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How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

Posted by Hemos on from the these-people-have-a-poison-aoe-need-totems-to-cleanse dept.

CoolVibe writes "Two Subversion developers talk at Google about how to keep pests and malcontents out of your open source projects. From the abstract: 'Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences.'"

6 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. That's easy... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Lock them out and tell them to become Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot.

  2. Not every "poisonous" person is easy to spot by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful.

    Those are easy to deal with. The problem is with people who, under the cover of "doing good to the project", make everybody hate everybody else. Those usually spread rumors around, go tell John that Jack, frankly, doesn't work enough, while at the same time telling Jack that John, really, isn't leading the project in the right direction, etc...

    We've had plenty of those at the company. More often than not, those are what we usually called "software diva", people whom management think are indispensable, and therefore should be more or less allowed to do or say anything.

    My way of dealing with these folks was usually simple: single them out at the weekley meeting, sum up the shit they've been spewing around, and tell them they're allowed to run free with whatever they thought was best on a local fork of the project for a week and prove they're right and/or better and/or more efficient than Jack or John. Failing to prove it, they'd be relegated to the line-pisser pool, otherwise they could take my place as team lead. Usually the result was the software diva leaving the meeting all offended, and half of the time resigning after a couple of days. Public shame and the threat of putting their supposed programming skills where their mouth is is a very efficient method of putting these people in their place.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  3. hmm by nomadic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful.

    AKA "coders".

  4. I believe they call it... by Billosaur · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...assassination in the journals. Quick, clean, and ensures they can't just be transferred to another department to create headaches for someone else.

    --
    GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
  5. Frankly, I'm getting tired of it. by VanessaE · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In the past I've run into a few coders on different projects, some who are just contributors, others who are the "main" coder on some project. More times than I can count, I've had coders tell me, "Oh, it's your hardware, my code works fine, sod off." That's just plain laziness, when the coder won't entertain the idea that maybe, just *maybe*, their program is buggy. Then, there's the other type I've encountered that says, basically, "I wrote this program for myself. You want Feature X, you code it!" All I have to say is that if the program was written for your own use and you didn't want people filing bug reports, why the hell did you release it to the world? All you're doing then is giving open source a black mark.


    The final type of person, the one that bothers me perhaps the most, is the coder or contributor who simply doesn't answer bug reports or emails (whatever the appropriate method may be) at all, even after several weeks of waiting. Are you guys *trying* to turn your users away!?

    People really do see those buggy programs, folks. They show up in lists of stuff at places like FM and SF. If you think your code is good and you want to release it, great! But if you won't consider bug fixes, keep the damn thing to yourself and/or contribute your code to an already-existing project instead.

    I've been a programmer since 1986 on another platform, but stopped in around 2000 and haven't come back since (outdated platform anyway, so my "skillz" don't exactly translate to modern programming methods), and I have never once considered telling someone off like these examples. What went wrong? When did the F/OSS community start to gain this elitist attitude?

    Mod me down if you want, I don't care. I've got the karma to burn.

  6. Re:Seen it... by slipsuss · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think you misunderstood that part of our talk.

    We didn't boot any person at all, we simply rejected the offered patch. The person wasn't a member of the community, just a drive-by patch contributor.... we didn't "throw him out", because he wasn't "in" to begin with! Patch contributions are great things, but if we can't come to an agreement, then that's the end of things. The person wasn't interested in resubmitting without his name attached to the patch, so we had to reject the patch. Our honest hope was that not only would he contribute his patch properly, but that he'd become a regular committer too. Instead, he was annoyed at us and walked away. C'est la vie, we're not going to change our code submission rules for a single visitor. Twas a shame.