5 ms·

The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autist

matthewpersico 6y ago
*THIS** If ever a collection of words thrown together has outpunched its weight, it is this! Brilliant! And I will be using it often, with reference to thrower123 on ycombinator. Just. Ducking. Brilliant.
anarazel 6y ago
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Hard-to-work-with individual have been a problem in open source projects for a long time. What I think is changing is less the personalities of new contributors and more that [sub]projects controlled/significantly influenced by such personalities are getting harder and harder to route around. It's feasible to fork a project / create an alternative if that's single-digit person-year/year of effort. There's plenty historical examples of that. If however maintaining / creating an alternative would take very significant resources, it's only going to happen if some large corporation foots the bill. Which has its own problems.
btilly 6y ago
The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. I don't think it worked as well in the good old days as you think. A lot of Perl's problems can be attributed to one of those old men, Tom Christensen. He combined technical brilliance with a flair for flaming, and was at the center of why p5p (perl 5 porters) became a hostile flame-fest. With the result that the 5.6.x series was a complete disaster. And the problems were so bad that as http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-perl-6 http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-p... describes, in 2000 Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal) brought attention to it by smashing mugs against a wall. The current spat is much less dramatic than that one was. You just know about it because it is current. People claim that Perl's problems began with Perl 6. But in fact Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. Like Tom Christensen. (Who Larry Wall also told to calm down.) And ideas from Perl 6 also made their way back to Perl 5 in various ways. Yes, it became a branding problem. But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly.
- lizmat 6y ago
  What btilly said!
- tp69 6y ago
  "Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. ... But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly." Care to expand on this a little, or suggest an external resource where it has already been elaborated upon?
- b2gills 6y ago
  I saw a bit of that when someone on P5P mentioned that perltoot (Tom's object-oriented tutorial for perl) didn't exist anymore. His argument for keeping it was simple. https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/msg186423.html https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/m... Wanna bet? :) It came across to me as being abrasive, and a bit dismissive. It didn't help that his photo showed up next to it in my email.
bsder 6y ago
> It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. It didn't work well, but it worked, sorta--until it didn't (see: jwz and xemacs). The difference wasn't the maintainers--the difference was the users. The "users" have gotten exponentially more numerous and steadily less competent. (I have an argument that so have the maintainers, but that's less easily argued while the drop in competence of users is horrifyingly easy to quantify.) A lot of complaints on the old newsgroups were met with "Send a patch or shut the fuck up". Generally followed by: "Alright, here's your damn patch, asshole. Now fix it." This moves things along in spite of the general hostility and roughly scales. But it requires that the users are somewhat on the level of the programming capability of the maintainer. It also doesn't help in the modern world that if you are a maintainer, you are expected to be some infinite well of endless tact instead of being able to tell some dipshit with teenage social skills: "Look, I don't give one ounce of flying fuck about you and your opinion and you can fuck right off to whatever primordial ooze you just crawled out from. You are killfiled." Then you get the Twitterverse whining at you even if you aren't on Twitter. AOL created "Eternal September." Twitter managed to one down that and created "Eternal High School." So, who's got dibs on "Eternal Middle School"? Twitch, maybe? In general, while I happily released stuff as open source in the past, I wouldn't dream of releasing anything now even if you put me under duress. If I release something as open source now, I have to perceive the benefit to ME as being very high.
- b2gills 6y ago
  "Eternal Middle School" is obviously TikTok

matthewpersico 6y ago

*THIS** If ever a collection of words thrown together has outpunched its weight, it is this! Brilliant! And I will be using it often, with reference to thrower123 on ycombinator. Just. Ducking. Brilliant.

anarazel 6y ago

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Hard-to-work-with individual have been a problem in open source projects for a long time. What I think is changing is less the personalities of new contributors and more that [sub]projects controlled/significantly influenced by such personalities are getting harder and harder to route around. It's feasible to fork a project / create an alternative if that's single-digit person-year/year of effort. There's plenty historical examples of that. If however maintaining / creating an alternative would take very significant resources, it's only going to happen if some large corporation foots the bill. Which has its own problems.

btilly 6y ago

The old FOSS model is not compatible with the kind of people who are being drawn into it these days. It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. I don't think it worked as well in the good old days as you think. A lot of Perl's problems can be attributed to one of those old men, Tom Christensen. He combined technical brilliance with a flair for flaming, and was at the center of why p5p (perl 5 porters) became a hostile flame-fest. With the result that the 5.6.x series was a complete disaster. And the problems were so bad that as http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-perl-6 http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-p... describes, in 2000 Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal) brought attention to it by smashing mugs against a wall. The current spat is much less dramatic than that one was. You just know about it because it is current. People claim that Perl's problems began with Perl 6. But in fact Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. Like Tom Christensen. (Who Larry Wall also told to calm down.) And ideas from Perl 6 also made their way back to Perl 5 in various ways. Yes, it became a branding problem. But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly.

lizmat 6y ago
What btilly said!
tp69 6y ago
"Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. ... But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly." Care to expand on this a little, or suggest an external resource where it has already been elaborated upon?
b2gills 6y ago
I saw a bit of that when someone on P5P mentioned that perltoot (Tom's object-oriented tutorial for perl) didn't exist anymore. His argument for keeping it was simple. https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/msg186423.html https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/m... Wanna bet? :) It came across to me as being abrasive, and a bit dismissive. It didn't help that his photo showed up next to it in my email.

bsder 6y ago

> It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody. It didn't work well, but it worked, sorta--until it didn't (see: jwz and xemacs). The difference wasn't the maintainers--the difference was the users. The "users" have gotten exponentially more numerous and steadily less competent. (I have an argument that so have the maintainers, but that's less easily argued while the drop in competence of users is horrifyingly easy to quantify.) A lot of complaints on the old newsgroups were met with "Send a patch or shut the fuck up". Generally followed by: "Alright, here's your damn patch, asshole. Now fix it." This moves things along in spite of the general hostility and roughly scales. But it requires that the users are somewhat on the level of the programming capability of the maintainer. It also doesn't help in the modern world that if you are a maintainer, you are expected to be some infinite well of endless tact instead of being able to tell some dipshit with teenage social skills: "Look, I don't give one ounce of flying fuck about you and your opinion and you can fuck right off to whatever primordial ooze you just crawled out from. You are killfiled." Then you get the Twitterverse whining at you even if you aren't on Twitter. AOL created "Eternal September." Twitter managed to one down that and created "Eternal High School." So, who's got dibs on "Eternal Middle School"? Twitch, maybe? In general, while I happily released stuff as open source in the past, I wouldn't dream of releasing anything now even if you put me under duress. If I release something as open source now, I have to perceive the benefit to ME as being very high.

b2gills 6y ago
"Eternal Middle School" is obviously TikTok