Re: changing flavor of the linux world? was: craig sanders
On Tue, Nov 14, 2000 at 03:06:41PM -0900, Britton typed:
} I don't think that flame wars have always been accepted as part of
} debian-devel, linux-kernel, etc., and in general, is there *anyone* out
} there who feels that such pointless unpleasantness is in any way
} beneficial? I think that nastiness between developers is ultimately more
} detrimental to open source communities than most people think, and to just
} shrug and accept it is not an appropriate reaction. I guess there isn't
} really anything that can be done to prevent it, but it disturbs me when I
} see it, and will continue to disturb me.
Welcome to the real world. You get any group of people together,
there will always be the idiots, the antagonizers, the backstabbing,
the politics, etc etc etc. And flamewars are, I believe, quite quite
ancient on all the lists/organizations/etc you mention.
In one way, flamewars are a good thing; it gets things out into the open,
and it means the participants (usually) strongly believe in *something*.
I've seen situations where the lack of any flaming lay over a quite
nasty undercurrent of backstabbing which, combined with a bunch of
cow-ish drooling followers of the backstabbing party, led to more or
less total disintegration. There's something wrong when a tiny minority
manages to subvert the larger majority into doing something *their* way,
no arguments allowed.
Hence: just because it looks nice on the surface doesn't mean it's all
nice and happy underneath; just because people have strong and different
opinions about certain issues doesn't mean that the entire project is
a black river of corruption.
It's human interaction. Deal with it. Going out and saying "I'm so
ashamed of you all... <sniff>, fix it now you nasty people!" doesn't
help and is actually a quite egocentric way of looking at things.
You're either preaching to the choir, and the people you want to listen
to you won't listen to you anyways.
It's just been a bad week, for some reason. People have been pissed,
people have been way over-reacting in multiple ways, there's just
bad vibes all over the place.
Just let this stuff blow over. We can't be happy and get along all the
time.
--
An Thi-Nguyen Le
|A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
| -- O'Henry
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