This comment, from the CFO, is particularly nasty: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...
It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be. Does a company like Gitlab really deserve to have its employees publicly insulted in this way, after giving away so much to their users, for free, and being so much more transparent than 99% of tech companies?
At this point I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would go to the trouble of making their product open-source. It's just not worth it.
'Allowed' to be? The "open source culture" is the sum of the participants and participation is open to the general public. If being rude were "not allowed" who would be doing the not allowing and why should they be so empowered over members of the general public?
For example, I don't see anyone stepping up in that github thread and saying that insults and middle finger emojis are not OK. That's because that behavior is normalized. Participants in the thread either a) are OK with it; b) have resigned themselves to it; c) are refraining from speaking up for fear of being attacked too. That is what I mean by "allowed to happen".
Your right to criticize it and their right to say it are one and the same. Criticizing it and not permitting it are not the same thing.
When GamerGate became a thing, every major publication and several major figures in the gaming community all loudly spoke out against the harassment, and many prominent Gamergaters permanently gained reputations as harassers.
Not only do we need this kind of condemnation from leaders within the open-source community, but we need to go farther. We need open-source projects to say "we will not accept any contributions from anyone who participates in harassing GitLab employees", and if they work for a large corporation who's paying them to work on open-source code (e.g. Red Hat, Google), then contact their employers and convince them to cut ties. If you participate in harassment campaigns and sustained personal attacks against private individuals over a policy disagreement, then you should have no place in the community.
Unfortunately the problem has deep roots, and the corporations you mention have a track record of either turning a blind eye to bad behavior when the perpetrator is a popular open-source figure (Google), or actively supporting it because the victims are employed by a competitor (Red Hat).
In general, open-source communities are still stuck in the middle ages from an HR perspective. You can be the victim of terrible behavior, and have no recourse at all, because the project itself has no clear legal requirement to protect you, and none of the corporate sponsors will take responsibility for protecting you in the same way they protect their own employees; even if in practice they are the only ones with the power to do so. The result is a legal limbo where people can get away with terrible behavior. I've seen people get crushed by this, it's kafkaesque.
I can't see tears falling for either of those companies' employees as far as the broader community goes.
We don't just allow it, it appears that a vocal part even encourages it. It's toxic and unprofessional behavior, but organizations have no choice but to listen (as evidenced by Gitlab's response).
How is this different than what would be expected with a Code of Conduct? Must one call out “Don’t be a dick”? Vigorous debate is to be expected, being rude is not.
They can ban people who clicked on the "Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended" emojis. If it's against their rules, they should (otherwise there's no point in having rules in the first place). That said, if the emoji is in their system (and it's not there by accident), it probably serves a purpose. In this case, it accurately represents the sentiment of people who gave that feedback.
> How is this different than what would be expected with a Code of Conduct?
No different at all; Codes of Conduct exist primarily to signal allegiance or submission to the social justice crowd. They introduce nothing new on top of regular rulesets that existed in on-line communities since on-line was a thing.
Umm...that's their business model. It's not an act of generosity. It was a decision that they thought was in their best interest.
Do you also think Facebook and Google are making their products free out of the goodness of their hearts?
How any C level position blindly walks into this kind of thing in a post Cambridge-Analytica world is a different conversation.
When a C-level fundamentally misunderstands the company's culture and the culture of their target audience, incompotence becomes presumable and maliciousness becomes possible, IMO.
I'm not advocating in favor of rudeness, but the same reasoning goes for the middle finger gesture. It's an emoji that Gitlab have (I believe) deliberately included in their commenting mechanism. As far as I understand, it acts as a way to categorize users' anger and vitriol in a much more sanitized manner than if the users were to type their sentiment into the comment box. In general, allowing and encouraging negative feedback of specific parts of the service helps drive user engagement and demonstrably makes good business sense.
If users feel entitled and free to speak up, it's because there is a lot of competition in this area and they can easily leave. The fact that users are providing this feedback to Gitlab, rather than just deleting their users is a sign that they still trust the company and the service, want to keep using it and to drive it to be better.
In a world where companies think little of collecting and selling our personal data to make a profit? In a world where companies feel the need to track every part of my life with or without my permission. This is something I can't escape, as every time I interact with someone that does use one of these platforms than they are able to collect data on me.
We both know that there are companies out there that are trying their best to not exploit their users, and sadly these companies are often held to much higher standards. When a company that we trust, and trust enough to recommend to others who value their privacy, it does hurt when a company goes in the opposite direction with your privacy even when they have noble intentions at heart.
It's also completely telling when their engineers are standing up for their users and others at the company are trying to find any excuse to collect certain information for reasons.
Now, I'm never for personal attacks on someone no matter what, but I find it hard to call out people for using a widely used and available emoji. I do agree it's very much on the line and others might take the other opinion in this case.
I find this attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them.
(Hopefully you get the parallel: some of us consider it harmful, and the fact that you don't care or you actually enjoy it does not mean we should be subjected to it)
As for telemetry, I can't find any reason one would willingly subject to it. But even if, that's why laws like GDPR don't ban it outright, just ask for it to be optional and opt-in.
Sure, from the perspective of non-smokers.
>On the contrary, a decent human being would not willingly expose non-smokers to cigarette smoke
A decent non smoker can also excuse themselves, in order not to disturb the smokers.
>Unfortunately, there's not enough decency around to outweight convenience, so it had to be turned into law
This is nothing to do with decency, the smokers doesn't have enough power/influence to prevent it to become law.
Lets say in a place where 95% are smokers, or even in the place there are 5% smokers but those 5% has a lot of power/influence. Do you think there will be law againts smokers ?
>As for telemetry, I can't find any reason one would willingly subject to it
You mean willingly subject to tracking ? Like I said before, I am fine with tracking because the benefit outweight the cost, it gives me something in return, free or cheap service.
From the perspective of any moral human being. Not intentionally harming others is kind of fundamental.
> A decent non smoker can also excuse themselves, in order not to disturb the smokers.
Non-smokers came first. And there's more of them. Plus, non-smokers are at best inconvenience to smokers, while smokers are a health hazard to non-smokers.
> Lets say in a place where 95% are smokers, or even in the place there are 5% smokers but those 5% has a lot of power/influence. Do you think there will be law againts smokers ?
Not likely. If the smokers are decent people, there won't be a problem; if they aren't, they obviously won't vote in laws that inconvenience them. But that only tells about deficiencies of the regulatory process, which optimizes for the loudest voices instead of maximizing good for everyone.
> Like I said before, I am fine with tracking because the benefit outweight the cost, it gives me something in return, free or cheap service.
And like I said, that's why current legal standard people are leaning towards is not to ban it, but to make it opt-in. So if you're fine with tracking, you can have it. The problem is with the infectious, anticompetitive nature of tracking - once one party does it to offset their costs, all other competitors have to follow suit or risk getting outcompeted.
Sure, at least from your perspective. But all human being ? Even now we disagree.
There are some people that to them harming people is the moral thing to do.
You may then say they are wrong, but again you view it from your morality, using your definition of 'wrong'.
>Non-smokers came first.
Sure, for the Non-smokers, Non-smokers came first.
>And there's more of them
Right, so its more to do with which side has more power/influence.
>Plus, non-smokers are at best inconvenience to smokers
Sure the non-smokers can dismiss it as merely inconvenience. But I'm sure there is some smokers that are highly suffer from not able to smoke anywhere anytime.
>Not likely. If the smokers are decent people, there won't be a problem
Again, some smokers can use the same argument, if the non-smokers are decent people, they can excuse themselves and there won't be a problem.
>if they aren't, they obviously won't vote in laws that inconvenience them
While I'm sure within smokers there are people who support the law, but I'm taking about the smokers who againts the law. Unfortunately, they fail or just don't have enough power/influence to prevent the law to exist.
>deficiencies of the regulatory process, which optimizes for the loudest voices instead of maximizing good for everyone
Its not deficiencies because it just the way it is, whichever side who are the strongest get to decide the law.
Maximizing good for everyone is an impossibility. What one human consider as good may be considered bad to other human.
>And like I said, that's why current legal standard people are leaning towards is not to ban it, but to make it opt-in. So if you're fine with tracking, you can have it
Sure if you can gain the power/influence to make it law. But I hope not and I will not support it. why ? It increase friction/inconvenience. Just like the cookie warning, its highly annoying, I would much prefer it to be opt-out or no option at all.
It is public evidence of commitment to an illegal policy after the CFO was informed of the legal problems.
Not sure how you can do something worse.
How is GitLab still this slow?
These kind of things, by nature, are difficult to cache because the balance between “fresh” new content and how often they are accessed leans heavily towards having it served from the backend directly.
>I don’t understand. This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition of using our product. There is an acceptance of terms and the use of this data should be included in that.
In what way is that "nasty"?