When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be.
If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxyz.
It doesn't help the conversation - which is one that the community needs to have.
I'm having a very hard time thinking of any positive social change that happened without individuals being called out. Take dueling. The Church preached against it for hundreds of years. Right-thinking people decided it was a bad idea. The government outlawed it. But everybody was afraid that if they didn't challenge people who insulted them to a duel others would think that they were cowardly, so they kept doing it.
But then people like Duke Wellington started getting publicly mocked in the papers for engaging in duels and the practice died out almost immediately.
So, talking about how people in general ought to be nicer won't actually change how people behave. Calling out githubuserxyz for being an ass, though, will make people afraid of being mocked like githubuserxyz and so actually change their behavior.
Seriously, there's an excellent book called The Honor Code about how these things happen historically that I would recommend.
Poignant. But I think it applies less here. For every guy who isn't out there berating the noobs there's multiple noobs engaging with the community. I'm happy to shut them up at that price.
Who was it that said, "I will tolerate anything but intolerance"?
I feel strongly about this because I was traumatized by interacting with Ullrich Drepper at an impressionable age :)
This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years.
> This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years.
If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life.
> If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life.
You're wrong. Generalizing from your personal experience and from verifiable facts while paying little attention to vague whining and anonymous accusations (of unnamed alleged perpetrators, no less!) is an excellent way to approach life.
>When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out.
Has it ever occurred to you that many people strongly dislike it when others attempt to change their legal, nonviolent behavior? It's nosy, condescending, self-righteous, and creepy.
What about my reply is contrary to "how the real world works"? I'm fairly confident that if this article had a link to tangible occurrences two things will occur in "the real world": 1) readers will react to those particular incidents 2) the author of the article will be called a hypocrite
The point is, moral authority doesn't help at all in changing the behavior of people who aren't on your side already. It's very important with leadership and group cohesion, so not opening yourself up to calls of being a hypocrite is something the leader of an open source project should consider when dealing with jerks in their project. But it isn't particularly useful in effecting change from the outside.
>When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? //
The point is here that it's assumed that the people making the pull request are attempting to make an honest contribution and the response they're getting is "look at what this jerk is doing".
I don't think it's possible to give real life examples without making it possible to find the people involved. Clearly the author isn't wanting to publicly chastise particular leaders; nor would they it seems want to draw attention to particular code that wasn't adopted and led to [over-harsh] dismissal of the contributor's effort.
The author is coming from a point of view that I don't know if anyone else in the OSS world holds, and that the Internet doesn't seem to agree with. Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole.
This guy currently contributes to several OS projects http://mutedsolutions.com/about, https://github.com/derickbailey and has apparently been a developer for over 30 years in a range of environments. Whilst I don't find it impossible to imagine that he's made up the problem it seems doubtful on balance - what would he gain?
He says he's fallen in to the trap himself of making fun of others [apparently] honest contributions.
Yes, that's not an argument but this
>Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole. //
is fallacious reasoning. It is not the case that failure to present examples of pathological behaviour means that behaviour is a fiction.
If your position is true and indeed he is literally the only person to believe that sometimes OSS leaders have made fun of the code of other [attempted] contributors then it's interesting to speculate why that might be so.
One possibility of course is that those who deny it's a problem simply can't see it despite it being there.
Also, if we can accept him to be a "leader" then we now know at least one person that he's being critical of ...
If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.