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Counterexample: Linux, GCC, Python, and practically the entire free software ecosystem from before the current crazy for hall-monitory-y supervision from above.

Counterexample: Linux, GCC, Python, and practically the entire free software ecosystem from before the current crazy for hall-monitory-y supervision from above. It is simply demonstrably, factually, clearly not true that a growing community needs the kind of structures that Rust imposed on itself. It really makes me sad that a certain kind of person these days sees some kind of censorious overlord as essential for the formation of healthy communities. > There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious" A disaffected and loud minority says things like that, and the rest of the world goes right on ignoring them. Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque.

couchand 5y ago
Perhaps no user avoided it (though that seems unlikely), but can't you imagine why some contributors may have avoided it? Wouldn't that lack of potential contributions be a material loss for the project?
- quotemstr 5y ago
  Who's to say that more contributors are turned off by Rust-style behavioral micromanagement? It's impossible to prove counterfactuals. All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.
  - couchand 5y ago
    If your greatest concern is some technical artifact and not the human beings in the community around you, kindly go touch grass.
    - quotemstr 5y ago
      It is more important to produce great works than it is to adhere to the behavioral strictures of internet activists. 100 years from now, people will recognize the name "Linux Torvalds". Who will remember the tone police? Linux is a major accomplishment and a boon for all humanity. All I see the hall monitors accomplishing is the production of drama.
      - couchand 5y ago
        These "internet activists" you spend so much effort maligning are simply reminding you that there is a human being on the other side of that screen. I'm not inside the Linux developers' world, but from the outside it seems like a much healthier, more vibrant place since Linus realized that he works with human beings.
        FeepingCreature 5y ago
        > These "internet activists" you spend so much effort maligning are simply reminding you that there is a human being on the other side of that screen. Actually, primarily they're reminding me that there's a human being on the other side of the screen watching everything I do in case I fuck up. How this is supposed to make anyone want to participate is a mystery to me. edit: The weird thing to me is that these people are so hyper-vigilant to the damage bad behavior can do, and utterly blind to the idea that their own behavior can also be damaging. If I ever read a sentence like "we know that overmoderation and tone-policing can create toxic communities, and we're watching out for that" from a moderation team, I will know that this is a community that I can trust to be administered in an even-handed and fair manner. So far I have seen this once.
        canaus 5y ago
        What is a "fuck up" to you?
        FeepingCreature 5y ago
        Well, the question is rather- what is a "fuck up" to them? And to that- who knows? Certainly the point of a CoC is supposed to be to codify this, but I believe experience shows that its interpretation tends to be expansive, when the wording is not already expansive to begin with. At the end of the day, events like Curtis Yarvin, a person who has never harmed a fly, almost getting banned from Lambdaconf over "safety" concerns, demonstrate that the fuck-up may just be having a political difference of opinion with the group in question. (Analogously, and I say this as somebody who would vote Dems every time if they lived in the US, a moderation team that included at least one Trump voter would also assuage such concerns. Consider it a commitment to diversity.) edit: To be clear, I am not asking for anything resembling quotas; just any demonstration of the ability of the team to coexist with a person they have serious ideological disagreements with.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      The purpose and greatest concern of a development team is and should be the development of a technical artifact.
  - maxk42 5y ago
    I do wonder whether there's not some implicit benefit to this kind of management. Is it possible that by dissuading all but the most confident committers the project's contribution team self-selected for stronger devs? That would probably be bad for small OSS projects and good for kernels.
mbesto 5y ago
Linux and Python (not aware of GCC) effectively have BDFLs that can just nix anything (hence the "dictator" in BDFL). So these aren't just really comparable.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  And they absolutely turn people off. The thing is, as long as it doesn't turn everyone off, it allows the project to move forward, because even with burned bridges, it leaves ownership clear. Communal decision making, however, does not have that advantage. If both sides of an issue, so to speak, become turned off of one another, you are more likely to have an abandoned project. There are, of course, other advantages (you don't miss generally accepted "good ideas" because of the particular vision of one person, and you can apply community standards to everyone, rather than having to weigh "continued participation in this project that is important to you" vs "dealing with -that- asshole again"), but that is definitely one con.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Yes, which is why Rust has been such a failure.
jcranmer 5y ago
> Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque. Actually, the best example of a project where the leadership of the project was so toxic as to drive away potential contributors would probably be glibc under Ulrich Drepper, which got so bad that most distributions abandoned glibc for the eglibc fork. (See https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ for a high-level discussion).
- quotemstr 5y ago
  Drepper was an asshole and people eventually routed around him, yes. The system worked. What people forget, too, is that Drepper's problem wasn't just an obnoxious personal style, but a ridiculous level of technical conservativism that led to critical bugs remaining unfixed for years. It was the latter problem that eventually prompted people to fork glibc, not the former.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  I mean, I think ReiserFS deserves an honorary mention.
- worik 5y ago
  NetBSD -> OpenBSD I know very little about NetBSD and am a great fan of OpenBSD. But Theo is a very horrible person who often attacks people in a personal way for disagreeing with him. I got into a stupid argument with him over fundraising - a subject where I have deep experience - and it was quite bizarre. He had a set of assumptions and disagreeing with them got abuse from him, and some of his minions on the OpenBSD-Misc list, and (I was astonished) abuse in my INBOX from throw away accounts. What an arsewipe!
  - dralley 5y ago
    And FreeBSD -> DragonflyBSD. Same story.
Shoue 5y ago
Linux with Linus, who famously had to change his abusive tone? GCC with Richard Stallman, accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct? Python, which felt it necessary to impose a CoC eventually? Your counter examples are questionable at best.
- azth 5y ago
  He changed his tone, he wasn't "cancelled" as how it is a fad to do today. There are no "cocs" for a very long time now. It's only after pandering to the SJW's that are unfortunately causing harm to everything they touch.
- teddyh 5y ago
  If “accused” is the worst you could come up with, maybe you shouldn’t spread random accusations so wildly. Anyway, regarding Richard Stallman and those accusations of “various kinds of sexual misconduct”: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/
  - Shoue 5y ago
    What random accusations am I "spreading so wildly"? The fact that Stallman is being accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct is a fact. I did not anywhere claim they were true. I'm pointing it out because it makes the points above stand on shakier ground. The article you shared also fails to defend many of the accusations against Stallman and completely ignores them, for example the "Emacs virgin girl" situation.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      Technically, what you did was to insinuate, not directly accuse. Which one is worse? Since you seem to have a great interest in this, do have any concrete reference to the “Emacs virgin” situation? I have only a vague recollection that Stallman was referring to anyone who had not used Emacs yet as an “Emacs virgin”, and some people took it as meaning some kind of sex thing. (Any other references to the “many of the accusations against Stallman” that wasn’t referenced in the linked article would also be interesting to see.)
dralley 5y ago
...I think many people would disagree with you about Linux. And perhaps GCC as well.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yeah it's comical because Linux has so obviously driven a lot of people away from kernel development. Tech is male-skewed, and OSS more so, but Linux kernel dev is even then still at the far end of the gender disparity spectrum.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    Are you aware of how many people have been driven away from Rust because of their community? I've never seen people talking about avoiding Linux even 1/10th as much as they talk about avoiding Rust. It's entirely due to the culture; developers don't like a culture in which a programming language needs a multi-member moderation team (who resigns because they can't punish people 100% of the time).
  - throwaway2077 5y ago
    >gender sex - sure, but gender? we got plenty of females in OSS!
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      More so in Rust than in many other communities was my perception. Far more trans women per capita in that community than Linux kernel dev. Still a general underrep of women. e: Oh I see - your comment wasn't in good faith at all.
      - throwaway2077 5y ago
        >More so in Rust than in many other communities was my perception not just yours :)
  - emptycan 5y ago
claytonjy 5y ago
One of the biggest contributors to R's success over the past decade is folks having negative experiences with the Python community, particularly folks who are women, non-white, or come from non-CS background. The R community (and RStudio in particular) has worked hard to be much more inclusive and you can see this clearly reflected in the diversity of users and package authors.

couchand 5y ago

Perhaps no user avoided it (though that seems unlikely), but can't you imagine why some contributors may have avoided it? Wouldn't that lack of potential contributions be a material loss for the project?

quotemstr 5y ago
Who's to say that more contributors are turned off by Rust-style behavioral micromanagement? It's impossible to prove counterfactuals. All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.
- couchand 5y ago
  If your greatest concern is some technical artifact and not the human beings in the community around you, kindly go touch grass.
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    It is more important to produce great works than it is to adhere to the behavioral strictures of internet activists. 100 years from now, people will recognize the name "Linux Torvalds". Who will remember the tone police? Linux is a major accomplishment and a boon for all humanity. All I see the hall monitors accomplishing is the production of drama.
    - couchand 5y ago
      These "internet activists" you spend so much effort maligning are simply reminding you that there is a human being on the other side of that screen. I'm not inside the Linux developers' world, but from the outside it seems like a much healthier, more vibrant place since Linus realized that he works with human beings.
      - FeepingCreature 5y ago
        > These "internet activists" you spend so much effort maligning are simply reminding you that there is a human being on the other side of that screen. Actually, primarily they're reminding me that there's a human being on the other side of the screen watching everything I do in case I fuck up. How this is supposed to make anyone want to participate is a mystery to me. edit: The weird thing to me is that these people are so hyper-vigilant to the damage bad behavior can do, and utterly blind to the idea that their own behavior can also be damaging. If I ever read a sentence like "we know that overmoderation and tone-policing can create toxic communities, and we're watching out for that" from a moderation team, I will know that this is a community that I can trust to be administered in an even-handed and fair manner. So far I have seen this once.
        canaus 5y ago
        What is a "fuck up" to you?
        FeepingCreature 5y ago
        Well, the question is rather- what is a "fuck up" to them? And to that- who knows? Certainly the point of a CoC is supposed to be to codify this, but I believe experience shows that its interpretation tends to be expansive, when the wording is not already expansive to begin with. At the end of the day, events like Curtis Yarvin, a person who has never harmed a fly, almost getting banned from Lambdaconf over "safety" concerns, demonstrate that the fuck-up may just be having a political difference of opinion with the group in question. (Analogously, and I say this as somebody who would vote Dems every time if they lived in the US, a moderation team that included at least one Trump voter would also assuage such concerns. Consider it a commitment to diversity.) edit: To be clear, I am not asking for anything resembling quotas; just any demonstration of the ability of the team to coexist with a person they have serious ideological disagreements with.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    The purpose and greatest concern of a development team is and should be the development of a technical artifact.
- maxk42 5y ago
  I do wonder whether there's not some implicit benefit to this kind of management. Is it possible that by dissuading all but the most confident committers the project's contribution team self-selected for stronger devs? That would probably be bad for small OSS projects and good for kernels.

mbesto 5y ago

Linux and Python (not aware of GCC) effectively have BDFLs that can just nix anything (hence the "dictator" in BDFL). So these aren't just really comparable.

lostcolony 5y ago
And they absolutely turn people off. The thing is, as long as it doesn't turn everyone off, it allows the project to move forward, because even with burned bridges, it leaves ownership clear. Communal decision making, however, does not have that advantage. If both sides of an issue, so to speak, become turned off of one another, you are more likely to have an abandoned project. There are, of course, other advantages (you don't miss generally accepted "good ideas" because of the particular vision of one person, and you can apply community standards to everyone, rather than having to weigh "continued participation in this project that is important to you" vs "dealing with -that- asshole again"), but that is definitely one con.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yes, which is why Rust has been such a failure.

jcranmer 5y ago

> Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque. Actually, the best example of a project where the leadership of the project was so toxic as to drive away potential contributors would probably be glibc under Ulrich Drepper, which got so bad that most distributions abandoned glibc for the eglibc fork. (See https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ for a high-level discussion).

quotemstr 5y ago
Drepper was an asshole and people eventually routed around him, yes. The system worked. What people forget, too, is that Drepper's problem wasn't just an obnoxious personal style, but a ridiculous level of technical conservativism that led to critical bugs remaining unfixed for years. It was the latter problem that eventually prompted people to fork glibc, not the former.
rsynnott 5y ago
I mean, I think ReiserFS deserves an honorary mention.
worik 5y ago
NetBSD -> OpenBSD I know very little about NetBSD and am a great fan of OpenBSD. But Theo is a very horrible person who often attacks people in a personal way for disagreeing with him. I got into a stupid argument with him over fundraising - a subject where I have deep experience - and it was quite bizarre. He had a set of assumptions and disagreeing with them got abuse from him, and some of his minions on the OpenBSD-Misc list, and (I was astonished) abuse in my INBOX from throw away accounts. What an arsewipe!
- dralley 5y ago
  And FreeBSD -> DragonflyBSD. Same story.

Shoue 5y ago

Linux with Linus, who famously had to change his abusive tone? GCC with Richard Stallman, accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct? Python, which felt it necessary to impose a CoC eventually? Your counter examples are questionable at best.

azth 5y ago
He changed his tone, he wasn't "cancelled" as how it is a fad to do today. There are no "cocs" for a very long time now. It's only after pandering to the SJW's that are unfortunately causing harm to everything they touch.
teddyh 5y ago
If “accused” is the worst you could come up with, maybe you shouldn’t spread random accusations so wildly. Anyway, regarding Richard Stallman and those accusations of “various kinds of sexual misconduct”: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/
- Shoue 5y ago
  What random accusations am I "spreading so wildly"? The fact that Stallman is being accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct is a fact. I did not anywhere claim they were true. I'm pointing it out because it makes the points above stand on shakier ground. The article you shared also fails to defend many of the accusations against Stallman and completely ignores them, for example the "Emacs virgin girl" situation.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    Technically, what you did was to insinuate, not directly accuse. Which one is worse? Since you seem to have a great interest in this, do have any concrete reference to the “Emacs virgin” situation? I have only a vague recollection that Stallman was referring to anyone who had not used Emacs yet as an “Emacs virgin”, and some people took it as meaning some kind of sex thing. (Any other references to the “many of the accusations against Stallman” that wasn’t referenced in the linked article would also be interesting to see.)

dralley 5y ago

...I think many people would disagree with you about Linux. And perhaps GCC as well.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Yeah it's comical because Linux has so obviously driven a lot of people away from kernel development. Tech is male-skewed, and OSS more so, but Linux kernel dev is even then still at the far end of the gender disparity spectrum.
- blindmute 5y ago
  Are you aware of how many people have been driven away from Rust because of their community? I've never seen people talking about avoiding Linux even 1/10th as much as they talk about avoiding Rust. It's entirely due to the culture; developers don't like a culture in which a programming language needs a multi-member moderation team (who resigns because they can't punish people 100% of the time).
- throwaway2077 5y ago
  >gender sex - sure, but gender? we got plenty of females in OSS!
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    More so in Rust than in many other communities was my perception. Far more trans women per capita in that community than Linux kernel dev. Still a general underrep of women. e: Oh I see - your comment wasn't in good faith at all.
    - throwaway2077 5y ago
      >More so in Rust than in many other communities was my perception not just yours :)
- emptycan 5y ago

claytonjy 5y ago

One of the biggest contributors to R's success over the past decade is folks having negative experiences with the Python community, particularly folks who are women, non-white, or come from non-CS background. The R community (and RStudio in particular) has worked hard to be much more inclusive and you can see this clearly reflected in the diversity of users and package authors.