Comment by xenadu02
7 years ago
IMHO Some of the responses here are missing the point. That seems to be a common theme as of late: "I don't like the argument or I'm already on side 'X' in this fight, so I'm going to setup a straw-man to attack so I can avoid engaging the core premise of the article."
Her post isn't about keeping a private repo or being selfish. It's about "I am not your therapist or punching bag, nor is it my job to educate you, so why would I waste my time submitting my patch and dealing with a toxic community? What am I supposed to gain from that interaction, other than being insulted, belittled, and having my patches ignored?"
She is hardly the only person who stays far away from contributing to the Linux kernel (and other projects) thanks to certain nasty and emotional segments of "community". Those people don't show up in stats. No one knows they exist. The project just has a reputation for being full of assholes, so many really talented people choose to stay away (or strictly limit their involvement). This can become a self-reinforcing cycle where only assholes can be heard, resulting in design-by-asshole rather than design based on technical merit. Assholes (by virtue of being assholes) usually immediately dismiss this by claiming anyone making such complaints is technically inferior (or is intrinsically unsuited to contributing because of their age, gender, or other attribute).
I'll also point out that acting out like this is purely emotional knee-jerk behavior - the exact opposite of merit or technical arguments. Linus is perfectly capable of criticizing patches on technical merits without calling people morons in the process. In the past he has chosen to lash out emotionally for one reason or another. Perhaps he had a bad day. Perhaps he just enjoyed insulting other people. Perhaps he thought he was better than them and wanted to show off how superior he was. None of us can really know the underlying reason, but at the end of the day it hardly matters.
I really want to stress my last point: lots of people (including here on HN) are trying to make a self-evidently Orwellian case that adopting a CoC and setting community standards is somehow trading technical merit for soothing people's feelings... in defense of another contributor's ability to lash out emotionally. One has to engage in some especially motivated reasoning to make such prima-facia false claims.
A code-of-conduct basically boils down to "don't attack people personally and don't belittle, harass or intimidate other contributors". Or perhaps in simpler terms: "act like a professional".
Being professional means giving direct and honest feedback. Lying to avoid hurt feelings is the opposite of professional!
> Those people don't show up in stats. No one knows they exist.
I am surprised by the thought that I might be one of those people. On paper, I seem like exactly the sort of person who ought to feel confident getting involved in Linux kernel development. I have decades of programming experience, I've been using Linux since the '90s, and I've spent most of my career building system software and developer tools. I've written drivers, filesystems, memory managers, embedded RTOS kernels, compilers, linkers, debuggers, VMs, runtime libraries, you name it. I've grepped through the Linux kernel source plenty of times. I am a thoroughgoing free software advocate and I've been GPLing all my personal projects for many years; in fact I am currently fortunate enough to be making my living developing free software.
And yet - it has never once occurred to me that I should get involved in the Linux kernel project. A friend actually suggested it last week, and my reaction was an instant, wordless sense of deflation - uffff, wow, "no way." Why? I didn't really investigate the feeling at the time, but it occurs to me now that I simply don't want to deal with a lot of hostile, critical "are you good enough" attitude, and that's what I expect I would get if I went and bothered those people.
Who knows what might have happened in an alternate universe where the kernel community were more welcoming; perhaps there would have been other reasons not to participate - but it's easy for me to believe that you're right, and there are lots of people who might have something to offer who are just quietly getting on with their lives and not even considering it.
That's all well and good. But none of it explains why the author says the current changes taking place in the Linux project reinforce her decision not to participate in Linux.
How does a code of conduct and a hiatus for the guy who was cursing at people reinforce the decision to stay away? The only way that makes sense is if she weren't previously aware of any of the documented cases of Linus' abusive behavior, and that seems quite unlikely given she was already using her own "shadow ecosystem" years ago.
But none of it explains why the author says the current changes taking place in the Linux project reinforce her decision not to participate in Linux.
I can't speak for the author, so I can't explain that to you.
What I can tell you is that virtue signaling is vastly more common than people actually doing the right thing and nasty behavior frequently gets a great deal worse during periods when people are very visibly and openly trying to publicly address the problem in some manner.
My observation is that a common outcome is the metaphorical guillotines come out, people on their high horses behead all the bad guys, pronounce themselves to now be the good guys in charge and then business as usual follows.
So, for example, if the issue is sexism, terrible evil asshole sexist pigs take the fall to be promptly replaced by more men, not a mixed gender group of leaders, and you hear a lot of smack talk about more women being in the pipeline and someday this will result in gender parity while nothing really changes. But you should be nice to the new men in charge since they beheaded the bad guys and, clearly, in twenty years this will pay off for women.
If the issue is racism, well, clearly, racist white supremacist assholes get removed and are promptly replaced by new white people who will obviously treat people of color better -- someday, but probably not today, but you should believe they are the good guys. After all, they were so kind as to behead your enemies.
Etc.
If you are part of an "oppressed" group, you eventually get burned out on watching all the white guys fight over which white guys are less evil while no one actually does much of anything to genuinely include women, people of color, etc. And you don't really care to get in the middle of this mess knowing that none of these people actually has your best interest at heart and every last one of them will be happy to trample you underfoot in service of convincing virtue signaling.
Some of the most vicious fights are the ones about how to be respectful and well-mannered. Those frequently get ugly real, real fast and only go down hill from there.
> What I can tell you is that virtue signaling is vastly more common than people actually doing the right thing
You absolutely nailed it right here IMO.
Codes of conduct nowadays I feel are hijacked and reshaped into the vendetta persecutions you described.
Could Linus be nicer? Everybody keeps talking about that. I almost never see anyone assume that he tried being nicer but the only way he could get through to people was to draw their attention with being rude.
1 reply →
This post is not virtue signaling, come on
I believe you are misinterpreting her post. I believe she's trying to communicate that the eruption of toxic behavior in response to the addition of a code of conduct reinforces her decision to stay away, not the code itself.
It also makes sense if you view codes of conduct as inherently toxic and a sign of a hostile community, and don't view Linus's cursing as particularly out of line. After all, Linus tended to chew people out for what they did or what they made, not what they were.
Not everyone views having a CoC as a good thing. If they did, this whole set of drama wouldn't be a thing in the first place...
>How does a code of conduct and a hiatus for the guy who was cursing at people reinforce the decision to stay away? The only way that makes sense is if she weren't previously aware of any of the documented cases of Linus' abusive behavior, and that seems quite unlikely given she was already using her own "shadow ecosystem" years ago.
I did not read it that way. I read it more of calling out both sides as being toxic. And I do not think she was speaking specifically about Linux, but the whole dialogue these days about codes of conduct. She's indicting both the pro and anti crowds.
But in reality, all of us (including me) are projecting. She simply doesn't spell out what she's talking about.
> why would I waste my time submitting my patch and dealing with a toxic community?
when I could be wasting that time writing blog posts for venting resentment towards communities I don't want to be a part of in the first place?
There are plenty of projects whose communities don't gel with me. The solution is not to participate, not poo-poo them online, explaining how everything would be better if they just did it your way.
>This can become a self-reinforcing cycle where only assholes can be heard, resulting in design-by-asshole rather than design based on technical merit. Assholes
Why are you labeling everyone who doesn't want to deal with you on your specific terms?
> "don't attack people personally and don't belittle, harass or intimidate other contributors". Or perhaps in simpler terms: "act like a professional".
Those are not "simpler terms". One is a basic guideline, the other sounds like "Everybody should act like the corporate environment I'm used to working in".
>when I could be wasting that time writing blog posts for venting resentment towards communities I don't want to be a part of in the first place?
>There are plenty of projects whose communities don't gel with me. The solution is not to participate, not poo-poo them online, explaining how everything would be better if they just did it your way.
I honestly don't see how your posting this comment on HN is any different from her posting it on her blog.
> What am I supposed to gain from that interaction,
You do gain from the recognition though. Your code can steer the project's future and set new standards for example. It gives you active influence, which is power, and recognition as a bonus course. That might explain why a lot of people do put up with shit.
If your goal is just to get your job done and call it a day, you probably don't care about that kind of recognition.
A lot of people seem to think that having a large "open source resume" is a large component of success in getting software jobs, but that really isn't the case.
> get your job done and call it a day, you probably don't care about that kind of recognition
Then i don't get what the article is about. "I don't care for what i don't want" is a passive aggressive drivel.