7 ms·

useless without pointer to the actual behavior.

• steele 14y ago
  Anonymous examples would help make the point, but outright pointers to the behavior described is not a not too distant cousin of "hah check out this jerk"
  • debacle 14y ago
    When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? If people are acting like assholes, they deserved to be called out.
    • steele 14y ago
      Singling out individuals/incidents would support the author's epistemic authority but would undermine their moral authority on the topic
      • debacle 14y ago
        That's not how the real world works.
        • steele 14y ago
          What about my reply is contrary to "how the real world works"? I'm fairly confident that if this article had a link to tangible occurrences two things will occur in "the real world": 1) readers will react to those particular incidents 2) the author of the article will be called a hypocrite
          • Symmetry 14y ago
            The point is, moral authority doesn't help at all in changing the behavior of people who aren't on your side already. It's very important with leadership and group cohesion, so not opening yourself up to calls of being a hypocrite is something the leader of an open source project should consider when dealing with jerks in their project. But it isn't particularly useful in effecting change from the outside.
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      >When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? // The point is here that it's assumed that the people making the pull request are attempting to make an honest contribution and the response they're getting is "look at what this jerk is doing". I don't think it's possible to give real life examples without making it possible to find the people involved. Clearly the author isn't wanting to publicly chastise particular leaders; nor would they it seems want to draw attention to particular code that wasn't adopted and led to [over-harsh] dismissal of the contributor's effort.
      • debacle 14y ago
        The author is coming from a point of view that I don't know if anyone else in the OSS world holds, and that the Internet doesn't seem to agree with. Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole.
        • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
          What's your background Debacle? This guy currently contributes to several OS projects http://mutedsolutions.com/about http://mutedsolutions.com/about, https://github.com/derickbailey https://github.com/derickbailey and has apparently been a developer for over 30 years in a range of environments. Whilst I don't find it impossible to imagine that he's made up the problem it seems doubtful on balance - what would he gain? He says he's fallen in to the trap himself of making fun of others [apparently] honest contributions. Yes, that's not an argument but this >Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole. // is fallacious reasoning. It is not the case that failure to present examples of pathological behaviour means that behaviour is a fiction. If your position is true and indeed he is literally the only person to believe that sometimes OSS leaders have made fun of the code of other [attempted] contributors then it's interesting to speculate why that might be so. One possibility of course is that those who deny it's a problem simply can't see it despite it being there. Also, if we can accept him to be a "leader" then we now know at least one person that he's being critical of ...
    • potatolicious 14y ago
      When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be. If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxyz. It doesn't help the conversation - which is one that the community needs to have.
      • debacle 14y ago
        This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years.
        • msbarnett 14y ago
          > This doesn't seem like an activity that's rampant in the community in any fashion. I personally only recall it happening once, ever, and I've been a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years. If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life. Maybe you've just been lucky.
          • debacle 14y ago
            This is something that one person has said happens, with no evidence, that many other people with equal credentials have said doesn't happen. Without evidence, it's just talk.
          • boboblong 14y ago
            > If a lot of other people are talking about the negative consequences of something you personally haven't experienced, generalizing outwards from your own experiences to conclude that something a lot of other people have experienced doesn't exist is a pretty wrongheaded way to approach life. You're wrong. Generalizing from your personal experience and from verifiable facts while paying little attention to vague whining and anonymous accusations (of unnamed alleged perpetrators, no less!) is an excellent way to approach life.
    • kevinh 14y ago
      When Internet witch hunts started ruining the lives of people because they made one bad decision.