Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community

(blog.feld.me)

56 points | by RohanAdwankar 2 hours ago ago

6 comments

  • OhMeadhbh a minute ago

    Greybeard here... let me start by saying I like the cut of the author's jib. I'm old enough to have sat before the elders of the arpanet when there were on,y 1's and they had to forge about half of them into 0's manually. Another thing about the old ways of making software is projects were often written or maintained by one or two people at a time. The intarwebs at large had their email addresses and mailed them bug reports directly. Some projects got discussed by the community on IRC or mailing lists. People were generally professional and if they weren't they were deleted from the mailing list or added to people's block files on iirc and pine.

    But my point is... the active dev group was, at any time, very small. Mostly I'm talking about small utilities like make, Sendmail, sed, awk, sed. Perl seemed like it was just Larry Wall and tchrist for most of the time before 1990. gcc was an insane counter-example with a cast of thousands who submitted patches and you had to socialize your patch w/ RMS if you wanted it upstream.

    oh wait... I forgot to make my point... My point is... the new tools support larger teams of people constantly interacting. I think there are great benefits to having a small team and effectively giving the middle finger to internet randos who don't submit their patches on one of their kidneys (i.e. - they'll think long and hard and sure as he'll won't submit two.) But getting people interested in your work output isn't one of those benefits. So... absolutely... go old school... But keep in mind the size of your team will be small and it may be hard to attract users.

    But... screw users... I write software to support my own use cases. I open source it on the off chance someone else may find it useful.

  • NordStreamYacht 32 minutes ago

    The CoC crowd are there to only instigate trouble.

    • wisty 21 minutes ago

      Every political group has bad faith actors who care more about winning the argument than the truth. And worse faith actors who are just there to trash talk people. Just look at the red button / blue button argument (where the vitriol in the debate would only make sense if the buttons were real, or if people like being jerks).

      Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them? Or say it should just be treated as a more utilitarian "be nice" convention for the mailing list (obviously it depends who is calling the shots, but that is true in any project).

    • throwawaypath 2 minutes ago

      Why anyone gave them the time of day over the past decade will always be a mystery to me. We should have pointed, laughed, and banned them. Instead, large projects and corporations dove headfirst into DEI/wokeism, openly inviting the entryists in. Looking back I think it was a COVID and ZIRP fever dream.

  • jauntywundrkind 36 minutes ago

    Isolating up is the opposite of interesting to me.

    What's clear is they mediating all selection choice and interest through pressure points of a single fixed trust board is of limited use going forward. I don't think the vouches and other web of trusts tackle the actual root need to disaggregate, decentralize.

    You can anti-social open source, reject, flee to nihil and going away, solo-ing. I think that's mad bad and dumb; just my judgement call. I agree strongly with v-it, open source is social. It's interesting and fascinating to open your mind. These other signals are fascinating. The glut of goodness is something we should firehose better, not shy from. https://v-it.org/

    • cwillu 2 minutes ago

      I care about what my best friend finds interesting. I care about what the people I willingly interact with daily find interesting. I categorically do not care what jauntywundrkind finds interesting, and if that bothers them, they're welcome to not use the little knickknacks I make for my friends; the license permits that.

      This is not antisocial.