On the sickness of our community

I'm adding my voice to those concerned that this article didn't add to the discussion. In the spirit of the good comments that Linux Weekly News has traditionally had, I hope I'm also adding positively to the discussion. I raise my concern because the editorial and articles at LWN usually achieve that same 'positive contribution' goal. The conclusion that the editor disagrees with Lennart's assertion that Linux has a poisonous community would benefit from differentiating linux-the-kernel community and Linux-the-ecosystem community, probably again further from Linux-the-geek-thing ecosystem, but that message could benefit from additional guidance for how two decades of open source contribution can provide insight into avoiding a poisonous community developing in future.

I think that spending more time unpacking the conclusions that Kathi Sierra arrived at in her seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-poing blog post would help too, and to describe a roadmap for not working with individuals who divide communities, for forking without acrimony and to extend the institutional memory so that the situation where a 'weev'-like sociopathic character can't destroy someone and then become feted and rehabilitated and able to return to harm the community that has been home to the prior victim.

I think also that we might consider reading the public components of Lennart Poettering's and Steven Rostedt's interactions over the kernel command-line parameters causing logging filestorms which locked up machines at boot-time -- as this has coloured both of the people involved over what was a technical decision. The two strong characters, plus Linus, are recorded in the bugzilla entries and mailing list posts as failing to find common ground -- are there any lessons to be learned? And can these lessons be discerned without excessive criticism?

Over and above that, it's certainly worth highlighting the goals of working together -- and that the core community gets together for that common purpose. Any discussion of working with people whose unusual skills and lone personal drive inspires them to interact remotely with others of their mindset and calibre should be balanced with a warning that not everyone is like you; any discussion about the skills of software developers will also need to balance the drive to get stuff done -- which has to be strong to risk failing in public -- with the need to act humbly when in the company of other experts. The willingness to write off the time and effort of 'my solution' to pick up and work with someone else's requires a strength of character above mere stubbornness and creative effort, but it's stubbornness that brings the contributor back to her community to keep plugging away with creative effort with the goal of building something great.

It's this latter see-saw balance which can easily fall the wrong way and that, among the multi-faceted gem of the collaborative free and/or open source world, there are many voices adding code changes, many voices adding opinions about the bike-shed colour but, problematically, few setting the tone for how to act humbly while also meeting that strong personal need to contribute.

K3n.