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Bruce Byfield addresses the all-too-often-seen ugliness in open source software circles, and the tendency of open source enthusiasts, to start flame wars based on their personal preference.
He explains that most people working in open source development and free software have very strong feelings of satisfaction in their contributions to the community. But often these feelings have an ugly side.
The issue was brought to a head in an article about the decline of Apache OpenOffice, and the ascendance of LibreOffice. His email indicated that many writers wanted to see Apache humiliated due to differences in their approach even though the products were basically the same code-base.
What disturbs me is when the strong feelings devolve into insularity that excludes other free software projects.
Why, for example, would I possibly want to see OpenOffice humiliated? I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and -- with some misgivings -- the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation.
[More after the Break]
This reminded him of the Desktop Environment wars, KDE vs Gnome, while several smaller players like XFCE, LXDE, and Enlightenment and a host of others, chug along largely unscathed. We see the same sort of camps forming around File Systems, Init Systems, as well as many user-space programs. We see user communities vilified, and companies trashed, usually for something tangential to the actual free or open source software involved. People become insular.
Sometimes, this kind of insularity may reflect which projects a person works on. However, at least as often, it is voiced by average users with no direct connection to any of the projects involved. It appears an expression of the human need to belong, although an unusually misguided one. ... In fact, I suspect that this insularity is responsible for much of the opposition to diversity efforts. After all, when your sense of who you are depends on externals and what you define yourself as not being, any change becomes uncomfortable -- and, often, an outright threat to your sense of self.
Personally, I'd have to say that what annoys me most about free and open source software are the forced marches imposed on the users, for frivolous reasons. To combat the insularity I see in myself, I try to install a different Distro, or a different OS every 6 months or so. I guess it's time to add a new Desktop Environment to those experiments. virtual machines are a godsend for this.
Bruce goes on to say
In theory, maybe some way exists to encourage the enthusiasm that free software inspires while discouraging the ugliness of insularity.
Soylentils: Do you ever force yourself to step outside your comfort zone with your choices of free software? If so, how, and how often?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday May 04 2015, @08:04AM
I wrote about this in my blog, I'll repost it here with the hope that someone finds it interesting.
What are holy wars? Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, you are probably acquainted with the concept: Coke vs Pepsi, Xbox vs Playstation, Emacs vs vi, Windows vs Mac, Linux vs BSD, MIT vs GPL. These are wars waged with few facts and many personal invectives, in an attempt to assert moral or technical superiority. Anyone with a lot of experience with holy wars learn to steer clear, for nothing good ever comes out of it. Or does it?
I believe that, even if holy wars may be harmful and ultimately futile, that there’s a real reason for fighting (and hopefully, winning) holy wars, similar to the reason why real religious wars are fought: community size.
Imagine the following scenario: there are two competing open source programs, A and B. For realism, feel free to fill in the spots with Emacs or Vim, in whichever order you like. A “wins” the holy war, gaining most, if not all, of the community in the domain of users of A and B. A gains many well-written up-to-date guides and tutorials, while B only has a few, out-of-date guides. A’s set of features grows far beyond B and remains just as stable, with many talented developers contributing code while the watchful masses of users reports any bugs. Other programs only support A because so many people use A and very few people use B. Any advantage that B may have is quickly appropriated by A, by its many users; no such speed of adoption exists for B, whose users would be lucky to get an extremely useful feature from A a year later. A has gained immensely, while B has lost immensely. As a user of A, I benefit from every other user of A. Holy wars matter because community size matters.
However, this piece of writing is not meant to encourage readers to begin hurling ad hominem attacks in the nearest forum or mailing list. While it is true that holy wars matter, to the extent of achieving a large community size, there are usually better ways than those in which holy wars are traditionally waged, that is, with personal attacks. One catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, as the saying goes. Here, marketing (of the morally sound variety) is the optimal weapon. Encouraging users to switch to A, presenting hard facts, and helping such new users during the difficult transition period, while neither forcing nor attacking, and allowing for a clear escape route at any time (for software, this amounts to using open data formats and support for exporting and importing data) will lure in many to your cause.
Happy hunting.
(Link here for reference, but I'm actually not looking for a lot of clicks. My wimpy server would kick the bucket.)
http://felesatra.moe/blog/2015/03/11/why-holy-wars-matter/ [felesatra.moe]
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