Actually, the best example of a project where the leadership of the project was so toxic as to drive away potential contributors would probably be glibc under Ulrich Drepper, which got so bad that most distributions abandoned glibc for the eglibc fork. (See https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ for a high-level discussion).
I know very little about NetBSD and am a great fan of OpenBSD.
But Theo is a very horrible person who often attacks people in a personal way for disagreeing with him. I got into a stupid argument with him over fundraising - a subject where I have deep experience - and it was quite bizarre. He had a set of assumptions and disagreeing with them got abuse from him, and some of his minions on the OpenBSD-Misc list, and (I was astonished) abuse in my INBOX from throw away accounts.
What an arsewipe!
All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.
100 years from now, people will recognize the name "Linux Torvalds". Who will remember the tone police?
Linux is a major accomplishment and a boon for all humanity. All I see the hall monitors accomplishing is the production of drama.
I'm not inside the Linux developers' world, but from the outside it seems like a much healthier, more vibrant place since Linus realized that he works with human beings.
Actually, primarily they're reminding me that there's a human being on the other side of the screen watching everything I do in case I fuck up. How this is supposed to make anyone want to participate is a mystery to me.
edit: The weird thing to me is that these people are so hyper-vigilant to the damage bad behavior can do, and utterly blind to the idea that their own behavior can also be damaging. If I ever read a sentence like "we know that overmoderation and tone-policing can create toxic communities, and we're watching out for that" from a moderation team, I will know that this is a community that I can trust to be administered in an even-handed and fair manner. So far I have seen this once.
And to that- who knows? Certainly the point of a CoC is supposed to be to codify this, but I believe experience shows that its interpretation tends to be expansive, when the wording is not already expansive to begin with.
At the end of the day, events like Curtis Yarvin, a person who has never harmed a fly, almost getting banned from Lambdaconf over "safety" concerns, demonstrate that the fuck-up may just be having a political difference of opinion with the group in question.
(Analogously, and I say this as somebody who would vote Dems every time if they lived in the US, a moderation team that included at least one Trump voter would also assuage such concerns. Consider it a commitment to diversity.)
edit: To be clear, I am not asking for anything resembling quotas; just any demonstration of the ability of the team to coexist with a person they have serious ideological disagreements with.
>Yarvin's online writings, many under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, convey blatantly racist views. He expresses the belief that white people are genetically endowed with higher IQs than black people. He has suggested race may determine whether individuals are better suited for slavery, and his writing has been interpreted as supportive of the institution of slavery.
https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/why-it-matters-that-an-obs...
You're upset that a Eugenics-lite writer was almost banned from a conference?
Curtis Yarvin is a bellwether - the sort of person that any group that starts excluding people for ideological disagreements, would probably exclude first precisely because his position is so problematic. So any group that accepts his technical contribution can obviously be trusted to tolerate any less-severe ideological disagreement. Conversely, any group that doesn't, especially when they have to make up nonexistent concerns to do it because their rules didn't cover this "obvious" reason to kick someone out and couldn't be hastily adjusted, must be viewed with caution.
I personally don't hold any beliefs nearly as objectionable as that. But I do hold objectionable beliefs - as I believe any halfway interesting person does. And those who don't, probably will eventually. Just stand by your convictions and give it time.
See also LambdaConf's conclusion on why they should allow him to participate anyway: https://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-inclusion I agree with this article fully.
Sure you don't have to, but if you do, it's a hell of a signal. (At any rate, Curtis Yarvin was invited for his semi-esoteric functional-based distributed operating platform, Urbit.)
> If you're protecting personnel, even after a number of others in your community have shown disagreement with the person's actions (and protections afterwards), just admit you agree with those thoughts.
Sorry, I don't. Of course, you'll believe that I do anyway, and that's fine. I do think it's a bit sad that you think that the only reason someone could want somebody to be included, is because they were your ideological compatriots.
In fact, the only reason I want anyone to be included in a conference is if they have contributions to the conference's topic.
It sounds like we just have a difference in moral standards.
Well - at least if I ever run a conference, you can be confident that you will be welcome to it anyways. :)
Even when it comes to unpleasant people like Moldbug I try to avoid talk of moral standards beyond the really clear-cut ones...
Not evil, an exaggeration but still: would you want to be in the presence of some body so bigoted? Who thought you inferior because because because?
If there is a conference being organized about some technology, I'd like to see speakers who have the most to contribute, on that merit only. I couldn't care less if they march around with armbands on in their spare time. I'm suggesting that more people learn to compartmentalize.
That would be nice... unfortunately, filter bubbles are such that it's hard for most people just to locate a reasonable person who has serious ideological disagreements with them. The current polarisation didn't happen in a vacuum.
Yeah, and probably exactly like that.
Your counter examples are questionable at best.
Anyway, regarding Richard Stallman and those accusations of “various kinds of sexual misconduct”:
The article you shared also fails to defend many of the accusations against Stallman and completely ignores them, for example the "Emacs virgin girl" situation.
Since you seem to have a great interest in this, do have any concrete reference to the “Emacs virgin” situation? I have only a vague recollection that Stallman was referring to anyone who had not used Emacs yet as an “Emacs virgin”, and some people took it as meaning some kind of sex thing.
(Any other references to the “many of the accusations against Stallman” that wasn’t referenced in the linked article would also be interesting to see.)
I don't think this is a fair counter example, he's been accused for expressing personal opinions, on his personal blog.
The accusations led to nothing.
Linus changed his tones just recently, now that he's older and have children, the "previous version" of Linus brought Linux to where it is though.
He's still very harsh when things get highly technical, because he's one of the few people that know at heart what's best for Linux.
Communal decision making, however, does not have that advantage. If both sides of an issue, so to speak, become turned off of one another, you are more likely to have an abandoned project. There are, of course, other advantages (you don't miss generally accepted "good ideas" because of the particular vision of one person, and you can apply community standards to everyone, rather than having to weigh "continued participation in this project that is important to you" vs "dealing with -that- asshole again"), but that is definitely one con.
I hear this "a lot" very often, but then it seems to be from people who have no real interest in technical work of kernel/OS core development. Linux is not the only way to scratch your itch for interest in low-level system dev. Like, this is just personal experience, but I have heard this on the order of 50-100 times: someone parroting how toxic Linux kernel dev is because of drama they heard -- but then you kind of dig a little bit and see what kinds of software stuff interests them, what do they work on -- probably only once or twice has it been anything embedded, hardware related, close to the metal. I would need compelling evidence to change my opinion that most of the complainers have no interest in the work being done by the community they are complaining about -- and I am fully aware that a number of people have departed Linux development, but we are talking about a tiny number of the thousands of contributors over the years -- you can't please everyone.
The hobby OS, emulation and demo scene is a pretty good indicator for "natural"* gender breakdown. These tend to be tight, tiny communities or often lone wolves working on projects. It is male dominated. This can't be explained by any systemic or community gatekeeping - because there is no system nor any mandatory community for participation or distribution. Nothing prevents anyone from putting their work out there.
* I am not discounting there may be other systemic reasons that set up this condition - but it has to be societal conditions that are in place in early childhood -- something that happens a bit before one considers contributing to the Linux kernel.
sex - sure, but gender? we got plenty of females in OSS!
Still a general underrep of women.
e: Oh I see - your comment wasn't in good faith at all.
not just yours :)
It is simply demonstrably, factually, clearly not true that a growing community needs the kind of structures that Rust imposed on itself.
It really makes me sad that a certain kind of person these days sees some kind of censorious overlord as essential for the formation of healthy communities.
> There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious"
A disaffected and loud minority says things like that, and the rest of the world goes right on ignoring them. Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque.