KWin Maintainer: Fanboys and Trolls Are the Cancer Killing Free Software

An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community. Quoting: 'Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it's against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community. But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.'"

Comments

Wow, just wow.

[mcgrew]

I read it. Pretty lame, and I've been using KDE for ten years (skipped 4, it sucked). There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing, just WAAH!! OMG, TROLLS AND FLAMERS!

I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article. If you get even the tiniest bit of recognition you're going to have that. From 1998 to 2002 I had a fairly popular Quake site that was popular enough that every mega site wanted to host me. Yeah, I got hate mail, but not much, and so fucking what anyway? 95% of the mail was YOU ROCK, DUDE!!

This guy needs to grow up and grow a pair. Haters don't hurt open source, and BTW, I HATE GNOME!

Re:Wow, just wow.

[mcgrew]

Really? How about the idea that having a bunch of lame-ass mooches, trolls, and flamers causing nothing but drama increases the stress level of developers and causes them to abandon projects entirely?

And that excuses censorship? Pretty damned cowardly, if you ask me. Stress levels is an excuse for censorship?

The projects don't complete or get kicked way back on deadline waiting for someone else to pick them up, learn the code, learn to extend it, and finish it off. If they ever do, since those same lame-ass trolls and flamers are waiting to pounce again.

That's just pathetic. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Nobody's irreplaceable. If it gets behind schedule it gets behind schedule. Nobody's life is on the line here.

OR, the lame-ass trolls need to grow up.

Yes, they should. They annoy me, too. Let me know if you ever figure out a way to make that happen.

Look, I get it. You're 14, you live in your parents' basement, and to you swearing is only nominally less exciting than a furtive glimpse at a pair of tits. You think it makes you sound grown up.

I'm 61 years old. I was in South East Asia in the USAF at the end of the Vietnam war. Your reading comprehension isn't too good, did you miss the part where I ran a popular Quake site from my crib, since according to you I was an infant? Do you realize how stupid that makes you look?

But there's a right way and a wrong way to phrase things, a right way and a wrong way to handle conflict, and a right and wrong way to deal with drama.

When someone advocates censorship, the only rational response is FUCK OFF AND DIE. That's exactly what profanity is for, to demonstrate beyond all doubt that this kind of shit pisses you off. The fact that an open source guy advocates censorship pisses me off. It wouldn't have bothered me if it had come from a Microsoft or Apple employee, I'd have thought it was hilarious.

I ran self-censorship when I had that web site, until the very end when some of the same crap spewed from an opinion on one of the bigger sites saying the same as this. I thought "wait a minute, this isn't a children's site." There was vulgarity afterwords, albeit in moderation. The same when I started my /. account (a fourteen year old with a five digit UID?), although I didn't comment much. Same with K5 before it died some time after I left.

You would not like my journals, the characters are "colorful" for lack of a better word.

"I don't like censorship, darn it" just doesn't cut it. Even FUCK CENSORSHIP AND THE HORSE IT RODE IN ON is too mild.

Hell, the reason I never made the jump to using Linux on the desktop was my own experiences trying to set up a Mythbox in my living room; because I didn't have the exact hardware that one of the developers had, asked for some help, got shouted at "RTFM you fucking loser" over and over again when the documentation was crap and had no relevance to the situation I was asking about... screw it.

I've heard that story before, but never experienced it myself when I was learning Linux at the turn of the century. Maybe things have changed since then, but obviously people shouldn't act like that. I don't like what they do and wonder if maybe they're really enemies of open source (MS shills; MS hates "open sores" and called it a cancer), but everyone has the right to be a jerk, and nobody has a right to not be offended.