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The Debian project has suffered from a long string of negative events recently, ranging from severe discontent over the inclusion of systemd, to talk of forking the project, to a grave bug affecting the important 'wine' package, to the resignation and reduced involvement of long time contributors.
The latest strife affecting Debian revolves around a request for a Debian package of the GPC-Slots 2 software. This request has been rejected with little more than an ad hominem attack against the software's author.
In response to the request, Stephen Gran wrote,
This is code by someone who routinely trolls Debian. I doubt we want any more poisonous upstreams in Debian, so I at least would prefer this never get packaged.
Jonathan Wiltshire proceeded to mark the request as 'wontfix', and closed it.
While Debian does strive to maintain high standards regarding the software it packages, the negative and personal nature of this rejection, without any apparent technical or licensing concerns, appears to conflict with Debian's own Code of Conduct. Such a personal attack could be seen as contradictory to the Code of Conduct's mandate that Debian participants "Be respectful", "Be collaborative", and most importantly, "Assume good faith".
Given its recent troubles as of late, many of them concerning the poor treatment of Debian developers and users alike, can Debian really afford to get embroiled in yet another negative incident?
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday November 24 2014, @05:33PM
I agree some people on the Internet are very nasty, though maybe I'm not old enough to see the "recency" you speak of. I think the Greater Internet F*wad Theory has been true for quite some time.
Regarding Lennart Poettering: he's just an ass. Regardless of the technical merits of his software, he's such an ass that he is, in fact, a "poisonous upstream" the same way Schilling was. Like Schilling, he won't listen to bug reports, and he thinks he's a god. He co-opted someone else's talk on audio systems after heckling the presenter with "questions" that were more comments, including calling Phonon "kind of dead" (which it's not). His whole team is like that, too; remember the "debug on the kernel command line" crap?
People who come up with crap ideas to solve nonproblems are usually just ignored. Debian users who would like to ignore Lennart are not able to. That makes him disliked. And the guy's an ass, which makes him more disliked.
And, this isn't something that happens to most OSS developers. You don't have entire threads hating Andrew Morton, or Greg Kroah-Hartman, or even Theo de Raadt, who is extremely unpersonable. Hans Reiser (before he became a murderer) you had a few, because he had the same sort of arrogance Lennart has, but even then people respected the quality of his work, and, well, you didn't HAVE to use ReiserFS.
By contrast, Lennart does work anyone could do (but doesn't, because it's not useful work), thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread because he solved 5 nonproblems while creating 6 real ones, and is in a position where many people can't just roll their eyes and ignore him if they want to. That is a recipe for pissing people off. And they are.
It's not the community. It's the software, and the toxic personality behind it.