
Dealing With (Not Dealing With) the Open Source Assholes - tswicegood
http://harthur.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/dealing-with-not-dealing-with-the-open-source-assholes/
======
neilk
And yet many projects reach the same equilibrium. Some of the biggest jerks
are also the best contributors. And then you can't throw them out without
making the project quality suffer.

Is being a jerk strongly correlated with skill of any kind?

Or are the jerky-but-competent driving away some nice-but-competent people?

Is jerkiness strongly correlated with being motivated to contribute to open
source? Perhaps for these people, their lack of social skills means their
career is somewhat stunted.

Is there something about bad behavior, exhibited by a skilled or high-status
person, that is more infective of community values than good behavior? Thus
the former tend to dominate, as everybody else adopts the asshole attitude?
I've seen this in at least two OSS communities.

~~~
tswicegood
1) I think an aggressive personality is common in many successful---not the
correct word, but it'll do---people. Look at any "team" sport where one player
tends to take the spotlight. With the Tour de France on, I can't help but
recall all of the prima donnas of Tours gone by. Actually, it's so rare to
have a down-to-earth, genuinely thoughtful and nice person rise to the top in
that sport that it's always called out when it happens.

2) I think being a jerk online and lack of in-person social skills aren't
correlated. For whatever reason, when it's a computer screen in front of you,
people tend to be more aggressive about their point of view. Unchecked, that
can turn into "jerkiness," but I don't think it's a one to one. Don't get me
wrong, I know plenty of people who are jerks online and the same offline. I
also know plenty of people who are jerks online and the kind of person you
hope passes you on the highway when you've got a flat or run out of gas---it's
a given they're stopping and helping in any way they can.

3) I'm a little disturbed by the implication that a stunted career is what
motivates people to contribute to open-source software, but I assume it wasn't
meant quite that way. This illustrates an interesting point. Given that I
don't know the context of where your fourth paragraph is coming from, I'm
assuming the best and that you didn't mean it as I took it during my first
reading.

That type of small misunderstanding could have resulted in me (or someone
else) firing off a quick response calling you out on it, or even less
hostilely taking issue with it and trying to rebute it. That in turn could
have made you feel more defensive, so your next post might have been
preemptively aggressive, and so on. This quickly deteriorates into a cycle
where we're making each other more aggressive without meaning to and give rise
to this mentality.

Subtly is lost online. It's ashamed, but the way it seems to be.

All that said, I do think those who the community looks up to are the ones
that set the tone, for sure. I can point to many a project mailing list that
have been rendered useless because some of the biggest (or perceived,
historically, or actual) contributors take it over with their overly curt
style of responses. :-/

------
josephb
You could re-word the second sentence to:

"There’s something about open forums that encourages socially-inept jerks to
deride people."

I'm into photography, I see the same behaviour on photography forums and
mailing lists that you see on the open source lists and forums.

The three bullet points in the article can apply to just about any hobby,
group activity etc.

1\. Go to the right meetups. 2\. Follow the right people. 3\. Don’t let anyone
cramp your style.

To these I would add, spend your time enjoying what you do.

Go take photos, go code some software, go build your app, instead of
"listening" to the ranters :-) Be happy.

------
listic
Greater Unified Fuckwad Theory suggests assholes are universal:
<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/>

------
kragen
Stuff like this makes me think of Ignaz Semmelweis:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_Semmelweis)

Many of his contemporary obstetricians heard his criticisms of their
practices, including his accusations that current obstetric practices amounted
to mass murder, said, "seriously, I don’t need to hear that crap," ignored
him, and went on murdering their patients by the hundreds of thousands for
decades. Carl Levy published a paper on how Semmelweis's theory of infection
was implausible. Semmelweis died in an asylum.

When you're _giving_ criticism, it is of course of paramount importance to
deliver it in a polite fashion, because most people will disregard the second
sentence of this paragraph, and you don't want to be Semmelweis. When you're
_receiving_ criticism, it is of paramount importance to entirely ignore
whether it is polite or not, because most people will disregard the first
sentence of this paragraph, and you don't want to be Levy.

But if you had to be one or the other, it would be _much_ better to be
Semmelweis the jerk than Levy the defender of incompetence.

------
mhd
_"Jumping into the open source and js world"_

I have a slight suspicion that the problem might be the latter part. The whole
web frontend world is balkanized as hell, pretty young and mostly not too
demanding. This is often reflected in the community and leads to some heated
(and often rather silly) arguments…

------
click170
Glad to see someone who wasn't put off by the unfriendliness that is sometimes
encountered when first entering the world of FOSS.

------
MostAwesomeDude
Whenever I see posts like this, I have to ask the question: How can code be
improved if nobody criticizes it? I can sense the ableist vibe of this blog
post, but in general, the ability to say, frankly, that somebody's code is bad
is _essential_ for teaching that person how to write good code. I've seen far
too many students get away with writing horrible code simply because there
isn't a TA on the planet willing to directly point out what's wrong with their
algorithms or logic.

In other disciplines, like music (something in which I have quite a bit of
experience), criticism is essential. The best teachers I ever had were the
ones who were unafraid to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong. One class
was taught in a group setting, and the instructor told us at the beginning of
class that he usually made people feel uncomfortable, and that thick skins
would be required. He had a habit of pointing out what you were doing wrong in
the middle of class, not for humiliation, but so that the entire class could
learn from example. Best class I've ever taken in that department.

~~~
fedd
> The best teachers I ever had were the ones who were unafraid to tell me
> exactly what I was doing wrong.

doesn't contradict with

> But as soon as someone says a software project is “retarded”, unfollow them.

anyway, the teacher should first earn the right to teach. if maradona tells me
i am retarded at football, i'll listen. if a random jerk tells that, i'm gonna
ask why and say go to hell if i dont like the answer

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
My issue wasn't with the "retarded" line, actually; I was more concerned by
this:

"If someone says something negative about your project in an unreasonable way,
don’t take it to heart. There’s something good in every project (it’s open
source, it already has one thing going for it), no single project is complete
crap, keep the good things and learn from the criticism.

All this boils down to basically 'surround yourself with good people.'"

This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable"
is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about
their code. There _is_ code which is complete crap and serves only as a
warning to others to pay heed, lest they write code just as bad. (Feel free to
consider that hyperbolic and point out that "complete" and "serves only as"
are contradictory.)

It's fine to surround yourself with "good people," who I presume are people
that are Good-aligned, but that's never going to reveal systemic weaknesses or
flaws in your code; you're just going to end up as another group of people
that relies on black hats to point out where your code was flawed.

In other words, this entire post feels like thinly veiled positive thinking in
excess. See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo> for a much better
summary of the problem.

~~~
billswift
>This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable"
is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about
their code.

Indeed, in my experience the very best producers are those who are toughest on
themselves. No one is ever likely to be as insulting to me as I am to myself
when I catch a mistake. Which is part of the reason for what neilk wrote
above: " _Some of the biggest jerks are also the best contributors._ " Because
they are tough on themselves and their own work and are less willing to help
others lie to themselves about what they have produced.

