On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by aleXXX
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

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'.

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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.