Open Source and Nasty Behaviour

L.Jenkins

I thought I'd post this here, as it might just die in the Open Source Forum. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/05/open_source_developer_survey_2017/?mt=1496664570314

Most of the negative behaviour is explained as ?rudeness?, which has been experienced witnessed by 45 per cent of participants and experienced by 16 per cent. GitHub's summary of the survey says really nasty stuff like ?sexual advances, stalking, or doxxing are each encountered by less than five per cent of respondents and experienced by less than two per cent (but cumulatively witnessed by 14%, and experienced by three per cent).? Twenty five per cent of women respondents reported experiencing ?language or content that makes them feel unwelcome?, compared to 15 per cent of men.

This sort of carry on cannot be good for the Ope Source Community as a whole, especially when there are those working toward being more inclusive of Women and other under represented groups.

Here's the findings and a data dump related to it can be found in the article.

14ned

L.Jenkins wrote: »

This sort of carry on cannot be good for the Ope Source Community as a whole, especially when there are those working toward being more inclusive of Women and other under represented groups.

Here's the findings and a data dump related to it can be found in the article.

I participate in quite a range of open source communities for over twenty years now, and I've definitely noticed a substantial cultural difference between US-centric open source and European-centric open source, and also between old projects (> 20 years) and new projects ( < 5 years). The US culture, especially with older projects, prefers "free speech" i.e. say what you like about people personally and multiple years of their work and contribution irrespective of fact. The line only gets drawn on ethnic, religious, racial and gender "free speech" where the moderators will cut in.

In such communities, it can be very tricky. People troll and attack people and their code personally, even the leadership, and if you don't bite back and hard, discussion can quickly spiral off into non-productive topics. Biting hard of course upsets and offends people and gives the community a wild west look particularly off-putting to millennials I've noticed, a bit like on the Linux kernel dev list. But that moderation policy gives you little choice: kill or be killed.

Newer communities, and especially European ones, have much more proactive moderation policies. There is a long and usually expanding list of things you can't say or do. Most are for good reason, but some are non-sensical and have resulted from an attempt to control and shape discussion for non-discussion purposes. Some of the posting rules here on this forum for example make little sense to be enforced rigidly in my opinion, but in the end each community gets to set the rules, and that community will wither and die as is appropriate if the rules are too strict.

So, for me personally at least, I prefer the "no free speech" culture a lot. It means I am not forced to be an a**hole when you are dealing with community leaders who have publicly avowed to destroy anything and everything you personally touch because they hate you personally, and will do things like bring in shill helpers to shout down any discussion relating to your code with as negative feedback as possible in order to get your patchset you'll be working on for months rejected irrespective of merit. That sort of thing.

So yay for more rules, and a clear code of conduct rigourously enforced. But as a European, I'm probably biased , our American cousins probably prefer discussion redder in tooth and claw.

Niall

kyote00

Interesting read alright.

Must admit that it is also something that I have noticed. I always assumed it was a personal power or "napoleon complex" thing ...

14ned

kyote00 wrote: »

Interesting read alright.

Must admit that it is also something that I have noticed. I always assumed it was a personal power or "napoleon complex" thing ...

Sometimes it is that. But mostly it's because most open source has only a dispersed unpaid "thought leadership" rather than a leadership with any real power or resources with which they can buy or bribe people changing their behaviour like say in politics.

Generally, where people are a**holes in open source, it's because they feel they need to exert power over domains not under their control, and power relations theory and practice is very clear that mixing nasty and nice empirically produces the most success with charismatic power - the Third Reich is the classic example of that, be really nice on lots of stuff, be nasty on specific targets and scapegoats which most of the population don't care or know much about. Mr. Trump is just a modern rendition of the exact same power theory, it's as old as the hills. It stems from a lack of alternatives to achieve real change otherwise.

Occasionally you get a**holes who are genuine sociopaths or psychopaths in an open source community. They generally get frozen out very effectively and very quickly, people don't like giving over their free time in service of a tyrant. So in that sense open source is pretty clean relative to other grass roots movements.

I therefore think most of the anti-socialness in open source is more caused by the consequence on power relations of dispersed unpaid thought leadership. In those open source communities with a professional paid leadership and a budget of grants to hand out each year, you almost never see any anti social behaviour at all. I mean, people can actually remember when in the past ten years someone was mean to someone else, down to the month and year.

If on the other hand it's just a bunch of people in their basements, well, fur does fly, and regularly. The nastiness in open source pales in comparison to the anonymous forums used by the privacy-sensitive in certain less well known parts of the internet for example, there ruining someone's real world life just to make some esoteric point is considered fair game.

Niall

Trojan

14ned wrote: »

... So yay for more rules, and a clear code of conduct rigourously enforced. ...

It sounds almost like you're describing boards.ie, but at a macro scale.

L.Jenkins

In my own mind, there needs to be some ground rules for discussion and inclusion. I'd hate to see an end to great projects, over nasty carry by those who lose the run of themselves. I'm sure there is a need for Boards.ie style clamp down on sexism, racism and downright trolling.

Manach

I would disagree. Political and social driven rules have no place in a project or a virtue in of themselves and you should be expected to give as good as you get so long as you can defend yourself as freely. Having code of conduct soon develop into ensuring only the those acceptable to the rules setters' agenda participate: ie an walled garden.

L.Jenkins

Manach wrote: »

I would disagree. Political and social driven rules have no place in a project or a virtue in of themselves and you should be expected to give as good as you get so long as you can defend yourself as freely. Having code of conduct soon develop into ensuring only the those acceptable to the rules setters' agenda participate: ie an walled garden.

I see where you're coming from, but how do you make an environment friendlier to those who wish to contribute, but may be deterred by a hostile ego driven environment?

Trojan

L.Jenkins wrote: »

how do you make an environment friendlier to those who wish to contribute, but may be deterred by a hostile ego driven environment?

IMO you don't. If you have zero standards when it comes to behaviour, then you accept that some (a lot - a huge amount?) of people will not interact with that system.

I've seen this on another forum where the regulars embrace a "tough love" combative style - and it's become an echo chamber because newbies won't stick around to accept abuse regardless of how it's marketed.

jmcc

Some people are there because they want to code.
Some people are there because they want to be part of a community that writes code.
Some people think that their feelings matter more than the code.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Trojan wrote: »

It sounds almost like you're describing boards.ie, but at a macro scale.

The horror! It sounds like a polite wasteland where the governing principle is mediocrity rather than merit. Groupthink and the infestation of SJWs are bad things for coding. It kills creativity and groups end up being governed by technology churnalist types who are more concerned about having the right colour of broadband and whether the number of reused electrons in the code contributes meaningfully to the fight against Climate Change, or something. Such groups stop being about coding and end up being about who has been most offended.

Regards...jmcc

Trojan

jmcc wrote: »

The horror! It sounds like a polite wasteland where the governing principle is mediocrity rather than merit. Groupthink and the infestation of SJWs are bad things for coding. It kills creativity and groups end up being governed by technology churnalist types who are more concerned about having the right colour of broadband and whether the number of reused electrons in the code contributes meaningfully to the fight against Climate Change, or something. Such groups stop being about coding and end up being about who has been most offended.

That's certainly a horrible picture, and one end of the spectrum.

The other end of the spectrum is this:

jmcc, SHUT THE F*** UP!

How long have you been a boardsie? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of boards?

Shut up, jmcc. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a boardsie again. Seriously.

How hard is this to understand?

This is paraphrasing Linus Torvalds to a Redhat contributor publicly on the kernel mailing list.

This is indefensible and is turning a lot of potentially great coders away. If that opinion makes me a SJW, so be it

L.Jenkins

That rant from Linus makes me think of a few Project Managers I've worked with. No tact what so ever. I suppose, in a way Linus is to Linux, as Gordon Ramsey is to Cooking. Easily p?ssed off perfectionist, but you have to be at times.

jmcc

Trojan wrote: »

That's certainly a horrible picture, and one end of the spectrum.

The other end of the spectrum is this:

jmcc, SHUT THE F*** UP!

How long have you been a boardsie? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of boards?

Shut up, jmcc. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a boardsie again. Seriously.

How hard is this to understand?

This is paraphrasing Linus Torvalds to a Redhat contributor publicly on the kernel mailing list.

Still laughing from reading that Kernel Mailing post. But it is perfectly obvious even if it was a complete LARTing. We've all done that kind of thing and all, at one time or another, been on the end of that kind of LARTing. It is part of the learning process.

This is indefensible and is turning a lot of potentially great coders away. If that opinion makes me a SJW, so be it

Actually it is not indefensible. High productivity and high performance lists tend to be like that in that cluelessness is rarely tolerated and it is necessary to come down hard on it to stop the list being derailed. Some communities are like that and have people who are generally at the top of their game. Newbies are often helped offlist so that the list doesn't get cluttered. Great coders generally believe in their code and will defend it up to and including starting a Holy War. When you get a group of great coders in a list, there will be arguments and it may often be no holds barred. But hand-holding and worrying about hurt feelings is not part of the ethos on some of these lists. If you make a stupid decision, you will be called on it. To do otherwise would be a disservice to the list and the wider community of users. Tech lists tend to be like this because despite all the clueless waffle from the Irish Times "technology" section, it is a mainly male profession. CS has much more balance/diversity than Electronic Engineering but that has changed slightly. But programming is one area where the level of concentration on the field is so intense that people worry more about the code being right than about hurting feelings. The medium is also text rather than face to face meetings and this also can lead to a kind of distance between individuals on the list. The visual cues from face to face communications are missing so it is not really possible to tell if someone is offended unless they say so and that's generally treated as offlist stuff. When conflict arises, it is generally those most respected in the community that will deal with it.

However, at the other end of the scale, there are the social groups/communities where people really join for support and to talk with like-minded people. These tend to rely upon the power of the many to enforce the rules as they will freeze out the offenders.

The myth of the great coder is that everyone is potentially a great coder. That's just not so. Very few have the dedication, the abilities and the time necessary to get that far. It is like that whole schools, county, national, international thing in sports. Someone might show some promise as a schools player but then when they get to county level, they find that there are a lot more players with similar abilites. Then if they progress, they find more players with the same or better abilities. Some of these lists are at the equivalent of these various levels. The expectations of performance, expertise and behaviour go up a magnitude at each level. Most communities will help members, if possible but there is an onus on the members to educate themselves. This is where the Boards.ie model of some schools level fora don't translate to the international level fora like the Linux Kernel list. They are different communities with different expectations and requirements. Like Boards.ie, it isn't a one community fits all thing.

As for the SJW thing, hope you get over it soon.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

L.Jenkins wrote: »

That rant from Linus makes me think of a few Project Managers I've worked with. No tact what so ever. I suppose, in a way Linus is to Linux, as Gordon Ramsey is to Cooking. Easily p?ssed off perfectionist, but you have to be at times.

Each community has its own rules and expectations. Asking Gordon Ramsey about how to boil water might get the same kind of response.

Regards...jmcc