What is the vitriol being directed at Drew DeVault? I enjoy reading his blog posts and am a fan of SourceHut.
That said, he has a history of... rash? impulsive? reactions to situations that might have been resolved with less bad blood if he had stepped away from the keyboard until he was less upset. The classic example is when he got upset about people wanting to unofficially add favicons to the Gemini protocol, and he threatened to blackhole any IP address which requests a favicon. https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I do not know if there is some specific recent event triggering vitriol, but the way this post is written, it sounds like Drew thinks it is resulting from less recent actions like the favicon threat.
In Drew's defense, he has made (limited) apologies and I do believe he is trying to do better. https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas... has a note at the bottom, saying:
> I realize that my blog has been a source of a lot of negativity in the past, and I regret how harsh I've been with some of the projects I've criticised. I will make my arguments by example going forward: if I think we can do better, I'll do it better, instead of criticising those who are just earnestly trying their best.
But it is also true that many people will not be quick to forgive him, and some people never will. It will take him time to undo the negative image he has created with some people, but after seeing Linus Torvald's positive changes, I am optimistic that Drew can change for the better if he wants to, and help create a welcoming community for everyone. If he doesn't give up first.
You're seeing the posts in his blogs. His timeline was full of bashing devs of other open source projects. Never a constructive criticism, just plain bashing (with occasional self-congratulatory comment for his own decision).
PS: I think part of his Rust criticism was towards the attempt to make Sway use wlroots-rs and it not fitting his idea. So, instead of saying "Sorry, it didn't work", he jumped into full bashing Rust for not doing what he was trying to do.
That was never a goal, not for Sway and not for wlroots-rs.
I wrote that to port Way Cooler, it was no different from the other wrappers in other languages that exist.
> Congratulations to Rust for its first (but not its last) supply-chain attack this week! They join a growing club of broken-by-design package managers which publish packages uploaded by vendors directly, with no review step, and ship those packages directly to users with no further scrutiny. [1]
And in the post where he's complaining about GoModuleProxy, he manages to self-righteously insult the entire Go team for no good reason:
> I will say that if I was in their position, and my service was mistakenly sending an excessive amount of traffic to someone else, I would make it my first priority to fix it. But I suppose no one will get promoted for prioritizing that at Google. [2]
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/12/Supply-chain-when-will-we...
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/25/Google-has-been-DDoSing-s...
But more generally, I think he has a negative reputation largely because of his blogging. He has criticized others in strong terms, in blog posts that get a lot of attention. We aren't that into reading another criticism when the previous ones didn't seem that well thought out.
Sometimes the advocacy for his own work is also based on strong criticism of others for doing it wrong. It's "my way is good and other projects are harmful" rather than "I think my way is better, but other projects have different goals and people have their reasons for preferring their workflows."
But he's getting attention because people keep sharing his blog posts in various forums, and he's not responsible for that. (Including this blog post appearing in Hacker News.)
> The reason people choose Electron is because they are too lazy to learn the right tools for the job.
> For the love of God, learn something else.
Now contrast with what he complains about in this blogpost:
> SourceHut’s email-oriented approach might not be for everyone, and instead of simply not using it, skeptics must harass any projects that do.
His blogpost on electron was fueling this exact brand of hate.
However if you’re going to traffic in language war melodrama and controversy-for-clicks (let’s be real, it’s a deliberate content strategy), then it’s sort of weak to cry about others not being nice enough in their criticisms of your own stuff. Pot meet kettle and all that /shrug.
Regardless, I hope he gets through the rough patch and I look forward to reading more of his posts that may or may not eloquently shit all over some of my favorite programming tools :)
That said, I don' t know and couldn't tell you.