On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 8:00 UTC (Fri) by edeloget (subscriber, #88392)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by misc
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

To be fair, it's quite easy to find some Lennart bashing threads on the net. They are literally everywhere. You might even find some on LWN - and if you really want to read stupid user comments, you can give a look to Phoronix (apologies ; I don't mean that Phoronix is bad, just that some users are repeatedly crossing the line ; but hey, any mention of Lennart in a news is generating 100+ stupid comments).

To be even fairer, a large part of Lennart defense - either by him or by some (why do they even exist) fanboy is a simple argument: "you do not criticize <INSERT PRODUCT NAME> because it's technically bad, you criticize it because you dislike Lennart". Which is as abusive as criticizing Lennart in the first place (this is and the too classical "you don't understand <INSERT PRODUCT NAME>, so shut up" or the "You're just a user, you don't have any word to say. Only coders do" which is also kind of wicked (software tend to be used by... well, users I think)).

Some people in the community need to learn how to communicate with other people in a constructive way. Some people need to learn how to listen other people. That's how we're supposed to build both a community and the software this community uses.

Regarding Lennart, and while I don't want to play the victim blaming game, I believe he needs to both learn how to communicate and how to listen others. Part of the bashing he receives (and I agree that it goes far beyond what is acceptable) has roots in his own attitude ; he made himself a very polarizing person - so a good way to help correcting this is also to work on his own behavior if it's not too late.

(I really hope I wrote this correctly ; it's a fine line I'm walking, and I have to say that I don't want to be neither inflamatory nor disrecpectful.)

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 14:42 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

Did he made himself polarizing, or do people made him polarizing ?

Because I see him listen to people as much as he can ( unless we suppose that the TODO list of systemd filled itself ), he went to speak and listen to several free software events, and he say in g+ that he did read lots of thread everywhere.

So the whole idea of "he doesn't listen to people" is more a variation of "he didn't do what I suggested at some random place or he disagreed with my vision".

We have bugs rotting in all bug trackers, and no one get called for that, no one say "I am being ignored" despites the fact this happen to everybody on every projects. Or PR, for that matter. yet, when a bug take 8 months to be fixed, people use it as a evidence to confirm their existing bias, applying double standards.

Anyone who think about free software realize that the ratio of people who code on a project vs people who use the project is most of the time very low. So of course, you cannot answer to everybody in a satisfying way for everybody. Yet, people seems to expect that for some reason for systemd.

Since that cannot happen until we start to recruit lots of people doing bug triaging and "customer" services handling, they then just use this fallacy to justify complains about Lennart as if this was different from any others projects. And people who do not want to take side start to think "yeah, maybe there is a middle ground", and just give more force to accusations.

Maybe that's a more general symptom of users/developers communication deficiency in free software, maybe that's just people jumping on the band wagon and not spending time to think about how free software is produced.

But in all case, just saying "he should listen more to users" while there is evidence he does is just propagating vicious memes leading to victim blaming. Sure, you do not want to do that, but that's the beauty of it, it is not sufficient to say "I do not want to do that" for it to not happen, ideas evolves outside of your control once your propagate it.