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Comment by mcherm

7 years ago

Well that sucks.

I mean she is WELCOME to keep her contributions to private repos shared only among trusted friends if that's how she wants to work. But it's not for me. I want the work that I do to be shared as widely as possible. (I would share more widely if my employer permitted it.) That is why I choose permissive licenses, and make an effort to contribute patches back to the original source.

Yes, sometimes the communities are toxic. When I see that I speak up. Yes, sometimes my code contributions are used by people I don't much like or used for purposes I don't support. But far MORE often they are used by people I don't know, who I would certainly find to be perfectly nice folks if I ever DID meet them, but individual connections don't scale.

So Rachel is welcome to her insular community -- but I'm going to stick to the open one. I'd rather fix the flaws it has than hope to get a better one by foregoing the openness.

How long did it take Linus to realize his behavior was toxic? How many times was he told?

That's a lot of work to fix a project for almost no benefit to yourself.

Life is too short to deal with [people who aren't nice].