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Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

That's false in the first 10 comments

> emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop".

"works on my machine"

Additionally I haven't seen a single comment that is "acerbically against it" just calm people making reasonable arguments to not virtue signal. Especially in a way that doesn't even make sense.

When people complain about the OSS community and github this is what they mean. A bunch of rando's who had nothing to do with a project chiming in with breaking changes bec of their feelings. It really is a great example of what the GP is talking about.

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They high-road the guy until their's no room left for discussion. They stop just short of calling him a racist authoritarian for naming his package RuboCop years ago. The creator isn't even from the US, it's a bit ignorant to assume the entire world shares their personal world view, and worse to assume the rest of the world should cater to it. I am entirely sympathetic toward the US' plight right now, and we have had protests in my city in a different country in solidarity. But it's a US systemic and cultural problem specifically, we probably shouldn't accuse random people from other countries of being racist just because they aren't immediately up to speed with your issues.

That's just what's frustrating me.

A ton of people out there want to prove to themselves more than anyone else that they care about this by doing totally meaningless things like renaming a project that has been maintained and used by thousands of people for YEARS and known throughout the entire (international) community as rubocop with all the reputation, tooling, clout, etc. built over the years, and completely destroy all of that just because you're sad and you feel like doing something to make yourself feel better.

The level of entitlement is just over the top. You don't like the name, fork it, rename it, and use that fork. Advertise it if you want. Don't come and demand from maintainers that have worked on this for years, for exactly zero dollars, to do such a thing. Honestly this is just another thing that turns me off from open source development.

That "works on my machine" comment in particular is flippant and definitely degrades a complex discussion in my opinion.

The project name is a pun on a science fiction movie, if the (unpaid) maintainer does not want to change it for compatibility reasons, that's entirely understandable. People should donate money or contribute substantial code effort towards the name change if they care enough.

Yeah, that remark really bothered me and I felt like it misunderstood the point.

"Works on my machine" is shorthand for the flippant dismissal that, "I don't need to care about that bug because it didn't show up or cause problems in a deliberately ideal environment."

The repo author is saying the opposite, that it "works" even in "non-ideal environments". That is, he has no inherent negative association with "cop" even in a near-dictatorship where, in practice, most cops are bad and work with impunity, since he thinks the concept is legit (enforcing law and order) even if particular jurisdictions get it wrong.

So, if anything, he was saying, "it even works on forgotten legacy systems"...

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