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When Enthusiasm For Free Software Turns Ugly
An anonymous reader writes: Bruce Byfield writes for Linux Magazine about the unfortunate side-effect of people being passionate about open source software: discussions about rival projects can get heated and turn ugly. "Why, for example, would I possibly to see OpenOffice humiliated? I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and — with some misgivings — the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation. The same is true of other famous feuds. Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs? Similarly, because I value Debian's stability and efforts at democracy, am I supposed to have a strong distaste for Ubuntu?"
Humans are pack animals. They need to gather according to shared traits and then see an enemy of everyone who does not fit. It happens with politics, religion, sports, cultural preferences, sexual preferences, computer platform choice and so on. The only thing going for nerd pack mentality is that slapfights and internet rage are funny. You want to get a good laugh at those losers flinging spitballs at each other over irrelevant minutiae. And then you want to twist their arms behind their backs and drown them in a toilet because they don't fit in.
you baited, I clicked.
"Why, for example, would I possibly to see OpenOffice humiliated?
I don't often possibly to see.
But when I do, I ask myself why would I.
For example.
I think, if we can just be patient and take the time to learn a bit more about each other, we can—quite possibly—finally get along with one another. No more fighting. No more squabbling. No more arguing about who or what is better. We learn to coexist.
Ya know, I think we may be on to something here. Before we lose this moment, let's just jot down those thoughts quickly...in emacs.
Entire story is care-bear SJW fluff. Discard.
He had me until he started his sexist moaning.
Can make a big difference between projects. For example LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice because to much potential contributors was frustrated by the way the OpenOffice maintainers was with them in the past. The libav fork from libFFmpeg was also a way to solve different way of maintaining the project at some point in time. And I am certain that there is a lot of others examples.
There nothing wrong with this process. Better having two peaceful projects than a single one with frustration against it.
Why ... am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?
He's talking about GNOME 2, right? *ducks*
At least when it comes to forks, a lot of what decides the winner is momentum. People who don't feel strongly either way about the divide who just want to work on their non-related part of the project and will eventually switch, but not until after the fact. That is why many dysfunctional projects and organizations keep on going, you might feel that your fork is the long term better way and you're just waiting for the old project to die and wither away so you can effectively get behind one rally flag again. From your perspective it's not so much a competition as the car ahead of you swerving all over the road to keep you behind him, so you get pissed. And sometimes there is a lot of sour grapes that you stole their thunder too.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I hope Slashdot adds a filter so I can automatically hide comments that contain "SJW". At this point I'm not sure if the real benefit would be the improvement in intelligent discussion or the savings in bandwidth!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, issues are licenses. BSD etc is permissive, but the GPL is not moving things ahead anymore because big corporations are 'freebie-ing' their stuff, in some cases with a few restrictions. If 'free' software only allows to build 'free' software it will succumb to very cheap, very good "for pay" tools. The one that broke Linux as a dev platform for me was GSL not being LGPL .
GSL is GPL on all platforms, so what could that have to do with Linux's suitability for development?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
A link please.
Lol
Microsoft Office ribbon is the worst POS in an office suite ever invented.
So our sames are more than our differents!
BRIAN: Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!
FRANCIS: We are! Ohh.
BRIAN: We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!
EVERYONE: The KOffice Project?!
BRIAN: No, no! Microsoft Office!
EVERYONE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
GNOME 2 had some good ideas.
"am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?"
Uhh? What? Where's this outstanding interface design, and why haven't they told anyone about it?
Look, we're not ignoring it. They just haven't shown it to us! Please, why keep that a secret and release Gnome 3 shell instead?
Stefan Axelsson
Indeed, those who use the phrase as a pejorative essentially label themselves as angry idiots. It also doesn't mean anything. I've seen SJWs blames in the comments on almost everything including quite diametrically opposite things.
I even saw them get blamed for making sci-fi about dystopia, and that was an AC modded up to +3 insigntful so clearly some people agreed.
So, I'd like to challenge anyone actually using the phrase to actually define what it means in a way that isn't a catch-all of "crap I hate on the internet".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Tribalism a.k.a. "us" versus "them" is one of the oldest and deepest-seated human instincts (chimpanzees are also very tribal, which suggests that the instinct goes back to the common ancestor of humans and chimps).
The overwhelming instinct is to choose a group to belong to and to want to see competing groups humiliated. Breaking out of this is very uncomfortable, as the effort will not be appreciated by your "tribe mates", who will consider you a traitor.
ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?
Similarly, because I value Debian's stability and efforts at democracy
I don't know what planet you've been on recently but that koolaids going to make you fat.
This is just human behaviour. This is like adding 'on the internet; to turn it into something new.
People have literaly killed because of their passion. This is not something new since Open Software. Not even since software or since computers. This has been going on since Kain and Abel.
People are passionate about things they care about: News at 11.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Skub.
stuff like this is why the year of the Linux desktop will never happen.
I've heard the same thing about rape, rape has been used to explain things like farts, sitting, listening to music, I guess that means 'rape' has no particular meaning any more when the follow the same logic.
I think Urban Dictionary has already a good definition.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If two projects have the same goal, why do they take opposite roads away from each other with their licenses? Not sure I buy the argument here.
Why, for example, would I possibly to see OpenOffice humiliated?
Because it never tells you when you accidentally a word, that's why.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
...Tribalism is a thing.
If we don't have nationalism (or patriotism as it's sometimes termed) we get irate and defensive over our favorite football team, or whether we liked the Partridge Family more than the Brady Bunch.
We're chimps, that's it.
-Styopa
Sadly it's a fact in open source. Outside criticism of a project, even valid criticism is often seen as an attack on the people who use it and it provokes some irrational responses. Or when some beloved piece of software is replaced in a dist by something else (usually demonstrably better) and supporters of the old software freak out. Happens all the time.
F/OSS teams have issues with anything that compete with them project. Why? Cause the only individual benefit in being on a F/OSS project is getting credit. When you have competition, credit takes a back seat, it's the product [features and implementation] that gets the focus.
That's why when a commercial proprietary comes in with a competing project (IBM, RedHat, Apple are culprits), there's a huge uproar typically.
Then again, Libre Office was created out of hubris and spite for the open office team. I prefer neither at this point, the commercial offerings are 5x better currently.
OSS communities, by nature, don't lend themselves well to large top-down designs. Unfortunately, that's the most common way humans have been able to successfully organize authority, showing itself in government and business alike. The result resembles feudalism - a bunch of small OSS lords ruling their small fiefdoms with a tribal mentality for anything against their cause. It is a very caustic environment, and in my opinion, the number one reason Free Software remains marginal. Decisions around OSS are made on politics and ideals, not on pragmatism. Its hard to attract mindshare in that kind of environment.
Same ugly thing for ZFS licence. Can run un kernel space for CDDL distro (bsd illumos...) , but it's harder to run un kernel space for GNU (Linux et hurd :P) because of licence incompatibility.
The main issue with the SJW label (as per definition of Urban Dictionary), is that it requires a lot of information on intent.
So far so good by UB standarts.
Judgmental, subjective observation, can be dismissed.
This is the key flaw in the definition, that makes it unusable. How do you know the motivation of the 'SJW'? Is there a separate community, where these SJW meet and brag about their achievements?
The examples that follow in the UB have issues as well.
Same problem of having to know the motivation.
So people reuse argumentation made by others. What else is new?
I have seen this only on slashdot, where there is karma (and karma whoring). Here, JS points are almost currency. Is there any other such community?
More likely that they actually believe their cause and the social circle they live in has the same belief, or they would have left it. Also, slashdot has exactly the same way of thinking. The correct view is that tech sector and open source in particular is meritocracy, that women just don't want to be there and this issue should just be dropped.
Also interesting label is "White knighting", which also is pejorative used to mock those who defend others. On the face of it, defending the abused sounds like a good thing to do, but when you don't like it, call it white knighting, and it suddenly becomes something bad.
"Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?"
Because there is no such thing as "GNOME's outstanding interface designs". But the rest of your argument makes sense :)
Some retard shilling for Systemd.
about "GNOME" and "excellent interface design", aren't you?
The other problem with labeling people SJWs - when it comes down to interpreting intent - is that you could label the very people who are calling people SJWs AS SJWs.
Do they repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet? I've seen some big rants against SJWs that qualifies as "engaging in arguments" about this subject.
"often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way"? Subjective, like you said, but could easily be applied to the anti-SJW poster as well as to the labeled-as-SJW poster.
"for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation"? Again, like you said, subjective and requires guessing as to the individual's motivation but could be applied to anti-SJW posters as well.
And so on. If a definition is so vague that it can be used to define both sides of a debate, then it's useless (at least as far as being used by one side to label the other).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Speaking of things turning ugly in FOSS space...
Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
Recently an opensource game release story was removed due to the game developer's open sexism(0) and harrasment(1) of women in tech.
A story posted by the editor of the popular Phoronix linux news site about a release of an Open Source videogame was later manually removed(2). The reason cited was the game developer's unacceptable views on social issues such as gender equality (3).
The release story was titled "Xonotic-Forked ChaosEsqueAnthology Sees New Release - Phoronix" and can be accessed via the google cache(4).
With the recent inclusion of a code of conduct(5) for those wishing to contribute to the Linux Kernel some questions now need to be asked and answered about the inclusion of code from people who are known to engage in or promote socially unacceptable attitudes or harrasments of those whom the free-software movement would prefer to attract in their place:
* Are the social or political views of an author of free software relevant to that software's inherent quality?
* Should the beliefs of an opensource developer weigh when when evaluating whether a piece of opensource software is worthy of any publicity or public notice?
* Should men with unpopular or "forbidden" views be excised from the opensource movement and "not allowed" to contribute, in a manner similar to that which is done in employment?
* Has the free/opensource software movement changed in these respects since its founding? If so is this a positive change?
* Should there be gatekeepers to opensource that decide who may and who may not contribute. Should abusive developers be "blackballed" to maintain proper social order and controls?
and
* What are the consequences of not doing this
Citations:
(0) Past related incident: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310
(1) http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/...
(2) Removed story URL: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
(3) http://www.phoronix.com/forums...
"Fortunately, the article has been removed now."
"Thanks everybody for speaking up."
(4) https://webcache.googleusercon...
(5) Linux "Code of Conflict"
In 3, 2, 1...
I don't know, but I think these people do: https://youtu.be/gb_qHP7VaZE
.
However, when the sports fan "my team is going to crush your team" mentality starts to creep into the competition, things can, and do, turn ugly.
So the question is, how do the project leaders keep that sports fan mentality out of the project, how do the project leaders keep participants focused upon the goals of the project and not on beating out the other projects?
Well, the distinction is that the people calling others SJWs are defending injustice and maligning any desire to fix injustices. Call them SIWs, social injustice warriors?
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GNOME 1.4 had all the good ideas, a flexible highly configurable interface that would still be good to use today. GNOME 2 was what made me move to KDE.
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The politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
I think the rivalry between vi and emacs pre-date Linux.
Besides, what's so "ugly" about it? Not as if people are rioting in the streets. Just juvenile posts back and forth.
The summary appears to totally misrepresent what Bruce actually wrote about.
(SUMMARY) Last week, I wrote an article about the decline of Apache OpenOffice, and how its attitude towards other projects might be part of its problem. "No one wants to see OpenOffice humiliated," ...
Why, for example, would I possibly [sic] to see OpenOffice humiliated?
Why indeed? Bruce never said he would want to see OpenOffice humiliated. He followed with:
(BRUCE)
I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and -- with some misgivings -- the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation.
So, he has a preference, personal ideals (or ethics, or something else, I don't know). So what? The thing is he prefers LibreOffice. Big deal; that's his right.
(SUMMARY)
The same is true of other famous feuds. Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?
*gasp*. He has a preference! This cannot be tolerated! The real information:
(BRUCE)
To me, a personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate. I may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale.
(SUMMARY>
Similarly, because I value Debian's stability and efforts at democracy, am I supposed to have a strong distaste for Ubuntu?"
I don't know. I wonder what Bruce thinks. Hey! He answers the almost rhetorical question in his fucking article!
To me, a personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate. I may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale.
The summary (and therefore the story as appearing here on /.) is flamebait. The summary picks and chooses quotes from the article and presents them out of context. There is no story here. The article is actually good and non-biased. Pity the same cannot be said about slashdot.
http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
I'm the only guy using Ubuntu in a couple of startup projects. It's interesting how people react to that. Windows users thinks I'm a communist. Other "True Linuxer(TM)" distro users thinks I'm like the typical image they associate to Mac users (a fancy guy that don't know about the existence of shell, etc, because a "True Linuxer(TM)" compile everything). And Mac users thinks I'm a smelly hacker.
Judgmental, subjective observation, can be dismissed.
Maybe you should learn what "pejorative term" means before you bitch about subjectivity.
That's a concern of dictators and managers.
Free Software is free of those, too. If I'm doing what I'm doing because I want to do it, I don't give a metric ratfuck about your ideas of efficiency.
Thanks. I work in a bondage-and-domination efficiency-driven profit-based business culture for my meager pay. Don't try to "improve" my free time that way too.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
This is actually freedom of choice not ugliness.
No ODF support, chinese app dev, less space than a nomad. Lame.
It's clear the author is referring to GNOME 3. He's probably only been using Linux for a month or he wouldn't have written such a twatty article.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll take a stab at it: A SJW, to me, is one who claims to fight for one or more changes to improve social justice but whose approaches to achieving their goals are 1) noticeably more aimed at salving their own conscience rather than the stated goal and/or 2) commonly agreed is unlikely to achieve that goal or even counterproductive, e.g. recent articles on women in technology and gaming. They also display aggressive contempt to those who don't share their views (which, ironically, alienates those whose support they need to achieve their goals).
As they have no label for themselves, SJW serves as well as any until the come up with one satisfactory to themselves.
Its root cause is "Because Oracle, Larry Ellison is the Antichrist", a point of view that I am not exactly unsympathetic with. Libre Office was forked from the "Before engulfed by Oracle" open-source code, and many of the OO developers jumped ship for LibreOffice.
So, Oracle ended up donating Open Office to the Apache Foundation, but the fork had already happened. Rationally, the two should merge, but The Great Schism is a done deal, there's competing hair-splitting in the various forms of free-as-in-speech licenses, and never the twain shall meet.
*sigh*
Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?
What outstanding interface designs?
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Also interesting label is "White knighting", which also is pejorative used to mock those who defend others.
White knighting is the act of defending a woman because she's a woman, regardless of whether she's guilty or innocent. And yes, this is a bad thing: it's a form of sexism.
Linux, which used to not have SystemD and PulseAudio never achieved anywhere near the penetration of the worst Windows OS (which does have the equivalent of SystemD and PulseAudio in its API's and Frameworks). And once PulseAudio was added and now that SystemD is added that is why Linux penetration is abysmal. Logic Much?
The whole Pinto thing was not a real issue. It was proven (in court) to be no more dangerous or likely to catch fire in any other car. Just because three stupid girls left their gas cap off, stopped in the middle of the road to retrieve it when it fell of the roof of the car, and then had an idiot driving a 5,000 van who was fucking around with his smokes and radio plow into the back of their stopped car (in the middle of the road with the gas cap removed) at somewhere between 50 and 80 mph turning the whole thing into a fire-ball does not mean it was an unsafe car. So, your entire example, just like the SystemD/PulseAudio nonsense is a completely false bunch of bull-shit. Maybe you should try and example that involves hot coffee instead?
Funny. He said "GNOME's outstanding interface designs" when it was the death of Gnome after 2.32 that made me decide to buy a Mac two years ago. I've been happy ever since. GNOME 3 is *still* borked all this time later. I used to be one of those people who thought Linux would conquer the world one day... eventually. I now have to admit that it will be a nerd's plaything for as long as I live, at least.
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done. -- Fred Allen
Canonical earned their black eye in spades by giving no advance guidance to their dual-head power users while knowingly ruining the dual head experience in the service of a reconceived user interface which might or might not be all for the best in the long run.
It was their blasted refusal to honestly inform their dual head power users that the dual head power user experience would be unavailable in Ubuntu for several releases so that we could plan accordingly that caused me to set the Canonical bit in my bozo register.
and the news then continues about "open source software"...
The OpenOffice / LibreOffice split can be mostly blamed on Oracle. When Oracle bought Sun, OpenOffice became one of their properties, but they really didn't have a clue how to handle it properly. The development process became largely closed off to outside open source developers - sure they could download the code and change it, but Oracle wasn't doing anything useful with their code submissions. The result was that a group of people forked the code and created LibreOffice. Many users and most Linux distributions quickly switched.
Eventually Oracle concluded that OpenOffice wasn't a strategic fit for them. But they weren't willing to admit they had made a mistake and transfer the code ownership and trademarks to The Document Foundation (the LibreOffice organization), so instead they worked out a deal with the Apache Foundation to take over OpenOffice. I allocate a side order of blame to Apache; they should have refused the deal and insisted that Oracle turn everything over to The Document Foundation.
It's called tribalism. Tribalism is very alive and well, thank you for asking.
1). People love a competition. Winning and losing creates drama and tension;
2). Lots of people ran to FOSS to get away from companies or behavior they didn't like. They were ideologically motivated and such personalities are prone to "us-versus-them" viewpoints. Did you think that strong-willed, opinionated people would suddenly stop being that way, once active in the FOSS world?;
3). It's common that people who adopt FOSS see that choice as part of their identity. It's not something they can just take or leave, whatever, no big deal. And that applies to sub-choices like Mageia vs. Ubuntu vs. Gentoo, etc.
Do you not see all the venom directed at systemd? Despite all the perfectly rational, reasoned arguments against it, the emotion it generates comes from a different place. I've been alive long enough to know the difference. When something happens that you don't agree with but aren't invested in, you sigh, shrug your shoulders and move on.
The high levels of friction and emotion within FOSS comes from people wanting to win, needing to win. And perhaps being afraid to lose. If the "rules" are broken then it's a moral outrage! That's where the heat and ugliness comes from.