Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

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?