, I'm quite aware that he might well not have actually been employed by RH, but that would have meant imputing bad faith and lying on his part, which was an addition step I was unwilling to make.

Just because someone's being unnecessarily horrible to me doesn't mean he's a liar! It probably means I've done something socially unacceptable without noticing it, yet again. (In this case, I don't think it did, but only because I checked with a bunch of people to make sure that I hadn't said something to offend someone.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 15, 2014 14:43 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aside: A week ago, when this interaction took place, he had his employer listed as "Red Hat" in his profile. I think someone must have had words with him, because that is now gone.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 21:29 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Having been on the receiving end of some, um, "love" from members of the KDE community over the years, don't deceive yourself that it is much better.

Not that I've been a saint either. But if your reaction is "my community is OK" you should probably look harder (and that goes for Jon as well). Goes doubly if you're a leader in the community (like Jon is)- that means you don't see a lot of what goes on behind the scenes, or don't feel it as acutely as new people.

(Which is also not to say that our communities are all bad; there is a lot of positive, human, humane stuff going on there. But that doesn't give us a free pass on all the other behavior.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 16:38 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

I agree that is a very balanced assessment of the situation.

My point is that the Linux kernel community is moving away from the bad boyz club, and people are not noticing. Lennart's experience is more of an exception than the rule. But that is due to past behaviors from him and Kay with their lack of willingness to listen to us when we brought up problems with their code.

If you read LKML on a regular basis, it is getting harder to find personal attacks. That's a good thing. Yeah, there's some old timers that still have their grumpy moments and when that's Linus, it makes the news. But those that actually try to join the community today, will have a much better experience than if they were to have when I joined.