6 ms·

Richard Mlynarik is a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation. And sometimes he has a sharp tongue which in context can be both enjoyable and terrifying.

by jerrya 15y ago

Richard Mlynarik is a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation. And sometimes he has a sharp tongue which in context can be both enjoyable and terrifying. But here's the important part for entrepreneurs: what percentage of users of mozilla products or any product bother to submit bug reports? What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. I am always amazed at the projects and companies that hold their users in contempt and get upset when bug reports or forum messages express a user's frustration. What they should be doing is sincerely expressing their thanks that the user would give them any message at all, and not just switch to a competitor, or just badmouth them to their friends. I see nothing in this bug report that deserves banning, and it is certainly Mozilla's loss and their user's loss that they would ban Mlynarik instead of listening to him. And to make matters worse, he's absolutely correct here too.

MrUnknown 15y ago
He was being a complete idiot in his bug report. The moderator stated that he has been warned many times before. He completely deserved to be banned after being warned that his actions will result in being banned. Sure, he is submitting bug reports, but his childish behavior shouldn't have to be tolerated because of this.
- vijaydev 15y ago
  We don't know the earlier instances where he was warned. IMHO, this particular bug report doesn't seem to be out of line with the rules here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    But you could look if you wanted to. How about when he called Thunderbird developers simians and said he wanted to cut off their hands so they couldn't program any more? Is that out of line enough for you? What about saying "screw you" and calling developers children. I consider all of that out of line. He was being a bully and he got banned for it. Good on Dan Mosedale. Bullies suck and we shouldn't let them pollute our communities with their abuse.
    - vijaydev 15y ago
      Yes, I saw one in a link posted above. Definitely out of line. No second thoughts on that. If the ban had happened in reply to one such post, it would have been unquestioned by many.
      - asadotzler 15y ago
        Yeah, unfortunately for everyone he was only warned on the worst of the interactions and given a second chance. Sometimes a ban on the first offense is better. Still, a ban after a failure to heed a warning seems completely reasonable. Heck, a re-evaluation of the original interaction with the knowledge of how he behaved after the warning would have worked too. But again, the important thing isn't where the ban happened, it's that the project rejected a bully.
        chittis 15y ago
        The important thing is exactly when and why the ban happened. As others have pointed out, his latest bug report that got him banned was hugely better than his older bug report filled with personal insults that got him a warning. This shows that he took the warning seriously enough to stop the personal attacks. Banning him now makes me think the developers of Thunderbird are ego maniacs.
- gojomo 15y ago
  If this report is representative, I don't think a thousand similar reports would deserve a ban. There's some exasperation, some sarcasm, some foot-stomping while expressing strong opinions. But there's no profanity or insults. The strongest negative word used is 'stupid', and it's applied to a question in the UI, not any person. The details and rationale for considering the software's behavior an interaction faux pas are strong. It's hard to even see which part of 'Bugzilla Etiquette' this report violates: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html If other reports are worse, that's another matter. But if so, it seems odd this relatively mild report would be the final trigger that brings down the banhammer. (If there's a reliable pattern of abuse, just wait for the next non-mild incident.)
  - sid0 15y ago
    No, if there's a track record of obscene bug reports, then the person involved shouldn't be given even the slightest bit of slack. edit: if I were dmose, I'd have banned him a year ago for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2.
    - gojomo 15y ago
      If they need to punish obscene reports, punish for those, specifically. When they happen. Don't punish a mild, non-obscene report some other time. edit for your edit: Thanks for finding an earlier clearer example. That comment was unnecessarily personal and abusive. It deserved reprimand or censure. And if the reprimand(s) are responsible for the less-personal tone of the 2011-06-30 comment, compared to the 2010-07-21 comment, they're working to increase the signal-to-emotional-noise ratio. But the controversy of a hard ban for a lesser transgression now introduces new emotional noise.
      - sid0 15y ago
        While we might disagree on the exact mechanics, I think we can agree that any open-source community would be better without such people.
bdfh42 15y ago
Correct - it was a great bug report. Without the expression of frustration then the nature of the bug would not have been clear. Reports like this from my customers would be brilliant.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  Would you like your customers saying "screw you" and "I want to cut off your hands so you can't program any more"? I wouldn't.
  - Deestan 15y ago
    Of course not, but the one time they are acceptably civil isn't the time to bring out the ban hammer.
    - asadotzler 15y ago
      When they continue to be abusive after a warning it doesn't really matter where mechanically the actual trigger was pulled. It was the right call. It was a late call, in my opinion. I'd have banned him at the "cut off his hands" comment with no warning and now recourse. But again, late or not, it was the right call. No project should have to tolerate bullies. They are toxic to the project and they should be excised as soon as possible.
  - soulinafishbowl 15y ago
    Absolutely! His was the pefect bug report. A chef cooks for his patrons, and a performer pleases his audience, just as a programmer codes for the user. With his report you have a passionately described, no holds barred look into what you are causing the user to feel when using the software. Don't let it hurt your feelings, just take it on the chin and recognize that in trying to make something better, you have inadvertently forgotten the primary objective: user experience. Oftentimes bug reports like this may just be a rant without relevant technical details, but the wonderful thing about this report, is that he gives you the best of both worlds: You have extremely insightful user experience along with the relevant technical details on how to address the issue. Be grateful, and wish more reports exactly like this.
ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
It took Mozilla 10 years to get Sunbird to version 1.0, not to mention how long it took them to iron out Thunderbird's "imperfections". As for FireFox, if it weren't for the extensions and the "open source" sticker no one would care about FireFox. They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. And I am..er... WAS a hard core FireFox user (switched to chrome a year ago) and still am a heavy Thunderbird user. Mozilla needs to haul ass.
- gjm11 15y ago
  > They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. Only if each Richard Mlynarik they have increases the quality of the product. Do you have any reason to think it does? This particular Richard Mlynarik wasn't writing code for Firefox or Thunderbird (which is too bad because i hear he's an excellent hacker). He was submitting bug reports, most of them allegedly duplicates, full of inflammatory language. If you believe that bug reports filled with inflammatory language make a project work better than bug reports without it, then do please present your evidence for that. My own guess is that being rude to people may be effective in getting them to pay attention in the short term to your needs or wants rather than someone else's, but that it doesn't do anything to improve their overall productivity and may well make it worse by reducing their motivation.
  - ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
    I've had complete strangers on the the street tell me to my face that I was ugly. That's life. Oh well. Rude-ass Bug reports are better than no bug reports. Emotion 101: When people are pissed they curse. I agree with you, it would be beneficial for them not to but they do. I have a feeling a lot of the people who don't tolerate his language have never worked in customer service or with the public. Emotion happens, a LOT, learn to ignore it. Don't want to deal with it? Write a greasemonkey script that changes all the language you don't like into encouraging statements. All the programmers I know are very logical, stable people and it seems as a whole they're not used to erratic emotional behavior that people in customer service are used to seeing.
shii 15y ago
Richard Mlynarik is one of the developers for XEmacs and has contributed to coreutils in GNU. open up your terminal and type in man whoami.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  And that gives him the right to be a bully? To say he'd like to cut off a Thunderbird developers hands so he can't program any more? To call developers simians? Nothing gives anyone the right to come into Mozilla's Bugzilla and behave like that.
  - rothron 15y ago
    Simians include all old world monkeys and apes, including humans. While you might interpret it as being an insult, and it may have been meant as such, it is factually correct.
maranas 15y ago
Agreed. Any bug report from a user is valuable - the fact that he was frustrated enough to report it means that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  That's not strictly true. If you've already got a report of the issue from other more helpful users, then someone coming in and calling you names and threatening to physically harm you, that isn't necessarily adding value. We're very fortunate at Mozilla to have tens of thousands of but reporters who aren't bullies and who don't think because they wrote some GNU code once that they can threaten you and deride you. This means that the cost of kicking out the bullies is either trivial, or a net win.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  Almost everyone files a bug report in frustration because you're filing an issue about something that doesn't work the way you think it should. But most people are considerably more civil about it. I really don't like to play the "free" card. Too often developers say "well, it's open source so fix it or stop complaining." I don't think that's right at all . . . especially if you've advocated people use your software. However, having been involved with a lot of OSS projects, I can say that the bugs that get fixed the fastest are the ones that affect the developers themselves. Anything that gets fixed above and beyond that is a developer being a nice person in volunteering his time to help someone else. More to the point: it's hard to get people to work for free when they're demoralized and bug reports like this are demoralizing. If I were involved with the project, he's about the absolute last person I'd try to please no matter how right he may be. So, while I'm neutral on the ban, the bug reporter has to realize this is a very ineffective way to win friends and get his issues resolved.
asadotzler 15y ago
I am amazed at projects that allow toxic people to disrupt and mistreat other project members. I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility. Not having to listen to "a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation" say he'd like to cut off your hands so you can't code any more is absolutely not a loss to the project. It's a proper and right kind of excision to remove toxic bullies like that no matter how correct was the substance of their report. (And as it turns out, the overwhelming majority of his reports were duplicates of existing reports, so it's not even a loss of the actual bug reports, just the nasty name calling and abusive and threatening behavior. I call that a win for the project.)
- jerrya 15y ago
  " I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility." I actually said nothing like this, did I? What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate. For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more. I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are. But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
  - nsomaru 15y ago
    There is a decided difference between emotion and reason. Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report. A bug report should factually describe a problem and the steps a dev can take to reproduce them. Your frustration is a symptom of your own unmet expectations. The problem with _any_ expectation is that (being constant) it is bound to be unmet, eventually, given that the world is in a state of continuous change. So you can either lose your cool, or understand that this is the nature of the world, adapt and move on. The title of this post has "click bait" plastered all over it, and that single post takes the whole thing out of context. I'm sorry I fell for it. Google _all_ his bug reports and understand in the context.
Confusion 15y ago
What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. Unfortunately, no matter how awesome he is for investing his time and no matter how useful his bug reports are, his bug reports are also so offensive, unconstructive and discouraging that it's deemed better for the community to ban him. I can understand and support that decision, although I may have chosen otherwise.
grandinj 15y ago
No, if he was really "investing his time", he'd be producing good, well-written bug reports, and, since he's such an awesome hacker, writing patches. Instead, he vents his frustrations on bugzilla and generally acts like an ass.
kahawe 15y ago
So because allegedly he is some "rock star", he should be allowed to violate their etiquette repeatedly?

by jerrya 15y ago

MrUnknown 15y ago

He was being a complete idiot in his bug report. The moderator stated that he has been warned many times before. He completely deserved to be banned after being warned that his actions will result in being banned. Sure, he is submitting bug reports, but his childish behavior shouldn't have to be tolerated because of this.

vijaydev 15y ago
We don't know the earlier instances where he was warned. IMHO, this particular bug report doesn't seem to be out of line with the rules here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
- asadotzler 15y ago
  But you could look if you wanted to. How about when he called Thunderbird developers simians and said he wanted to cut off their hands so they couldn't program any more? Is that out of line enough for you? What about saying "screw you" and calling developers children. I consider all of that out of line. He was being a bully and he got banned for it. Good on Dan Mosedale. Bullies suck and we shouldn't let them pollute our communities with their abuse.
  - vijaydev 15y ago
    Yes, I saw one in a link posted above. Definitely out of line. No second thoughts on that. If the ban had happened in reply to one such post, it would have been unquestioned by many.
    - asadotzler 15y ago
      Yeah, unfortunately for everyone he was only warned on the worst of the interactions and given a second chance. Sometimes a ban on the first offense is better. Still, a ban after a failure to heed a warning seems completely reasonable. Heck, a re-evaluation of the original interaction with the knowledge of how he behaved after the warning would have worked too. But again, the important thing isn't where the ban happened, it's that the project rejected a bully.
      - chittis 15y ago
        The important thing is exactly when and why the ban happened. As others have pointed out, his latest bug report that got him banned was hugely better than his older bug report filled with personal insults that got him a warning. This shows that he took the warning seriously enough to stop the personal attacks. Banning him now makes me think the developers of Thunderbird are ego maniacs.
gojomo 15y ago
If this report is representative, I don't think a thousand similar reports would deserve a ban. There's some exasperation, some sarcasm, some foot-stomping while expressing strong opinions. But there's no profanity or insults. The strongest negative word used is 'stupid', and it's applied to a question in the UI, not any person. The details and rationale for considering the software's behavior an interaction faux pas are strong. It's hard to even see which part of 'Bugzilla Etiquette' this report violates: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html If other reports are worse, that's another matter. But if so, it seems odd this relatively mild report would be the final trigger that brings down the banhammer. (If there's a reliable pattern of abuse, just wait for the next non-mild incident.)
- sid0 15y ago
  No, if there's a track record of obscene bug reports, then the person involved shouldn't be given even the slightest bit of slack. edit: if I were dmose, I'd have banned him a year ago for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    If they need to punish obscene reports, punish for those, specifically. When they happen. Don't punish a mild, non-obscene report some other time. edit for your edit: Thanks for finding an earlier clearer example. That comment was unnecessarily personal and abusive. It deserved reprimand or censure. And if the reprimand(s) are responsible for the less-personal tone of the 2011-06-30 comment, compared to the 2010-07-21 comment, they're working to increase the signal-to-emotional-noise ratio. But the controversy of a hard ban for a lesser transgression now introduces new emotional noise.
    - sid0 15y ago
      While we might disagree on the exact mechanics, I think we can agree that any open-source community would be better without such people.

bdfh42 15y ago

Correct - it was a great bug report. Without the expression of frustration then the nature of the bug would not have been clear. Reports like this from my customers would be brilliant.

asadotzler 15y ago
Would you like your customers saying "screw you" and "I want to cut off your hands so you can't program any more"? I wouldn't.
- Deestan 15y ago
  Of course not, but the one time they are acceptably civil isn't the time to bring out the ban hammer.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    When they continue to be abusive after a warning it doesn't really matter where mechanically the actual trigger was pulled. It was the right call. It was a late call, in my opinion. I'd have banned him at the "cut off his hands" comment with no warning and now recourse. But again, late or not, it was the right call. No project should have to tolerate bullies. They are toxic to the project and they should be excised as soon as possible.
- soulinafishbowl 15y ago
  Absolutely! His was the pefect bug report. A chef cooks for his patrons, and a performer pleases his audience, just as a programmer codes for the user. With his report you have a passionately described, no holds barred look into what you are causing the user to feel when using the software. Don't let it hurt your feelings, just take it on the chin and recognize that in trying to make something better, you have inadvertently forgotten the primary objective: user experience. Oftentimes bug reports like this may just be a rant without relevant technical details, but the wonderful thing about this report, is that he gives you the best of both worlds: You have extremely insightful user experience along with the relevant technical details on how to address the issue. Be grateful, and wish more reports exactly like this.

ChrisNorstrom 15y ago

It took Mozilla 10 years to get Sunbird to version 1.0, not to mention how long it took them to iron out Thunderbird's "imperfections". As for FireFox, if it weren't for the extensions and the "open source" sticker no one would care about FireFox. They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. And I am..er... WAS a hard core FireFox user (switched to chrome a year ago) and still am a heavy Thunderbird user. Mozilla needs to haul ass.

gjm11 15y ago
> They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. Only if each Richard Mlynarik they have increases the quality of the product. Do you have any reason to think it does? This particular Richard Mlynarik wasn't writing code for Firefox or Thunderbird (which is too bad because i hear he's an excellent hacker). He was submitting bug reports, most of them allegedly duplicates, full of inflammatory language. If you believe that bug reports filled with inflammatory language make a project work better than bug reports without it, then do please present your evidence for that. My own guess is that being rude to people may be effective in getting them to pay attention in the short term to your needs or wants rather than someone else's, but that it doesn't do anything to improve their overall productivity and may well make it worse by reducing their motivation.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
  I've had complete strangers on the the street tell me to my face that I was ugly. That's life. Oh well. Rude-ass Bug reports are better than no bug reports. Emotion 101: When people are pissed they curse. I agree with you, it would be beneficial for them not to but they do. I have a feeling a lot of the people who don't tolerate his language have never worked in customer service or with the public. Emotion happens, a LOT, learn to ignore it. Don't want to deal with it? Write a greasemonkey script that changes all the language you don't like into encouraging statements. All the programmers I know are very logical, stable people and it seems as a whole they're not used to erratic emotional behavior that people in customer service are used to seeing.

shii 15y ago

Richard Mlynarik is one of the developers for XEmacs and has contributed to coreutils in GNU. open up your terminal and type in man whoami.

asadotzler 15y ago
And that gives him the right to be a bully? To say he'd like to cut off a Thunderbird developers hands so he can't program any more? To call developers simians? Nothing gives anyone the right to come into Mozilla's Bugzilla and behave like that.
- rothron 15y ago
  Simians include all old world monkeys and apes, including humans. While you might interpret it as being an insult, and it may have been meant as such, it is factually correct.

maranas 15y ago

Agreed. Any bug report from a user is valuable - the fact that he was frustrated enough to report it means that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

asadotzler 15y ago
That's not strictly true. If you've already got a report of the issue from other more helpful users, then someone coming in and calling you names and threatening to physically harm you, that isn't necessarily adding value. We're very fortunate at Mozilla to have tens of thousands of but reporters who aren't bullies and who don't think because they wrote some GNU code once that they can threaten you and deride you. This means that the cost of kicking out the bullies is either trivial, or a net win.
nirvdrum 15y ago
Almost everyone files a bug report in frustration because you're filing an issue about something that doesn't work the way you think it should. But most people are considerably more civil about it. I really don't like to play the "free" card. Too often developers say "well, it's open source so fix it or stop complaining." I don't think that's right at all . . . especially if you've advocated people use your software. However, having been involved with a lot of OSS projects, I can say that the bugs that get fixed the fastest are the ones that affect the developers themselves. Anything that gets fixed above and beyond that is a developer being a nice person in volunteering his time to help someone else. More to the point: it's hard to get people to work for free when they're demoralized and bug reports like this are demoralizing. If I were involved with the project, he's about the absolute last person I'd try to please no matter how right he may be. So, while I'm neutral on the ban, the bug reporter has to realize this is a very ineffective way to win friends and get his issues resolved.

asadotzler 15y ago

I am amazed at projects that allow toxic people to disrupt and mistreat other project members. I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility. Not having to listen to "a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation" say he'd like to cut off your hands so you can't code any more is absolutely not a loss to the project. It's a proper and right kind of excision to remove toxic bullies like that no matter how correct was the substance of their report. (And as it turns out, the overwhelming majority of his reports were duplicates of existing reports, so it's not even a loss of the actual bug reports, just the nasty name calling and abusive and threatening behavior. I call that a win for the project.)

jerrya 15y ago
" I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility." I actually said nothing like this, did I? What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate. For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more. I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are. But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
- nsomaru 15y ago
  There is a decided difference between emotion and reason. Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report. A bug report should factually describe a problem and the steps a dev can take to reproduce them. Your frustration is a symptom of your own unmet expectations. The problem with _any_ expectation is that (being constant) it is bound to be unmet, eventually, given that the world is in a state of continuous change. So you can either lose your cool, or understand that this is the nature of the world, adapt and move on. The title of this post has "click bait" plastered all over it, and that single post takes the whole thing out of context. I'm sorry I fell for it. Google _all_ his bug reports and understand in the context.

Confusion 15y ago

What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. Unfortunately, no matter how awesome he is for investing his time and no matter how useful his bug reports are, his bug reports are also so offensive, unconstructive and discouraging that it's deemed better for the community to ban him. I can understand and support that decision, although I may have chosen otherwise.

grandinj 15y ago

No, if he was really "investing his time", he'd be producing good, well-written bug reports, and, since he's such an awesome hacker, writing patches. Instead, he vents his frustrations on bugzilla and generally acts like an ass.

kahawe 15y ago

So because allegedly he is some "rock star", he should be allowed to violate their etiquette repeatedly?