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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the be-nice-or-I'm-gonna-cry dept.

El Reg has an interesting read on an OSS developers survey:

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 stuff has consequences: 21 per cent of those who see negative behaviour bail from projects they were working on.

Now I take an entirely different conclusion than El Reg on this. To me this says that two or three percent of respondents have valid reason to bitch about bad behavior but a further eighteen or nineteen percent above that simply are not capable of working with other people. Come on, who here has never held a job where someone on staff was a dickhead/bitch but you kept on working anyway? Me, I've not once held a job where there were zero personality conflicts. In my less than humble opinion, part of being an adult is being able to deal professionally or at least civilly with other human beings who do not cater to your every sensitivity.

Maybe I'm just a relic of the past though. Maybe the future really is a bunch of snowflakes crying to $boss to get you fired if you say or do anything they dislike.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:57PM (#522248)

    Low Barrier to entry.

    Having worked elsewhere in open source software (and closed mud developments) dating back to the 80s I can tell you the caustics were still there, but good staff would discipline them (IE you lose your submission privileges, we pull your code, etc etc.) However, where these situations got toxic was when people socially networked their way into staff positions, then started reining in the freewheeling behavior. What this often lead to was people being ousted over socially unacceptable language/behavior, while the same people enforcing the rules were performing that exact same behavior in private, either amongst themselves (belittling those they 'disciplined') or to the faces of those they disciplined having already discredited them to the casual resident populace. The result was a decline in users/devs/players until only the power trippers, their lackeys, and any newbies who hadn't heard the history/believed the staff were in the right. In the end all of these places languished and died. If you go and look at much of the MU*ing community today you will see the aftermath of what I am conveying. The majority of places left are fetish themed sites, many of which have similiar disciplining problems, but due to the unique psychology of the players involved and the lack of alternatives with a similiar playerbase, manage to survive regardless. Others have become the resident of a few die hard idlers and nother else happens.

    The point of my rant is: Similiar to Buzzard's opinion, I think the 'protect the snowflake' mentality is turning out to be a net drain on our society, similiar to prevention of terrorism, rather than a positive that is helping these communities grow. Most of the good developers were always a bit curmudgeonly, socially coarse, or outright autistic. Ousting those people because they won't behave might make things more civil in the short term, but it may lose you the talent necessary to proceed in the long term. A lot of the PC'd software projects people can use as examples are not actually doing very well if you look at the pace of development, the increasing number of bugs, etc.

    Similiar issues apply with long term leadership positions in open source organizations. Rarely does the cream rise to the top, as as can be seen even from Linux kernel development, many people rising to leadership/code steward positions don't really deserve them (Go trying building a default kernel config for any non-x86 arch for instance, and see how many irrelevant/unavailable pieces of hardware/devices/etc end up BUILT-IN by default. Go and compare to default configs from 2.2/2.4 era for the subset of arches that were supported back then: Hint, nobody has been doing QC of the non-ARM/x86 KConfigs, or even the ARM/x86 KConfigs going by some of the ARM-only features that are being enabled by default on x86.)

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