alt Hacker NewsI don't know why people keep sharing this. It's highly offensive and inflammatory. Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously, and ensure that even if suggestions or contributions are rejected, it's done in a thoughtful and considerate way. Acting like a jerk isn't a blueprint for how to be a good maintainer, it's how to be a jerk. And this "us experts vs. entitled users" mentality is cultural poison.
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Calling someone a jerk for their views on how OSS should or shouldn’t function isn’t appropriate.
It’s actually completely out of line and smacks of the very entitlement described in the piece.
Don’t agree with his views? Go make your own project and run it however you want.
Cultural poison? The truly cultured understand that a monoculture would be the real poison. There’s room for all modes of operation in OSS. Without “jerks”, there’d be no Linux and there would be nothing else of high value either.
If you want to sit around and hold hands then find a project where they do that, or maybe just take up finger painting.
> It's highly offensive and inflammatory.
It is sane and factually correct.
> Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously
Rich is taking governance very seriously. Others aren't and give nobodies the right to vote. In any case, he's factually correct. Nothing in open source implies anything about any type of governance, as "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period".
> Acting like a jerk
Pot, meet kettle.