> This is the time when reddit made an appearance. I blessed the Shen subreddit because I thought that reddit was some polite ladies bookclub - obviously showing my ignorance of it. It is nothing of the sort of course and some of its most vicious sites like Coontown - the reddit for racists only recently closed - shows what is so often like. Reddit is a shit hole; and to a lesser degree so are SlashDot, and Hacker News.
> Unfortunately some members of the Shen group, imbibing the mindshare poison, gave much power away to the opinions on reddit.
> The OS fanatics relished their power to bully and shame and people used to mail me and say 'You need to say something because XYZ has said such and such on reddit'. I did on occasion call such people 'complete prats', but really this was whack-a-mole because the supply of arseholes was unending.
If we're going to say that X is wrong because Y said it, well Stallman is an albatross around the neck of everyone who talks about free software.
The author is very critical of open source on the whole. He has a series of articles detailing criticisms of open source software.
http://marktarver.com/problems.html (The Problems of Open Source) http://marktarver.com/open.html (In Praise of Closed Source)
He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect with a configurable type system). He experimented with taking it open source. He was very underwhelmed by the results and has made later revisions closed source again. In particular as far as I can tell he felt he was losing creative control of the project and getting little to nothing back for it in terms of contributions and features (and in general very unimpressed with people's reaction to the language and the wider programming community's capability of understanding the language).
He has also had at least one argument on Reddit about this (see the post by Mark_Tarver here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/57h33q/arguing...).
This is one article in a long series of events and thoughts for him that have played out over the past decade.