
Abusing Contributors is not OK - luu
http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/01/abuse-is-not-ok.html
======
wyager
There's a _huge_ difference between abusing people and refusing to coddle
them, and I'm not sure this article reflects that very well.

"unless I help create environments where all participants are willing to speak
up" is an example of actively trying to appeal to a group of people, not an
example of not abusing people. It might be a worthy goal, but let's not use
words like "abuse" so lightly.

> abuse newcomers for still being in the process of learning

Project maintainers have a finite amount of available time, and dealing with
inexperienced people who are wasting your time, even if they have perfectly
good intentions, is simply not practical. To pick on Linus, since he's
mentioned in this article, he has _no choice_ except to be an asshole to
people who try to add shitty stuff to Linux, because if he didn't scare those
people off, he would waste all his time politely turning them away and never
get anything done.

I have a few projects I've done over the years that have evidently reached a
fair number of people, and I have to ignore probably 90% of the emails and
github interactions I receive from people because the requests are often very
stupid and unproductive. I can't imagine how bad it must be for a huge project
like Linux.

And then, towards the beginning and end of the article, the author gets into
stuff like encouraging diversity (not sure what they mean by that) and going
to feminist workshops. Maybe that's a good idea for some people, who knows,
but not really wanting to spend your time on stuff like that _does not_ mean
you are "abusing" contributors in some way. It's a dishonest and dirty
rhetorical trick to try to conflate "extensive personal abuse" and failing to
sufficiently immerse oneself in the political culture advocated in the
article.

Ironically, one of the things that scares me the most about interacting with
the open source community is people like this, who demand that you invest time
and resources into whatever "inclusive" political ideology they're trying to
sell you, or else you're actively harming (abusing!) other people in the
community. They try to subvert otherwise productive communities, making
politically motivated and technically useless pull requests (e.g.
[https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185](https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185))
or institute political rules called things like "codes of conduct" that allow
them to exclude people that _don 't_ agree with whatever they're advocating
under the banner of inclusivity.

