Kuhn: Toward Civil Behavior

[Posted December 24, 2014 by ris]

Bradley M. Kuhn talks about abusive behavior in the FLOSS community. "In the politics of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), some people regularly engage in behavior right on that line: berating, verbal abuse, and intimidation. These behaviors are consistently tolerated, accepted, and sometimes lauded in FLOSS projects and organizations. I can report from direct experience: if you think what happens on public mailing lists is bad, what happens on the private phone calls and in-person meetings is even worse. The types of behavior that would-be leaders employ would surely shock you." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

Is Linus Torvalds Considered Acceptable Or Not?

Posted Dec 25, 2014 21:06 UTC (Thu) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link] (3 responses)

It would be nice to point to examples of what to do and what not to do in this regard.

Is Linus Torvalds Considered Acceptable Or Not?

Posted Dec 29, 2014 23:28 UTC (Mon) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (2 responses)

General case (where "you" is anyone reading this comment)
What to do: See any systemd related article you have not posted to recently
What not to do: See any systemd related article you have posted to recently

Specific case
What to do: Start a lively, interesting discussion by putting the real thrust of your argument in the comment body. Ideally you don't make it personal.
What not to do: What you did in the subject line above

Cheers
Jon

Is Linus Torvalds Considered Acceptable Or Not?

Posted Jan 1, 2015 1:16 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

As we have learned in the interminable 'goto' discussion, ldo's requests for examples are only made so he can pooh-pooh anyone who doesn't provide them, and tell those who do that the examples are inadequate.

Is Linus Torvalds Considered Acceptable Or Not?

Posted Jan 2, 2015 0:04 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

I created the above comment before I saw that thread. Now given your comment here and those of cyberax in that thread (two folk I have grown to trust in general as knowing what you are on about) amongst others, I might have been a little too subtle here.

Don't worry though: if I see ldo pooh-poohing anything else in future, I shall be sure to pooh pooh his pooh pooh in a more forthright style.

Cheers
Jon

This isn't a new problem.

Posted Dec 25, 2014 23:13 UTC (Thu) by jra (subscriber, #55261) [Link] (1 responses)

Here is a column I wrote on this subject from back in the prehistoric days of 2005 :

https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/colum...

This isn't a new problem.

Posted Dec 27, 2014 0:50 UTC (Sat) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

Back in 2005, things were pretty nasty on the mailing lists. Today, I hardly see any personal insults. I don't see the nasty flame-wars that were so common at that time or even up to 2009. But things have changed, and the community has become much more accepting of differences. Maybe because most developers are now employed by corporations with HR departments. I only deal with the Linux kernel community, and can't express any opinions about other FLOSS projects, but as the kernel community seems to be the poster boy of insults, I would think that when it has become more tamed, so has the rest of the community.

I'm sure there may be an insult here or there, but when there's something like 700 emails a day, if there's a bad comment 0.005% of the time, that means you'll see one once a month. And the only times I do see people start to insult, is when the one being insulted totally ignores all the advice they received, and continue doing the same thing over and over, when finally, being 'nice' becomes a waste of time.

Another difference between Open Source projects and proprietary, is if you have a person who ignores all the advice from the lead, and continues doing things wrong, in proprietary, projects, that person can be disciplined in several ways. Either moved to another project, suspended, or even fired. It goes both ways. There's no HR for the project leads, but there's also nothing to stop someone communicating with them from consistently doing things wrong. In proprietary work you can say, "Do that again, and you're fired", it's much harder to do that in the open source community.

I don't condone insults to people. But when it comes to only using email for communication, insulting the code itself is usually much more efficient, and gets the point across much better.

Kuhn: Toward Civil Behavior

Posted Dec 26, 2014 0:46 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm certainly not going to challenge Mr. Kuhn's claims of being witness to or at the receiving end of uncivil behavior in the FLOSS community, but I have to admit that when I clicked on the link to the article I was sort of hoping to find some examples of such behavior or incidents, and was somewhat disappointed that the only example he gave was that of Hans Reiser, much of whose behavior, as I understand it, would be considered far outside the norm in just about any context.

Kuhn: Toward Civil Behavior

Posted Dec 31, 2014 15:48 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

I sincerely hope we do not waste our energy fixing imaginary problems.

Kuhn: Toward Civil Behavior

Posted Dec 26, 2014 5:03 UTC (Fri) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link]

The money quote:

"Is it really true that any words are fair game, and nothing you can say is off-limits?"

Think about it.