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I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especial

I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don't agree with. I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of "registered" modules on cpan imo ) The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source stuff to the world. Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face. I am referencing names of individuals so that people can lookup these events and see the truth in what I'm saying; NOT to shame these people. They are all good developers, and I value their contributions ( don't necessarily like these people but what does that matter ). There should be respect in the community regardless of whether you like or dislike people's projects.

netrus 12y ago
Don't you think adding your real-name would be a nice move when you choose to give names of people you disagree with?
- deleted 12y ago
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  - andyl 12y ago
    Is this you? http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he-hacked-university-of-maryland-contractor-turned-hacker-tells-all/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he...
    - binarysolo 12y ago
      If it is, thanks for being a high-integrity individual.
      - nanoscopic 12y ago
        Thank you. Unfortunately the FBI and Secret Service have a different opinion, and so the FBI is still holding onto $5000 of my gear. For myself, I can't say I would try to "do the right thing" again, because it simply isn't in my best interest to try to get people to listen to what is reasonable.
mike_hearn 12y ago
The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor. It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy to get into a downward spiral where behaviour gets more and more extreme as people try to make their opinions stand out amongst the crowd. What's worse, the fact that this scares off contributors is hard to spot, because you by definition cannot easily measure contributions that would have happened but didn't because of a community problem. If you look at non-technical forums like Facebook, newspaper comment sections etc there's usually some form of moderation that imposes house rules like "be civil". This sort of thing can clean up individual forums but the wider problem remains: some people are just nasty and they often believe they can influence the development of their favourite project by being sufficiently nasty to developers they disagree with. If they can't do that in the project's own forums they'll do it elsewhere. The Bitcoin community has pretty severe problems with this too, it's not just a Linux thing.
- _delirium 12y ago
  They're smaller communities, but I've been on a few developer lists that are fairly strict about the dev list being only for developers. That doesn't solve the "dev who's a jerk" problem, but it does raise the barrier to entry by excluding people who want to only argue and not develop: if you subscribe and immediately start arguing, without having contributed anything, you get booted.
- kazinator 12y ago
  You cannot moderate mailing lists because they are not centralized. When you hit "reply all" in a mailing list, the replies go directly to everyone who is on the To: or Cc: list. The list robot is just one of those parties. And of course, private replies are possible that the list robot doesn't even see. Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken. About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent web archive. [Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century, and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can be configured.]
qwerta 12y ago
I find it (mo/i)ronic that you reference people with full name "XYZ attacked me", only for verification of course, but you forgot to include your own name.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  He named the GitHub repo which has his name in big bold letters: https://github.com/nanoscopic https://github.com/nanoscopic
  - qwerta 12y ago
    Still not cool. Proper way is to reference commits and bugs. Just imagine someone Google your name and first link is to this comment: XY attacked me....
    - nanoscopic 12y ago
      Go ahead and Google my name. You'll find that it is mostly just attacks on my character related to an incident with UMD and the FBI. Unfortunately people don't reference facts; news ( and people in general ) just believe what they want. Once again, my point in referencing these people is to say that negative attitudes and attacks are widespread, and happens by many professional ( the people I mentioned ). I don't blame them; it is a hard community; I'd just like us all to have better attitudes.
      - qwerta 12y ago
        But I do not care that some guy refused to approve your name or whatever. I do care, that you are shaming people you do not like on public forum. It is pretty much same behavior as Linus and other a*holes in OS community. Congrats on top comment BTW.
        nanoscopic 12y ago
        I'd like to point out that I have a lot of respect for the developers I named; my point is that we should all play nicely, not that I wish for these people to be shamed. People get hurt. I was hurt. I'm not attacking; I am saying it still hurts to be treated that way by members of the community, and that I agree with the notion that you need to have a thick skin. It shouldn't be this way; the entire open source community should strive to improve the world together, not fight about which project is better. Notice above comment from mst ( Matt S Trout ). I appreciate him saying sorry and it actually means a lot to me. I have even more respect for those who recognize when their actions have been misunderstood and hurt people. He didn't need to apologize, but it helps the community and I wish more developers were willing to see that there are many different opinions and we need to respect them all.
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- Someone1234 12y ago
  I'm confused, did he force you or anyone else to utilise his "crap?" If it is "crap" why are you using it? And what's more why are you UPSET that you're voluntarily using his contributions? What you just said literally makes zero sense to me... Also he hasn't (according to him nor Wikipedia) contributed to the Linux kernel, yet you moved kernels to avoid his "crap." Makes zero sense. The Linux kernel isn't one of his projects.
  - deleted 12y ago
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    - Someone1234 12y ago
      So isn't your beef really with the distro's which aren't fulfilling your needs? Maybe you should start your own branch with Systemd specifically excluded. That is how many currently popular distro's because popular (mostly relating to different windowing systems, etc but still). You could also move to Gentoo Linux which doesn't (and has no plans) to utilise Systemd as the default. Last point; systemd is so "crap" that every single distro' is moving to it? Either they have VERY low standards or there is more to this story than that.
      - deleted 12y ago
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        freehunter 12y ago
        Well it's a good thing you switched to Unix then, because Linux is not Unix.
        peatmoss 12y ago
        This comment needs a disclaimer that I think it's possible to be opposed to the use of systemd, and not be flamey about it. And I don't mean to suggest that you're the flamey sort of systemd opposer. That out of the way, I really hope that the FreeBSD community is not inundated with the flamey kind of systemd refugee.
sii 12y ago
> Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face. Really? My contributions to the open source world are certainly modest, but I get thank you emails perhaps once a month for applications I've released. People are quite pleasant.
- nanoscopic 12y ago
  Yes, for many years I intentionally did not release more open source due to only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you. Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more. The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the distributed discs ). Several people benchmarked it and said it was amazingly fast. I'm pretty sure it is used by a fair amount of people, but since it is mainly distributed through CPAN I have no idea who really uses it or how many. I think this is the case for what I wrote because it is a component. People in general I think appreciate tools much more than components, especially if the component is one of many somewhat inter-compatible other options. There is little love for "another thing added to the pile" even if it is different in fundamental ways.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you // I wonder if in part this is due to solicitation - you [by which I mean 'one', a person, not specifically you] have a "support" forum for problems, you have a note asking for contacts with bugs but generally OSS projects don't have a "comment with thanks" or a tip jar or whatever. Guestbooks used to be the way people could offer a quick comment of thanks. But as you say this is more likely to work for frontend user-facing projects. Stars on github or similar will show at least that people appreciate your work if they've not explicitly thanked you.
- audunw 12y ago
  Are these end-user applications? I suspect developers can tend to be less grateful than end-users, and this guy was writing an XML parser. I've also had people thank me for a FOSS app, but that was also a consumer application. The fact that it was open-source was actually incidental though, I don't think anyone have actually forked or looked at the code. If they did, maybe I'd have gotten some hate mail ;)
vph 12y ago
I failed to understand this line of criticism. Open Source is a software development model. It's not a model of society and does not guarantee to consists of only well-mannered people. There are ugly, difficult people everywhere, not just in Open Source projects.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Open source is a software development model. It is also a community. If you bill yourself as a "movement", you're building a community around yourself, like the open source movement. "Gamer" is a hobby, but it can also refer to a community that is much, much different from the broad spectrum of people who just play video games.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    Most of us did not bill ourselves as a movement though. Some money grubbing people did back in the .com bubble days. I did not make the OSI. I am not part of any movement. I write software I want, and give the source away freely for others to use if they find it useful. That's it.
- mcantor 12y ago
  Genuine question: Did you read the article? I feel like the author's main point is that there seems to be a higher abundance of toxic interactions in Open Source than other communities.
  - DSMan195276 12y ago
    > Genuine question: Did you read the article? I feel like the author's main point is that there seems to be a higher abundance of toxic interactions in Open Source than other communities. I'm not the same person you responded to, but regardless I'd argue that there probably isn't much more toxic interactions in open-source then there is in any other communities. People tend to fight and get angry over stuff they care about, that happens everywhere. The thing with open-source is that all of those communications are open, and thus it's much easier to see. The thing is though, how many times do you think anybody on here has actually looked at the Linux Kernel mailing list for a reason other then a post on here about Linus getting angry? I'd wager not many. Everybody loves to see a good fight, but it's rare to see someone being helpful and nice highlighted. I've only seen one post on HN highlighting Linus being nice and helpful, even though that's the bulk of the posts he makes, and I see one every time he gets angry. For example, looking at some ones he sent yesterday, I'm seeing this (https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/96 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/96), this (https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/112 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/112), and this (https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/107 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/107), all of which are generally nice and well mannered questions, and explanations of things people may need to do differently. I don't think the Open Source community is nearly as toxic as people make it out to be.
vph 12y ago
I failed to understand this line of criticism. Open Source is a software development model. It's not a model of society and does not guarantee to consists of only well-mannered people. There are ugly, difficult people everywhere, not just in Open Source projects.
deleted 12y ago
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Alupis 12y ago
You make a lot of good points, but I take issue with: > me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge Sometimes this is a perspective thing. It's not always a bug just because some user reports it as a bug in their opinion. Don't know the story behind that anecdote, but perhaps you didn't understand the codebase like you thought you did, or what the expected behavior should of been? In any regard, if the project maintainer does not consider it a bug and won't accept a PR, then that is their prerogative. You are [usually] free to fork the codebase and fix it yourself if you had a PR that wasn't accepted. With closed source, that isn't even a remote possibility.
- nanoscopic 12y ago
  The specific bug was in the Varnish reverse proxy. It had to do with the non-functionality of the ESI ( Edge Side Includes ) "support". I really like Varnish and was making great use of it, and was happy to learn it supported ESI. I thought that if you change the contents of an ESI file, and then invalidate that file in Varnish, that Varnish would know the files that include it and invalidate them as well. Nope. Varnish seemingly has no recognition of ESI in regard to invalidation and simply includes the contents of the file, in effect treating them like regular SSI ( server side includes ). I reported this behavior properly, and I was told that I don't know what I am talking about and there was no problem. The bug I filed was then closed without the issue being fixed or addressed in any way. I can and will make a competing reverse proxy; because ESI is important IMO, and disregarding supporting it properly is silly. I think Varnish is great; I'm happy it exists; I think it is silly to close a reported bug on the codebase without addressing it properly. The proper address to it is to simply say "No we don't really support ESI", just as I have said "No my parser is not really an 'XML' parser, because it doesn't really follow the spec."
  - Alupis 12y ago
    Just to parlay - This page has not been edited in over 3 years and says Varnish does not have full ESI support: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ESIfeatures https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ESIfeatures Perhaps you missed it, or perhaps this anecdote took place prior to this page's posting. In either case, seems it was a misunderstanding - which goes back to my first comment about a reported bug is not always a real bug just because one (or a few) users believe it to be.
lazyant 12y ago
thanks for contributing your code
jgh 12y ago
I find in my project people are generally quite helpful and thankful. I can't say I've received much criticism for sharing a project with the world.
robomartin 12y ago
Lord of the Flies. Regrettably, human interaction, in the context of the achievement or retention of power, can devolve into scenarios of violence that range from verbal and psychological to the unthinkable. Open Source is obviously not immune to this.
knz42 12y ago
After doing some research on "I also got attacked by PHK" I did some research and found this: - you sent 2 e-mails to the Varnish-misc mailing list in Feb 2011 about the ESI-related bug you found (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-February/019931.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2... https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-February/019942.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), which then remained unanswered - but then you also tried to "help" another user in an unrelated thread "Lots of config" in March 2011 (starting here, https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-March/020127.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), and PHK had a knee-jerk reaction (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-March/020159.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...) to one of your "suggestions", a reaction that was indeed a bit vitriolic, but when read in the context of your other contributions to that thread, it makes a little bit of sense.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Why are you putting help and suggestions in quotes? What's wrong with a jump table? There's no excuse for the language in that post.
feld 12y ago
I would love to hear some details. When I've see PHK get vicious he's always been right. He's been in this game years longer than most and perhaps he's tired of defending the right way nicely.
- nanoscopic 12y ago
  I wasn't exactly polite when he attacked me. I responded in turn because it was absurd and silly to me to be threatened. To know anything about me is to know that threatening me is a joke; I'm not afraid. To this day I'm unclear why he didn't understand the problem with ESI include files being invalidated not forcing the main including file out of the cache as well. ( in Varnish ) I think he was just in a bad mood and didn't have the time nor care to understand what I was pointing out at the time. He was pretty mean though, and refused to play nicely to the bitter end of that particular argument. Just google "Lots of Configs" if you want to read the whole silly debate. Here is what I want: A cache where it supports ESI... File A ESI includes file B. Both A and B are in the cache. If I forcibly tell the cache to invalidate file B, I expect that file A will automatically be invalidated as well, since the cache should know that file B was included into file A. Varnish does not do this. That was my statement to PHK, but apparently he doesn't want to hear it and somehow things this is an unreasonable request.
  - feld 12y ago
    Couldn't you accomplish this with a vmod?
grantmnz 12y ago
I am disappointed to learn that you feel I have attacked you in the past. I apologise unreservedly for any offence I caused you. I always try to be civil and professional in my interactions and to be mindful of the difficulty of conveying the intended tone over an electronic medium. If I have voiced some criticism of your code it is certainly not because I wished to belittle your efforts or to make any value judgements about your worth as a person.
- nanoscopic 12y ago
  Thank you for expressing this. It helps me to be able to move past it. I have always thought you were angry at my contributions to the community. You will note that I applaud the simplicity of your module, and even went so far as to create a SAX streaming version of my parser that works together with XML::Simple so that those who wish to stick with your interface can do so. I didn't maintain it much, but can do so if there is any real interest in it. I named you simply because you are the first person to state that my XML parser is "invalid", despite my having worked very hard to ensure that it does parse XML meaningfully. I do acknowledge freely that I am disregarding the specs to some extent for the sake of raw speed. You will see that I have altered the documentation to make this clear so there is no confusion. For myself, with your apology I consider that extremely adequate to address the past. I don't really remember clearly, but I know that it was a very rough entry into the open source world to have my parser attacked ( considering it is the first meaningful thing I contributed to the community ) I would like to point out that communication and understanding between members of the community is exactly what I am asking for. I thank you for stepping out and attempting to resolve this. There is no way I would ever know that you felt this way without you expressing it, and unless I did I would have lived forever thinking you have bad feelings towards myself and the code I have created. For all the people who imply that I was attacking any of the named people, including Grant, see that was and is not my intention, and I am very happy today to have some of these things addressed. I will throw this out there for consideration; it boggles my mind how wikipedia has banned the article on my parser, considering there are entries for many other equivalent parsers. The article was up for years then removed suddenly for no legitimate reason imo... Do you have any opinion on the clear favoring of certain parsers in the information community? ( such as on wikipedia or in excluding specific parsers from being mentioned as related codebases )

netrus 12y ago

Don't you think adding your real-name would be a nice move when you choose to give names of people you disagree with?

deleted 12y ago
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- andyl 12y ago
  Is this you? http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he-hacked-university-of-maryland-contractor-turned-hacker-tells-all/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he...
  - binarysolo 12y ago
    If it is, thanks for being a high-integrity individual.
    - nanoscopic 12y ago
      Thank you. Unfortunately the FBI and Secret Service have a different opinion, and so the FBI is still holding onto $5000 of my gear. For myself, I can't say I would try to "do the right thing" again, because it simply isn't in my best interest to try to get people to listen to what is reasonable.

mike_hearn 12y ago

The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor. It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy to get into a downward spiral where behaviour gets more and more extreme as people try to make their opinions stand out amongst the crowd. What's worse, the fact that this scares off contributors is hard to spot, because you by definition cannot easily measure contributions that would have happened but didn't because of a community problem. If you look at non-technical forums like Facebook, newspaper comment sections etc there's usually some form of moderation that imposes house rules like "be civil". This sort of thing can clean up individual forums but the wider problem remains: some people are just nasty and they often believe they can influence the development of their favourite project by being sufficiently nasty to developers they disagree with. If they can't do that in the project's own forums they'll do it elsewhere. The Bitcoin community has pretty severe problems with this too, it's not just a Linux thing.

_delirium 12y ago
They're smaller communities, but I've been on a few developer lists that are fairly strict about the dev list being only for developers. That doesn't solve the "dev who's a jerk" problem, but it does raise the barrier to entry by excluding people who want to only argue and not develop: if you subscribe and immediately start arguing, without having contributed anything, you get booted.
kazinator 12y ago
You cannot moderate mailing lists because they are not centralized. When you hit "reply all" in a mailing list, the replies go directly to everyone who is on the To: or Cc: list. The list robot is just one of those parties. And of course, private replies are possible that the list robot doesn't even see. Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken. About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent web archive. [Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century, and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can be configured.]

qwerta 12y ago

I find it (mo/i)ronic that you reference people with full name "XYZ attacked me", only for verification of course, but you forgot to include your own name.

Someone1234 12y ago
He named the GitHub repo which has his name in big bold letters: https://github.com/nanoscopic https://github.com/nanoscopic
- qwerta 12y ago
  Still not cool. Proper way is to reference commits and bugs. Just imagine someone Google your name and first link is to this comment: XY attacked me....
  - nanoscopic 12y ago
    Go ahead and Google my name. You'll find that it is mostly just attacks on my character related to an incident with UMD and the FBI. Unfortunately people don't reference facts; news ( and people in general ) just believe what they want. Once again, my point in referencing these people is to say that negative attitudes and attacks are widespread, and happens by many professional ( the people I mentioned ). I don't blame them; it is a hard community; I'd just like us all to have better attitudes.
    - qwerta 12y ago
      But I do not care that some guy refused to approve your name or whatever. I do care, that you are shaming people you do not like on public forum. It is pretty much same behavior as Linus and other a*holes in OS community. Congrats on top comment BTW.
      - nanoscopic 12y ago
        I'd like to point out that I have a lot of respect for the developers I named; my point is that we should all play nicely, not that I wish for these people to be shamed. People get hurt. I was hurt. I'm not attacking; I am saying it still hurts to be treated that way by members of the community, and that I agree with the notion that you need to have a thick skin. It shouldn't be this way; the entire open source community should strive to improve the world together, not fight about which project is better. Notice above comment from mst ( Matt S Trout ). I appreciate him saying sorry and it actually means a lot to me. I have even more respect for those who recognize when their actions have been misunderstood and hurt people. He didn't need to apologize, but it helps the community and I wish more developers were willing to see that there are many different opinions and we need to respect them all.

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Someone1234 12y ago
I'm confused, did he force you or anyone else to utilise his "crap?" If it is "crap" why are you using it? And what's more why are you UPSET that you're voluntarily using his contributions? What you just said literally makes zero sense to me... Also he hasn't (according to him nor Wikipedia) contributed to the Linux kernel, yet you moved kernels to avoid his "crap." Makes zero sense. The Linux kernel isn't one of his projects.
- deleted 12y ago
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  - Someone1234 12y ago
    So isn't your beef really with the distro's which aren't fulfilling your needs? Maybe you should start your own branch with Systemd specifically excluded. That is how many currently popular distro's because popular (mostly relating to different windowing systems, etc but still). You could also move to Gentoo Linux which doesn't (and has no plans) to utilise Systemd as the default. Last point; systemd is so "crap" that every single distro' is moving to it? Either they have VERY low standards or there is more to this story than that.
    - deleted 12y ago
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      - freehunter 12y ago
        Well it's a good thing you switched to Unix then, because Linux is not Unix.
      - peatmoss 12y ago
        This comment needs a disclaimer that I think it's possible to be opposed to the use of systemd, and not be flamey about it. And I don't mean to suggest that you're the flamey sort of systemd opposer. That out of the way, I really hope that the FreeBSD community is not inundated with the flamey kind of systemd refugee.

sii 12y ago

> Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face. Really? My contributions to the open source world are certainly modest, but I get thank you emails perhaps once a month for applications I've released. People are quite pleasant.

nanoscopic 12y ago
Yes, for many years I intentionally did not release more open source due to only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you. Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more. The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the distributed discs ). Several people benchmarked it and said it was amazingly fast. I'm pretty sure it is used by a fair amount of people, but since it is mainly distributed through CPAN I have no idea who really uses it or how many. I think this is the case for what I wrote because it is a component. People in general I think appreciate tools much more than components, especially if the component is one of many somewhat inter-compatible other options. There is little love for "another thing added to the pile" even if it is different in fundamental ways.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you // I wonder if in part this is due to solicitation - you [by which I mean 'one', a person, not specifically you] have a "support" forum for problems, you have a note asking for contacts with bugs but generally OSS projects don't have a "comment with thanks" or a tip jar or whatever. Guestbooks used to be the way people could offer a quick comment of thanks. But as you say this is more likely to work for frontend user-facing projects. Stars on github or similar will show at least that people appreciate your work if they've not explicitly thanked you.
audunw 12y ago
Are these end-user applications? I suspect developers can tend to be less grateful than end-users, and this guy was writing an XML parser. I've also had people thank me for a FOSS app, but that was also a consumer application. The fact that it was open-source was actually incidental though, I don't think anyone have actually forked or looked at the code. If they did, maybe I'd have gotten some hate mail ;)

vph 12y ago

I failed to understand this line of criticism. Open Source is a software development model. It's not a model of society and does not guarantee to consists of only well-mannered people. There are ugly, difficult people everywhere, not just in Open Source projects.

freehunter 12y ago
Open source is a software development model. It is also a community. If you bill yourself as a "movement", you're building a community around yourself, like the open source movement. "Gamer" is a hobby, but it can also refer to a community that is much, much different from the broad spectrum of people who just play video games.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  Most of us did not bill ourselves as a movement though. Some money grubbing people did back in the .com bubble days. I did not make the OSI. I am not part of any movement. I write software I want, and give the source away freely for others to use if they find it useful. That's it.
mcantor 12y ago
Genuine question: Did you read the article? I feel like the author's main point is that there seems to be a higher abundance of toxic interactions in Open Source than other communities.
- DSMan195276 12y ago
  > Genuine question: Did you read the article? I feel like the author's main point is that there seems to be a higher abundance of toxic interactions in Open Source than other communities. I'm not the same person you responded to, but regardless I'd argue that there probably isn't much more toxic interactions in open-source then there is in any other communities. People tend to fight and get angry over stuff they care about, that happens everywhere. The thing with open-source is that all of those communications are open, and thus it's much easier to see. The thing is though, how many times do you think anybody on here has actually looked at the Linux Kernel mailing list for a reason other then a post on here about Linus getting angry? I'd wager not many. Everybody loves to see a good fight, but it's rare to see someone being helpful and nice highlighted. I've only seen one post on HN highlighting Linus being nice and helpful, even though that's the bulk of the posts he makes, and I see one every time he gets angry. For example, looking at some ones he sent yesterday, I'm seeing this (https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/96 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/96), this (https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/112 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/112), and this (https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/107 https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/5/107), all of which are generally nice and well mannered questions, and explanations of things people may need to do differently. I don't think the Open Source community is nearly as toxic as people make it out to be.

vph 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Alupis 12y ago

You make a lot of good points, but I take issue with: > me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge Sometimes this is a perspective thing. It's not always a bug just because some user reports it as a bug in their opinion. Don't know the story behind that anecdote, but perhaps you didn't understand the codebase like you thought you did, or what the expected behavior should of been? In any regard, if the project maintainer does not consider it a bug and won't accept a PR, then that is their prerogative. You are [usually] free to fork the codebase and fix it yourself if you had a PR that wasn't accepted. With closed source, that isn't even a remote possibility.

nanoscopic 12y ago
The specific bug was in the Varnish reverse proxy. It had to do with the non-functionality of the ESI ( Edge Side Includes ) "support". I really like Varnish and was making great use of it, and was happy to learn it supported ESI. I thought that if you change the contents of an ESI file, and then invalidate that file in Varnish, that Varnish would know the files that include it and invalidate them as well. Nope. Varnish seemingly has no recognition of ESI in regard to invalidation and simply includes the contents of the file, in effect treating them like regular SSI ( server side includes ). I reported this behavior properly, and I was told that I don't know what I am talking about and there was no problem. The bug I filed was then closed without the issue being fixed or addressed in any way. I can and will make a competing reverse proxy; because ESI is important IMO, and disregarding supporting it properly is silly. I think Varnish is great; I'm happy it exists; I think it is silly to close a reported bug on the codebase without addressing it properly. The proper address to it is to simply say "No we don't really support ESI", just as I have said "No my parser is not really an 'XML' parser, because it doesn't really follow the spec."
- Alupis 12y ago
  Just to parlay - This page has not been edited in over 3 years and says Varnish does not have full ESI support: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ESIfeatures https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ESIfeatures Perhaps you missed it, or perhaps this anecdote took place prior to this page's posting. In either case, seems it was a misunderstanding - which goes back to my first comment about a reported bug is not always a real bug just because one (or a few) users believe it to be.

lazyant 12y ago

thanks for contributing your code

jgh 12y ago

I find in my project people are generally quite helpful and thankful. I can't say I've received much criticism for sharing a project with the world.

robomartin 12y ago

Lord of the Flies. Regrettably, human interaction, in the context of the achievement or retention of power, can devolve into scenarios of violence that range from verbal and psychological to the unthinkable. Open Source is obviously not immune to this.

knz42 12y ago

After doing some research on "I also got attacked by PHK" I did some research and found this: - you sent 2 e-mails to the Varnish-misc mailing list in Feb 2011 about the ESI-related bug you found (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-February/019931.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2... https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-February/019942.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), which then remained unanswered - but then you also tried to "help" another user in an unrelated thread "Lots of config" in March 2011 (starting here, https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-March/020127.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), and PHK had a knee-jerk reaction (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2011-March/020159.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...) to one of your "suggestions", a reaction that was indeed a bit vitriolic, but when read in the context of your other contributions to that thread, it makes a little bit of sense.

Dylan16807 12y ago
Why are you putting help and suggestions in quotes? What's wrong with a jump table? There's no excuse for the language in that post.

feld 12y ago

I would love to hear some details. When I've see PHK get vicious he's always been right. He's been in this game years longer than most and perhaps he's tired of defending the right way nicely.

nanoscopic 12y ago
I wasn't exactly polite when he attacked me. I responded in turn because it was absurd and silly to me to be threatened. To know anything about me is to know that threatening me is a joke; I'm not afraid. To this day I'm unclear why he didn't understand the problem with ESI include files being invalidated not forcing the main including file out of the cache as well. ( in Varnish ) I think he was just in a bad mood and didn't have the time nor care to understand what I was pointing out at the time. He was pretty mean though, and refused to play nicely to the bitter end of that particular argument. Just google "Lots of Configs" if you want to read the whole silly debate. Here is what I want: A cache where it supports ESI... File A ESI includes file B. Both A and B are in the cache. If I forcibly tell the cache to invalidate file B, I expect that file A will automatically be invalidated as well, since the cache should know that file B was included into file A. Varnish does not do this. That was my statement to PHK, but apparently he doesn't want to hear it and somehow things this is an unreasonable request.
- feld 12y ago
  Couldn't you accomplish this with a vmod?

grantmnz 12y ago

I am disappointed to learn that you feel I have attacked you in the past. I apologise unreservedly for any offence I caused you. I always try to be civil and professional in my interactions and to be mindful of the difficulty of conveying the intended tone over an electronic medium. If I have voiced some criticism of your code it is certainly not because I wished to belittle your efforts or to make any value judgements about your worth as a person.

nanoscopic 12y ago
Thank you for expressing this. It helps me to be able to move past it. I have always thought you were angry at my contributions to the community. You will note that I applaud the simplicity of your module, and even went so far as to create a SAX streaming version of my parser that works together with XML::Simple so that those who wish to stick with your interface can do so. I didn't maintain it much, but can do so if there is any real interest in it. I named you simply because you are the first person to state that my XML parser is "invalid", despite my having worked very hard to ensure that it does parse XML meaningfully. I do acknowledge freely that I am disregarding the specs to some extent for the sake of raw speed. You will see that I have altered the documentation to make this clear so there is no confusion. For myself, with your apology I consider that extremely adequate to address the past. I don't really remember clearly, but I know that it was a very rough entry into the open source world to have my parser attacked ( considering it is the first meaningful thing I contributed to the community ) I would like to point out that communication and understanding between members of the community is exactly what I am asking for. I thank you for stepping out and attempting to resolve this. There is no way I would ever know that you felt this way without you expressing it, and unless I did I would have lived forever thinking you have bad feelings towards myself and the code I have created. For all the people who imply that I was attacking any of the named people, including Grant, see that was and is not my intention, and I am very happy today to have some of these things addressed. I will throw this out there for consideration; it boggles my mind how wikipedia has banned the article on my parser, considering there are entries for many other equivalent parsers. The article was up for years then removed suddenly for no legitimate reason imo... Do you have any opinion on the clear favoring of certain parsers in the information community? ( such as on wikipedia or in excluding specific parsers from being mentioned as related codebases )