On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 7:57 UTC (Thu) by simosx (guest, #24338)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I think this whole discussion is somewhat misguided and the real issue is *the problem with taunting* in the community.

Last year, Mark Shuttleworth wrote a long blog post to announce the codename for the subsequent version of Ubuntu (trusty tahr), and in it he vented his frustration about the attacks that Ubuntu has been receiving from some other open-source projects regarding Mir/Unity:

> Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;) And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development.
Source: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295

Then, Lennart Poettering was one of the people to pick on this, and went on taunting:

> So if we are the Tea Party of Open Source now, then I want to be our Sarah Palin! Who wants to be our Ted Cruz?
Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/571469/

He did not stop there, he even printed a t-shirt, and wore it at a conference (linux.conf.au 2014):
http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Kdbus-Neue-Interprozessk...

That t-shirt also went into a slide (someone else, Redhat Summit):
https://dwalsh.fedorapeople.org/SELinux/Presentations/RHE...

The purpose of taunting is to get someone have a bad time by making a lasting attack. Lennart Poettering has been doing it and now he is on the receiving end.

Is the community sick? When friendly banter becomes taunting, it escalates to all sort of nasty things.
Just stop the taunting.

to post comments

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 11:43 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (9 responses)

You forget to consider that Mark Shuttleworth went way over the top with his initial blog post (he posted an apology later). All Lennart did, IMHO, was to react in kind.

Mocking other people's opinions about the importance of their project or their politics or whatever may not always be warranted, but it's not in the same category at all as harrassing somebody because of their gender / skin color / etc., or trying to get them fired, let alone death threats.

Taunting...

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:41 UTC (Thu) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link]

My point is that taunting is unacceptable behaviour.
Yet, you see it happen rather often in the open-source communities.

By letting it pass, taunting can progress and escalate into death threats and what not.

This outcome is hardly surprising.

Individual communities may have a Code of Conduct, but the whole of the FLOSS community does not abide to a Code of Conduct.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 19:38 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (6 responses)

Say he did react in kind - then that would imply they were either both wrong or both right. So I assuming you felt they were both over the top and wrong. The difference is Mark realized it and apologized.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 20:07 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (5 responses)

It seems to me more like using humor to diffuse and make light of the situation, the systemd folks got called something silly by an influential CEO so they had t-shirts printed to make a joke of it, that doesn't sound like hard feelings and vitriol to me.

While there it too much acceptance of bullying instead of civil behavior in our community I don't think we should allow our fight against it to destroy our sense of humor.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 9:50 UTC (Fri) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link] (1 responses)

The t-shirt thing is called passive-aggressive trolling.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 15:01 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Indeed. In the early days of Ubuntu, a few debian developers took to wearing 'FCUK Ubuntu' T-shirts (in homage to a certain fashion brand AD of the time). That's, erm, 'not very nice'.

Taunting gone wrong

Posted Oct 11, 2014 9:55 UTC (Sat) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link] (2 responses)

> While there it too much acceptance of bullying instead of civil behavior in our community I don't think we should allow our fight against it to destroy our sense of humor.

I think that describes the whole misconception. Just like some people who claim freedom of speech for their personal attacks.

Being _funny_ at the expense of others is not nice. If someone has a real sense of humor, they can safely work on any self-deprecating funny material.

Apparently, the _death threat_ against Lennart Poettering was a comment on IRC about _hiring a hitman_ because that person was annoyed about something. It is quite possible that that person was "being funny".
Just like it is _funny_ when some people shout "I'll kill you" when they are being cut off on the road while driving. Obviously, then do not really mean to kill anyone. However, it's up to interpretation whether those were just venting their frustration or it was an actual death threat.

With some social intelligence, it's possible to feel when someone is overstepping the lines. For those who have trouble realizing those boundaries, they can check-in at a main airport while singing "bomb bomb bomb" over a tune of their choice.

Taunting gone wrong

Posted Oct 11, 2014 12:58 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>Apparently, the _death threat_ against Lennart Poettering was a comment on IRC about _hiring a hitman_

As others have pointed out before there was a kickstarter style campaign as well that got taken down later.

Taunting gone wrong

Posted Oct 11, 2014 15:50 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> people who claim freedom of speech for their personal attacks

The last refuge of an argument that has totally failed, that it's not technically illegal to say ... 8-)

> Being _funny_ at the expense of others is not nice

That depends on the context, among friends insult-humor is common, the difference with our communities is that this kind of in-group commentary often happens on public mailing lists and not in private as it would in-person. That is some of the heart of this issue, at least where Linus is concerned, the mailing lists are both a public work space for employees at many companies, who prefer civil business-like communication, and the personal living room of the old-timers who act like vikings on occasion.

> With some social intelligence, it's possible to feel when someone is overstepping the lines. For those who have trouble realizing those boundaries, they can check-in at a main airport while singing "bomb bomb bomb" over a tune of their choice.

LOL

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 4:13 UTC (Tue) by liam (guest, #84133) [Link]

Mocking other people's opinions about the importance of their project or their politics or whatever may not always be warranted, but it's not in the same category at all as harrassing somebody because of their gender / skin color / etc.,

You're right, such harassment is far more personal.