> I will not be sending any more patches due to the attitude that is not only unwelcome but also intimidating to newbies and non experts.
Maybe not being nice is part of the immune system of open source.
Maybe not being nice is part of the immune system of open source.
Talk about predictive power in a hypothesis.
There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None. In my opinion it's baseless speculation.
It's far more likely that they are upset over being called out, and are out of touch with regards as to what is ethical testing.
From TFA: “The UMN had worked on a research paper dubbed "On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits". Obviously, the "Open-Source Software" (OSS) here is indicating the Linux kernel and the University had stealthily introduced Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability to test the susceptibility of Linux.”
Suggesting a foreign government could be leaping to conclusions as well, given domestic activists with an agenda may do the same thing. A linux kernel backdoor is valuable to a lot of different interests. Hence why counter-intelligence should be involved.
However, I just looked at the names of the people involved and I don't know. Even if they were Taiwanese, that's an allied country, so I wouldn't expect it. Who were you thinking of?
Getting banned from contributing is a light penalty.
It is pretty comfortably not sabotage under 18 USC 105, which requires proving intent to harm the national defense of the United States. Absent finding an email from one of the researchers saying "this use-after-free is gonna fuck up the tankz," intent would otherwise be nearly impossible to prove.
Presumably, this reference is intended to be to 18 USC ch. 105 (18 USC §§ 2151-2156). However, the characterization of required intent is inaccurate; the most relevant provision (18 USC § 2154) doesn’t require intent if the defendant has “reason to believe that his act may injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense activities” (emphasis added) during either a war or declared national emergency.
It wouldn’t take much more than showing evidence that the defendant was aware (or even was in a position likely to be exposed to information that would make him aware) that Linux is used somewhere in the defense and national security establishment to support the mental state aspect of the offense.
"Well if you're gonna be a jerk about it, I won't be sending any more patches."
If not you get cluttered up with bad code and people there for the experience. Like how stackoverflow is lost to rule zealots there for the game not for the purpose.
Something big and important should be intimidating and isn’t a public service babysitter...
If I have a community, bombarded by a random number of transient bad actors at random times, then if R0 > some threshold, my community inevitably trends to a cesspool, as each bad actor creates more negative members.
If I take steps to decrease R0, one of which may indeed be "blunt- and harshness to new contributors", then my community may survive in the face of equivalent pressures.
It's a valid point, and seems to have historical support via evidence of many egalitarian / welcoming communities collapsing due to the accumulation of bad faith participants.
The key distinction is probably "Are you being blunt / harsh in the service of the primary goal, or ancillary to the mission?"
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Could you provide references to some of this historical support?
Some can tolerate a steady influx of bad actors: some fall apart. There's probably a valid paper in there somewhere.
Like?
If they weren't doing it, then quality of SO would decrease for all of us.
It's in our interest to have strict mods on SO
(Not to say I like the StackExchange community much. It's far too top-down directed for me. But I'm very much sympathetic to the spirit of strict moderation.)
There are all sorts of community websites around the world. Which have developed into a serious SO contendor? IMO many things are threatening SO’s relevance, but they don’t look anything like it, which suggests that what SO is doing wrong isn’t the small details.
For example, I’d argue that Discord has become the next place for beginners to get answers, but chat rooms are very different from SO. For one thing, the help is better because someone else can spend their brain power to massage your problem. And another is that knowledge dies almost instantly.
Forgive me if I wasn't being clear. It seems like your core point is that SO's rules are on the whole good for keeping it focused, and it seems like you are assuming I'm a beginner programmer who is frustrated with SO for not being more beginner friendly and thus advising me on what I should do instead. I feel like you are shadow boxing a little.
I think we probably mostly agree; I think SO gets an unfortunate reputation as a good place for beginners (as opposed to a sort of curated wiki of asked and answered questions on a topic, a data store of wisdom), and that in general beginners are probably best served by smaller 1-1 intervention. I usually suggest people seek out a mentor, it had never occurred to me that Discord could be a good way to go about this.
The original point I was trying to make is simply that you can see overzealous rule following on SO and that a form of that is in inappropriately closed as duplicate questions.
You don't need to do that by telling them they're garbage. You can do it by getting them invested in growth and improvement.
also here we are seeing persons are having no interest in "growth and improvement", they are not even creating the good faith contributions to project.
People introducing bad code on purpose, for a social experiment, are on a whole new level of bad and so would his anger be.
Someone for whom being a bad actor is a day job will not get deterred by being told to fuck off.
Being nasty might deter some low key negative contributors - maybe someone who overestimates their ability or someone "too smart to follow the rules". But it might also deter someone who could become a good contributor.
If you ran a bank and had a bunch of rude bank tellers, you are only going to dissuade customers, not bank robbers.
Sustaining the belief that every submitter is an earnest, good, and altruistic person is painfully expensive and a waste of very valuable minds. Unhinged is unhinged and that needs to be managed, but keeping up the farce that there is some imaginary universe where the submitter is not wasting your time and working the process is wrong.
I see this in architecture all the time, where people feign ignorance and appeal to this idea you are obligated to keep up the pretense that they aren't being sneaky. Competent people hold each other accountable. If you can afford civility, absolutely use it, but when people attempt to tax your civility, impose a cost. It's the difference between being civil and harmless.
However, in this particular case, I agree that it is not a valid argument since it is doubtful whether the beginning kernel contributor's patches are in good faith.
[1] Torvalds encouraging new contributors to send in trivial patches back in 2004: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255
It's like "be kind I'm new to the concept of airplanes, let me fly this airplane with hundreds of passengers"
This is just a form of "well I'll just take my business elsewhere!". Chances are he'll try again under a pseudonym.
EDIT: University is fair game too.
The idea that "not being nice" is necessary is plainly ridiculous, but this post is pretty wild--effectively you're implying that they're just amateurs or something and that this is a novel idea nobody's considered, while billions and billions of dollars of business run atop Linux-powered systems.
What they don't do is hand over CI resources to randos submitting patches. That's why kernel developers receive and process those patches.