Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels [LWN.net]

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:01 UTC (Tue) by graydon (guest, #5009)
In reply to: Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels by louie
Parent article: Sharp: Closing a door

Fwiw the main factor pushing me away from further contribution to FOSS is the culture. Not the difficulty of the work, not the unrewarding nature of the bugs or anything. Just the people and their hostility, arrogance, dismissiveness, insularity and defensiveness. I try to continue to contribute, but the overall culture is (and has been for as long as I remember) the limiting factor in my willingness to engage. It infects me when I have contact with it -- I become a meaner, more argumentative, more anxious, pickier and less generous version of myself -- and it poisons the joy I'd otherwise find in the activity. I wind up ashamed to have anything to do with it, looking for other pass-times, other social groups.

I know lots and lots of people who are good programmers who used to enjoy the community but have similarly burnt out, left, resigned themselves to programming only for pay. It's very painful for a lot of people.

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Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:48 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (4 responses)

Do you find that FOSS development communities per se are different with respect to hostility etc. from other types of online communities (forums/blogs/magazines/chans/social*/etc.)? Is it the onlineness or the FOSSness that you think is a attracts stronger repulsors?

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 7, 2015 17:26 UTC (Wed) by graydon (guest, #5009) [Link] (2 responses)

I think FOSS communities have frequently been epicentres of setting norms for online discourse. They interact with several other online cultures (gamers, infosec people, chans, bloggers), and of course silicon valley libertarian culture. Possibly these days reddit is the biggest epicentre; but its norms grow from the same roots, and there's substantial cross-pollination.

The connecting thread is a sort of radical-honesty / tough-love idea, that by sufficient amounts of transparency, "honest competition", argument and conflict, one will arrive at a good/just/true/ideal outcome. That freedom to speak one's mind is the #1 most important priority in all circumstances, and that any suggestion to the contrary -- that one speak carefully, choose words in a way that's aware of consequences, consider other people's feelings, etc. -- is equivalent to being rounded up and sent to a prison camp by the thought police. That it obscures truth and harms progress.

What actually happens when this weird social-darwinist "virtue through conflict" norm governs a group is that weaker and more vulnerable people feel too hurt, exhausted and attacked to participate, and even those who have the energy to participate waste a lot of it in defensive status-arguments over non-issues, and the meanest, loudest, most persistent or merely most verbose people eventually come to dominate discourse. It produces very distorted goods, very approximate truths, very non-ideal outcomes.

I'm writing this as an honest attempt to answer the question. This is the only response I'm going to post. I've discussed this sort of thing with you enough in the past to be wary, but it's been a while and maybe, just maybe, this time it'll be heard and not turn into a sealioning session where you demand evidence and try to argue me out of it. This is the impression I have. I've been in the community 20 years. I stay on the edges because of this. If you want to not believe it, it'll be better for you to just chalk it up to me having a morbid and defeatist personality than engaging in further argument.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 9, 2015 5:45 UTC (Fri) by da4089 (subscriber, #1195) [Link] (1 responses)

Let's assume there's a substantial number of the potential FOSS developer pool who feel that the dominant cultures of FOSS projects are overly hostile.

Is there something preventing these like minded, technically capable people from building their own communities? Or is it that any such nascent community becomes infected by those with a more aggressive communication style? Is it just too draining to constantly try to tame (or eject) those individuals who do disrupt?

I ask, because if this was a technical issue, the solution would be to fork. But having forked, I guess it takes a bunch of work to maintain the distinction?

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 9, 2015 15:56 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I think this is a real danger: "any such nascent community becomes infected by those with a more aggressive communication style."

I think the reason that people don't generally go on rants in corporate environments is that you're usually face-to-face with your coworkers. Even people who telecommute occasionally have face-to-face interaction and more often phone or video conferences.

It's a lot harder to be an asshole to someone in person. In a development environment where most people hardly ever see any of their collaborators, the weakness of email as a communication mechanism really hurts: You can't see people's body language and fights tend to escalate instead of being damped down by conciliatory body language or natural inhibition when one sees one is upsetting someone else.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:06 UTC (Wed) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

It has been my experience that FOSS is thankless. Lot's of people have opinions on how things should be, but few help out. (Check out nearly any systemd discussion anywhere for a good example.. not just do people have opinions but the personal attacks there are appalling.) You hear all the complaints about something not being how they want it but relatively little help comes in. People generally have myopia for their own needs and disregard the greater community. People will sell and profit from the code of others but the kick backs to the original authors is rare, that won't stop the demands from coming though. The rare contributors want to contribute on their terms and be treated like they're wonderful because they're contributing to your project, your terms and needs be damned, no matter how clear they are spelled out.. Linus' behavior isn't new, I'm not going to defend it because I don't like the way he says some things (because of the profanity mostly,) but he's the king of being on the receiving end of it all. You have no idea how many times someone has "fixed the scheduler" by just depositing some stupid patch that doesn't even follow the code formatting guidelines...

LKML has profanity, there are plenty of inside jokes, I've seen tons of code shredded there but I don't think it's usually personal, that's not the norm. Different people see and hear different things differently. I don't think much of it is personal, but some do, no question about it. You have to extend yourself some to contribute, you take some risk and there is a good chance you will fail. They'll tell you why and how to fix it though, but I can see some folks taking that failure as personal. It's pretty clearly not a supportive culture that promotes growth and it's pretty clearly something that some folks find toxic.

The original blog poster had another post that suggested Linus was advocating violence when he was pretty clearly joking. I don't know if that was just a misunderstanding or something else, it seemed pretty obvious that it was a joke. I may be a jerk for this, but I feel that finding a culture as toxic or even finding it abusive (I guess if someone uses profanity or all caps when they talk/email with you, some could consider that abusive..) is a very very different accusation than sexism, racism, or homophobia. Maybe it's splitting hairs and it probably doesn't matter that much when you're on the receiving end or feel that your receiving it. It seems like it should be pretty easy to demonstrate the sexism or homophobia though, and I'm fairly confident that the greater kernel hacker community wouldn't tolerate it. Honestly, for all its warts and issues, I don't think most kernel maintainers would tolerate it if any maintainer denied patches for any non-technical reasons. Maybe I'm mistaken but can anyone point to any examples of that?