> Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians

These developers do not wield power over anyone and they are not filing lawsuits. They are developing code, either as their job, or as volunteers. And in either case, contributing their work as open source.

It might help to take a little perspective before publicly passing judgement on _individuals_ and what you imagine their intentions to be rather than merely judging the merit of their contributions. Those are completely different things.

What I'm talking about really has nothing to do with power. Maybe the examples I chose suggested that power dynamics are relevant to my point, but I think they aren't, so here is another example without one: Should an architect refrain from judging Frank Lloyd Wright just because they never worked together? I think certainly not. That seems completely backwards to me. Anybody is entitled to have an opinion on Frank Lloyd Wright, another architect particularly so.

Are you talking about judging his contributions and significance to architecture or his worth as a person?

I get that the two things have some overlap and aren't cleanly divisible. What we do is a major part of who we are.

But I mean, it's one thing to say "I think it [his architecture] is awful", or even "I think his architecture had a negative impact on people/society/cherished values/whatever" but quite another to say "I think he sought the ruination of everything good and decent because he was a demented and feeble mind." Because, yes, I do think the last one would only be appropriate if you actually knew something about the guy...

Edit: And yeah, of course, I'm not trying to censor anyone's opinions. Of course you can _have_ the opinion, you can even express it. I just think that it's not what engaging in productive/civil discourse looks like and, depending on the venue, people may call that out or whatever.

I am not talking about judging his 'worth as a person'; rather his 'worth as a developer.' Maybe in his private life he's a wonderful person, who knows? Who cares? It is his professional activities that concern people.

You are of course welcome to have an opinion, and to choose whatever product you want based on that opinion. But if the extent of your opinion is "this person is a jerk and their work is terrible and not to my taste" that is unlikely to convince that person to change course, especially if they don't know you and if the decision is already made.

Furthermore, the "this person is a jerk" part is clearly not part of some dispassionate evaluation of his professional accomplishments and is just a verbal attack couched in the language of professional criticism.

I suspect that, in many instances, people who do that are not trying to convince anybody of anything. If they expected to be greeted everywhere with agreement then they would not go around saying things which they know perfectly well are not likely to result in a vigorous and healthy debate if they were said to strangers in the street :)

We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, no matter how strongly you feel about something or someone. We're trying for something else here because it's the only way to keep the site interesting.

From some of your other comments I gather that you've been around this material for a long time and you know a lot about it. Why not share some of what you know, so others can learn? and make your substantive points thoughtfully? Then you'll be making this place more interesting, and your points will have some persuasive power. Just venting only adds energy and credibility to the views you disagree with.

I get that there's a low probability this argument will work with you but I think it's worth trying to persuade people that it's in their own interest to follow the rules, which are designed to try to keep a community that's interesting for everybody:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding.

If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.

I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well.

I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many people love to theorize about what these are, making correlations which are usually driven more by their feelings than reality.

I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not considering that person like they are more likely to do so if they were in person.

I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt by some people in a community where there is freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired (I know that not everyone has this option).

I do think however that the article of this thread expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it explains how it effects them without resorting to emotional attacks towards the project and it's something I really liked about reading it.

I just don't want our community to turn to conspiracy theorizing and conjecture. We can do better.

I think people believe Linux is community driven project, while in reality it is strongly corporate backed. Just look at kernel contributions [1]. I think same applies to most of the infrastructure, someone works on FreeType, Cairo, Pango, etc.

In such case disjoint between users and developers is even further. I am professional developer, yet I have zero contributions to my framework and just a few contributions to libraries. After 10 years my contributions to Linux community limited to bug reports, few patches and manuals.

In reality there is not enough community support to maintain existing systems. "Freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired" by individual is overrated, that's TempleOS.

EDITED: Some bragging about making a difference

There are a lot of projects with less corporate influence. No systemd on BSD, but hardware support is not as good. Generic distributions is something that works for most of the users. There are a lot of niche distributions and projects (Void Linux runit!). Current state is just a reflection of users priorities.

[1] https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

Sorry if it was not clear, by take it in another direction I generally mean find funding, get hired by someone else to work on it, or start another company to work on it if there is enough of a business opportunity there. It's very hard to make significant changes to a large codebase without a team of people.