Comment by lovich

3 years ago

I’ve never participated in an open source community so this is the view of an ignorant third party. Everytime I see anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.

It seems utterly exhausting to be involved

13 comments

lovich

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munificent  3 years ago

> Everytime I see anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.

This is entirely explained by survivorship bias. The matural social interactions which are the bread and butter of open source never bubble up to your purview because they aren't dramatic and interesting.

  • TillE  3 years ago

    This is such a key insight into understanding the world in general. What you see vs what's actually going on overall are two completely different things.

  • ianbutler  3 years ago

    I wish those mature normal dynamics got more spotlight, not just in OSS but the general world. All the air is taken up by drama like this.

capableweb  3 years ago

Every larger community (or even medium sized ones) have friction around collaboration, as they are efforts to reach a common goal but not always is the way of achieving those goals agreed upon by everyone (or sometimes, not even the goal is common).

The only difference between open source community and private ones is that the discussion ("the social drama") tends to be done out in the open for everyone to see in the open source ones, while in the private ones it happens behind closed doors or between individuals behind peoples back.

ensignavenger  3 years ago

Thats because disputes tend to get a lot more attention than things that work well.

For example, it seems you never saw any of the news about how the Python community calmly and carefully discussed what they were going to do to move forward after Guido resigned as BDFL?

nequo  3 years ago

Disputes are not unique to open source projects. But they usually have no hierarchies and no contracts. So disputes are settled this way.

mariusor  3 years ago

> anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.

That's because open source washes its dirty laundry in public. The same things happen behind closed doors in companies all the time, it's called office politics, and yes, it is exhausting.

sjcoles  3 years ago

> Everytime I see anything related to the open source world bubble up into the public I am only reminded of high school and college level social drama.

This is engineering/technical communities in general. You get a lot of strong opinions and individuals who cannot take criticism. A few, often very loud, people make a ton of noise and take up the time of the individuals actually contributing real substance to the project.

Don't like it? Fork it. Simple as that. Same with all the code of conduct nonsense that crops up a couple times a year.

If your opinions are so popular forking and moving contributors to a new project should be easy right? Yeah, turns out your opinions aren't shared by most and only the loudest of the group, no one else really cares.