Zemlin on the Linux Foundation's by-law changes

Posted Jan 28, 2016 9:21 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Zemlin on the Linux Foundation's by-law changes by weaselkeeper
Parent article: Zemlin on the Linux Foundation's by-law changes

Criticising someone's code, isn't toxicity. It's quality control.

That's certainly one way of looking at it. But there is – abstractly speaking – still a difference between “Your code sucks dead hamsters through a straw. Go away.” and “That's not bad – if you changed this-and-such like this, that would play better with so-and-so, and your code would be more useful.” It seems that there are people who enjoy the former style of interaction a lot more than the latter, and that contributes to the toxicity issue.

In any case, making efforts to provide the latter style of interaction in order to encourage contributors who would be turned away by the former increases the chances of their creating good and usable code in the future. If somebody decides to raise money and use it fund this sort of endeavour in order to increase the level of participation on the part of minorities (in the open-source development community) such as women, developers from third-world countries, or for that matter left-handed people, that is their prerogative and should be viewed favourably in the broader context of ensuring a higher level of good-quality code submissions in the future.