Examples of where it's done right [LWN.net]

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:03 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: Examples of where it's done right by epa
Parent article: Sharp: Closing a door

Mozilla's not perfect, but the harsh language Linus uses would not be acceptable coming from a Mozilla module owner/reviewer.

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Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:31 UTC (Tue) by rhekman (guest, #102114) [Link] (7 responses)

"Mozilla's not perfect, but the harsh language Linus uses would not be acceptable coming from a Mozilla module owner/reviewer."

I'm not a member of the Mozilla developer community, so I can't speak to the quality of day to day discourse. However the public campaign against Brendan Eich was an example of how ugly it can get in a popular project when a vocal minority decides that unrelated personal beliefs are more important than technical matters.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:40 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't recall any Mozilla employee being anything close to harsh in any such discussions. So that seems to be a poor counter example.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 7:56 UTC (Tue) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link] (3 responses)

Some employees asked him to step back in public (Twitter). That's about the harshest thing one can do, even if using the nicest words.

Those employees where a tiny minority, but that doesn't really help in the beautiful new world of social media outrage.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 16:16 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

We are talking about different things, I think. One is a disagreement of leadership position and it is ok to state that out loud publicly regardless of your rationale as long as you specify it clearly. The other thing is to engage in name calling and so on.

In other words, it is ok to say, this patch is broken, can you fix it by doing foo and bar? It is unnecessarily harsh to say, you have a lousy patch and you are brain dead. Even if you are doing that to someone you know very well, it is a public list and potential contributors are lurking.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:06 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, it's pretty much the same – if you ignore all facts.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:08 UTC (Wed) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]

Could you elaborate on those facts?

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:27 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

That was not coming from Mozilla module owners or reviewers.

In any reasonably large and open project, jerks are going to show up from time to time, cause trouble, and be abusive. Some of them may be useful contributors, though in Mozilla that's been rare. You can expel them, and we do, but they still cause pain. So any large open-source project will have examples of bad behavior in the community, and you can't eliminate that. Your leaders and mainstays, however, do reflect on the project.

The Brendan situation was different again, though, in that the vast majority of the venom came from people who weren't associated with the project in any way, for whom we were just collateral damage in the culture wars.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:40 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

I'm not sure how a pushback on the idea of appointing a CEO who actively opposes the rights of a chunk of the people participating in the project seems unreasonable to you, unless you think anti-gay campaigners should get a pass that anti-semites, for example, wouldn't.