just got off the phone with the lug radio gang. they had me on for a quick update of the goings on in KDE land. they also took the opportunity to grill me with a few of the usual questions about interoperability and linus. you can hear it on next week's show if you're interested.
and speaking of such things ... i've been sitting on my blog-hands the last few days thinking about what to say as the brush fire ignited from a spark of linus' torvalds pen swept across the community.
i really have nothing to say about the topic itself; there's simply nothing there for me to comment on. but the community reaction has been amazingly frustrating for me to experience.
but how to express that frustration in a way that makes any sort of sense is not easy. the question that keeps circling around my head is: if people are as passionate about this open source stuff, why do they engage in destructive behaviour that works directly against the efforts of those who are trying to make it better? this is not a soap opera for your benefit, this is a real effort being made by a relatively small number of people that, goddess forbid, ought to actually be enjoyable. and someone writing one impassioned email, even if that someone is the pope of linux himself, does not qualify as a reason to ignore that.
it is high time we agreed that we can be individuals when it comes to our project identity and purposes, but that we are generally working in the same space for similar ends: an open source desktop experience that kicks ass. there can be more than one result, but there is really only one directive..
i think it is also high time that we got to the business of making taboo out of the sort of actions that sew seeds of division within our culture.
that way when linus' says, "i like Foo and Bar sucks in this particular way" we can all just step back and say, "interesting. i always wondered what he did and didn't like. i wonder how bar could be made not to suck in that way?" and maybe the answer to that question is "nothing" or "bar is meant to suck like that, huzzah!". but it shouldn't result in tears and gnashing and arguments and fights and stories on the top geek web sites.
this isn't to say we always have to agree, we just have to stop ripping the clothes off each other when we find points of difference. it makes us look like foolish, and there are a lot of people watching. most of those people want to believe in what we're doing, but we keep giving them reasons to doubt.
so how do we move the people in our community in a positive direction? the obvious answer is leadership, but i think we need more than just small numbers of leaders that are self-selected from amongst the developers. not only are we only human (meaning we need to eat and sleep and do slip up as well), and there are very few of us relative to the numbers of people who aren't developers.
i believe it is time community leadership from amongst the user base stepped up and started doing the Right Thing(tm) in these situations. it's time those who write about the open source desktop stopped fanning the flames and instead wrote about strengthening the community (those can be controversial, click-makers too!).
when i see people like frank from kde-look.org and kde-apps.org sites i see the possibilities of such leadership (not to put any pressure on you frank =). those websites show the positive change (and not just for kde!) a committed user can create. he wrote those sites, maintains them and sets a really positive mood and a cool groove.
the community needs more franks.
in other news, i finally made a decision on how to address the transparency painting issues in kicker and simply removed the problematic shadow-around-the-text-labels code from the minipager for 3.5.1.
i also really need to get myself a dual screen system again so i can ensure things work properly there. there have been 3 regressions since 3.4: one in the new DnD pager code, one related to panel autohide occasionally doing odd things and one in the taskbar settings. all fairly minor, but all things that likely would've been caught if i were using xinerama on a daily basis. it's also easier to debug those situations with the right hardware ;)
which is a concern with plasma development since there will be so much from scratch code that will need to be tested thoroughly on both single and multiscreen setups.
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5 comments:
Respectfully, I strongly disagree with your conclusion. The problem is not that Linus is critical of (what I see as) a growing disease inside the Gnome project. It's our responsibility as concerned citizens to raise such issues. The actual problem is that Linus was not courteous in his approach.
I believe that we have lost much of the art of rhetoric in this Internet culture where everyone is a publisher, a king of Very Own Web Page. No longer are the eloquent, groomed, elite class the primary creators of language of record and of discourse. We are all publishers now. Unlike any other time in our history, we all wield words as weapons. And doing so we are passionately swinging our mighty pens in high arcs unaware of the damage we can do.
What we need is a 100% commitment to etiquette.
no. how things are said is pretty much irrelevant, as long as the point gets across. Especially in communities with members from all over the world and many non native speakers, demanding eloquence is unrealistic and unproductive. The important part of this story isn't even linus' original statement. Its the community's reaction to it.
Some people on planet kde and planet gnome have asked members of the community to become more professional. I believe that is the wrong way to go tho. Acting more mature would be plenty IMO.
hm.. perhaps i didn't word it properly, but what both of you (jason and tom) is essentially what i was (trying to?) say.
it isn't about shutting up, it's about engaging each other in a positive, productive manner.
emphasis on positive.
the only thing i'd disagree with is tom's assertion that it doesn't matter how something is said. it matters a lot. there is often a way to say something that is destructive and a way to say the exact same thing that is constructive.
that's why people usually ask specifically for constructive criticism rather than just simply criticism =)
Maybe reading "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" will shed some light on this:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
It doesn't give ready anwers, but does explain a lot about group dynamics and where optimal solutions live.
Another entrypoint for information about flamefest versus group cohesion lays around the discussion of "Dunbar's Number". It is research about optimal (sub)group sizes and effects of modes of interaction (say email versus forum, or game worlds versus real life).
Etiquette is an answer, though 'grammar nazi' style commitment to that is not healthy, neither for the individual nor the group. Aaron is on the right track for saying that individuals should interact with groupmembers in a positive way. Basicly you should cooperate with the group, or not be with it at all. Else groups just dissapate because not enough that binds them.
'not reacting' to things that are unhealthy for the group has a similar point. If nobody reacts trolling will just continue. If everybody reacts you get an avalanche effect. Groups need a way to effectively put 'noisy' comments on a sidetrack. A good example of this is the appearance of an 'off-topic' subforum in about every online forum you encounter. On some way this you could see this as a need to have blinders available in the group structure, so everybody can focus on the tasks that need to be done.
Anyways, sorry for the "looking from the moon"-viewpoint of this post. But the things you are seeing are quite general behaviour patterns. It is just that due to the internet we are beginning to see stronger group<->individual feedback loops than ever before in history.
Aaron, I think it would be good idea if you could think and blog about this some more. I suspect that quite a few people read your rablings ;-)
Henk Poley <><
Anyone who has ever seen a mailing list thread where Linus has commented will know that the four posts that he made are absolutely nothing unusual - it's just that it involved Gnome and KDE.......
Linus is a pretty even handed, straight down the middle guy, but when there's an issue that does not warrant a really, really pointless thousand post thread discussing how 'bar' can be made not to suck he will simply recommend the simple method - use 'foo'. The fact that it made many news sites and many gnashed their teeth on blogs is just symptomatic of how some people really don't like it, although they would almost certainly be happy to dish it out if Linus had said 'use bar'. Linus almost always ends up being right, most of the time. Thats how Linux got where it is today. He went with what worked, chose the right license to get code back in and did not get bogged down in academic crap about microkernals. That's why many seem to think his opinion matters.
I think it's also revealing of how Linus views projects like Portland. Although there's obviously a lot of really useful stuff that can be done in terms of better integration between desktops and low level components, hardware and communication, the notion that we're going to get two incompatible desktops to work in harmony for ISVs and IHVs is just wishful thinking. I wish Portland and you guys all the best on the stuff where you really can get things done, but long term I'm a bit more sceptical of some of the other claims made for it.
Faced with that, in the end these ISVs and IHVs are just going to go with what Linus recommends - use 'foo'. We're probably a good ten years away from that though. I have a pretty good idea about what will work and what will make 'desktop Linux happen', and who knows, I may even get around to it one of these days. However, many of those same people who've commented over the past few days really, really, really won't like it. Linus' comments would seem as nothing.
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