this blog post has a major omission of any specifics whatsoever. I've never seen this kind of behavior, and I'm having a great urge to say something like, "oh well because PHP/Ruby/etc". But that is all prejudicial.
Won't we be given some specifics so that we don't have to guess what famous OSS author actually typed "HAHAHA" at a pull request ?
It's hard to believe that people "have never seen this behaviour" have spent much time watching the OSS community. Ulrich Dreper, well known OSS contributor and former steward of glibc, was famous for flaming the ever-living shit out of anyone who dared submit a patch that he in any way did not care for. To give but one example, http://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053.htm...
Surely we can find a better example of this supposedly widespread behavior than this. Reading that whole thread, it's clear that this Christopher guy hasn't even considered issues that are quite important to Ulrich and his collaborators. Then when his failure to consider is pointed out, instead of taking the lesson to heart he doubles down with unconvincing, unrelated arguments. That is "crap", and that's what Ulrich called it.
So it's not that you've never seen this behavior in your tenure as " a contributor to open source projects for almost ten years", it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable.
That's, at least, a more intellectually honest position than your previous claim.
There are a lot of ways to reject a patch on the grounds of cleanness and efficiency that don't involve deriding the contributor's work as "BSD crap" that only helps people who "deserve to be punished".
Drepper was a monumental asshole, and he deeply hurt the glibc project for years.
Toxic is exactly the correct word. It poisons the community and kills morale. If an employee of mine were ever using that tone around the office, we would be making a quick trip to a small conference room to discuss appropriate behavior toward colleagues. If it kept up, they'd be gone. Because somebody would eventually be leaving over that behavior, and I'd rather it be the perp than the victims.
>it's just that you think toxic behavior is acceptable.
You think that calling someone's idea crappy is unacceptable? In what sense of the word? Are you saying that it should be illegal to make fun of someone's ideas?
Won't we be given some specifics so that we don't have to guess what famous OSS author actually typed "HAHAHA" at a pull request ?