What do Open Source Projects need?
Open Source projects need for sure multiple things to be
beneficial to the project members as well as to communities
of users.
And without skilled programmers who do a lot of development
work there would not be Free Software to share.
But do we need people with special priviledges in responsible
positions like Christoph Berg aka Myon who make public
statements about other developers like this:
df7cb.de/blog/2007/Sadness.html:
>
Sven Luther, you suck.
>
I desperately hope Debian will recover from these months.
> PS: Please go see a psychologist. Really.
Such public statements are not surprising since Sam Hocevar
was elected as new Debian Project Leader back in April after
many public defacements were targeted at Sven Luther by him
during the electoral campaign.
To people with a social conciousness that shows the real spirit
of many debian developers.
Christoph Berg, Sam Hocevar and other developers should
take the time to re-read the Social Contract they signed when
they applied to become a debian developer.
The Debian Social Contract makes a few very interesting and
important statements.
Christoph Berg and other developers wrote great code and did
a good job in technical regards. But on the other side they are
lacking empathy for other people and intuition for conflict
situations. And from people with their special priviledges and
such responsibilities I expect these essential social skills.
If the conflict around the person of Sven Luther indirectly did
some harm to the Debian Project, then it happened due to a
non-existent conflict management.
The situation started to become a problem for Sven Luther
when decisions were taken against his person by Frans Pop
and other people. Both sides had problems to communicate
to the other party what their problem is in such a way, that
bigger conflicts could have been avoided.
And that was the pivotal moment.
A proper conflict management strategy could have taken care
of the desires of both conflict parties.
A proper conflict management could have assisted in a better
communication.
That was not existent and because Sven Luther was obsessed
about his work for Debian like many others he tried to get help
in all kinds of places. What you guys deface as "trolling" is
a helpless attempt to find a solution to his problems.
And every single person out there who joked about Sven Luther,
who defaced and attacked him was actively escalating the
situation.
Christoph Berg and Sam Hocevar are two of these people who
actively escalated the situation.
It is a hell of a cheap trick to blame one single person now for
many months of drama that many of you people influenced in
a negative way.
--
greetings,
Patrick Frank
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