How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

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.'"

Link is a video

[CaptainMunchies]

Tag the story video or videolink to inform.

Re:You mean....

[fishyfool]

No, They mean like Jeff Merkey. Ever read some of his comments to the Linux Kernel mailing list? hoo boy.

Re:What I learned working on NetBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean seriously, when my own fully functional version of "echo" is 4116 bytes stripped, how come GNU's is 13880, and all it has mine doesn't is --help and --version? (Both are dynamically linked.

See it for yourself:
OpenBSD `echo': http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/bin/echo /echo.c?rev=1.6&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup [openbsd.org]
GNU `echo': http://cvs.sv.gnu.org/viewcvs/coreutils/coreutils/ src/echo.c?view=markup [gnu.org]

GNU version supports de-escaping the parameters before printing them while your version probably doesn't.

Re:Seen it...

[slipsuss]

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.

Re:Video link

[anagama]

In your post you indicated:

grub install /dev/hda

The program you were looking for was "grub-install" -- note the dash, grub-install is one word.

This weekend I helped a friend rescue his data from a windows install that quit working -- it would get to the windows loading screen, then reboot. We installed ubuntu on a new drive (slave), then copied over the windows data from the master. Hooked up his other drive as master and of course, no way to boot because the newly installed master didn't have the appropriate MBR. Five minutes on google (I'd never had to repair an MBR before) and the solution was quite simple, boot up the live CD, mount the slave with the linux install, and then do the grub install cmd, like this (assuming IDE):

sudo mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt (NOTE: mount the drive w/ linux, in my case, it was slave so hdb)
sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt /dev/hda

Your main problem was the lack of a live distro. You decided to go ape-shit instead of deciding to get a live cd.

Re:Video link

[Pigeon451]

If you had problems with Ubuntu, the user-friendly Linux distro of the world, you will not fare better with other distro's. Wait a couple years and try Linux again when it has matured some more and/or you've grown some patience.

10 years ago, only hardcore nerds used Linux. 5 years ago, Windows users tried switching, but were put off by the difficult install and idiotic Linux users with nasty support. Now we've reached a point where Linux installs fairly easily, programs are more user friendly and support is very good. But it'll still be several years yet until Linux is ready for "mom and pop".

BTW, trying to get ANY two systems to dual-boot is a struggle, and Linux is actually fairly good at it. Ever try dual-booting two Windows machines? It's not easy, and it's not necessarily Linux's fault. Get a dedicated hard drive, yank all the others out, and install it then. Or stick with a live CD.

Re:Frankly, I'm getting tired of it.

[Rakishi]

"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?

I've found lots of such programs useful, if the features in already don't do it for me I can either modify the code nyself and add it.

All you're doing then is giving open source a black mark.

Oh, I'd say you were. Open Source isn't about having someone do something for you, its about having the ability to do it yourself (ie: have source code and can modify it). How about instead of telling someone who is likely busy and gains almost NOTHING (save an ego boost) from more users to code something for you for free you instead do it yourself or maybe pay them for it. Hell many of these people are getting paid for the parts they're coding for their own use so you essentially want them to work for free to implement what you do while they'd get paid to implement what they need.

They're simply being honest about who they're coding the project for, not everyone is unemployed and has 60 hours a week to burn on a hobby.

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!?

It's likely that many gain very little from users, they're not a company and have no incentive to reply to you. It's likely, as someone else, mentioned that if your email was more useful then they would answer. Possibly they already know of the issue and are too busy to answer, that's life.

Re:Link is a video

[HermMunster]

Although some good points those guys were blowing smoke up their own asses. They want to set themselves up as the figureheads to follow for managing open source. Give them 20 more years of dealing with hard to work with people and they'll say everything they said should have been reevaluated. I was troubled throughout the whole thing. They acted like they had all the answers and they had a pool if people and that one project is enough to make someone who has been a solid open source contributor a shunnable person. They didn't even begin to touch on the fact that they need to teach instead of direct. If they lost time due to people that's the cost of doing business. You can't drive people like machines, and in the end they are trying to manage people as if they were managing a project. Never works, never has, never will.

Re:Seen it...

[slipsuss]

We imitated this CVS behavior because it achieves two feature goals:

1) severability: you can 'break off' any part of a working copy, and it still functions as a standalone working copy.

2) portability: you can transport a working copy to different disks or machines, and it still functions.

That said, we're now re-evaluating the utility of these features... it seems that few people actually use them or care. In svn 2.0, we might just go for the 'all metadata in one place' design, much like svk and other systems do. :-)

By the way, you don't need to use slashdot to "get our ear", come post questions on the [e-mail] lists.