Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

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Check your privilege. While you may have the luxury, political cachet, or just plain old luck at your job to pooh-pooh whatever open source libraries, applications, or frameworks that don't meet your arbitrary definition of saccharine civility, the rest of us out in the real working world have far more pedestrian concerns.

The ideals you've posited sound pleasant initially, but they bear little resemblance to being able to do real work in the messy, impatient, human-infested world others live in. Would it be nice to eschew the linux kernel, or the openbsd community, because a large fraction of those folks meet the ESR 'busy hacker with attitude' definition? Sure. Would it be career-killing to say "Linus/Theo were curt with me, _how wude_, let me agonize over it on my Tumblr and waste dev cycles finding another kernel/crypto library/whatever"? Absolutely.

ESR's guide is pragmatic, and far more effective at solving the real problem in front of the questioner, than the "pout and shun" methodology you've espoused.

I am well aware that several critical projects have incredibly awful and hostile communities. I'm also aware that a subset of people in those communities actually attempt to claim that their hostility is a feature. That's a bug, and useful to warn people about, and to attempt to fix, and to not copy in any new community. It's not a thing to revel in, excuse, and encourage, lest we end up with more.

You seem to be reading more into that statement than I've actually said. You're also attempting to ascribe a ridiculously patronizing tone that is of course easy to argue against, having been artificially constructed for that purpose rather than representing any actual position I've stated. I didn't say "don't use Linux because LKML is awful"; that would indeed be counterproductive. I'm saying "make new communities more friendly and welcoming than LKML, and don't encourage or excuse being awful to others".

Are you actually attempting to claim the document has no issues at all? Or are you simply trying to claim that despite its issues the document also contains useful information? I'm not arguing against the latter, simply stating that that's a good reason to create and propagate new documents that don't have those issues. If you're trying to claim the former, you've done nothing to actually support that position or reply to the detailed list of such issues.

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