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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Obviously we don't have the full context of prior communication, but the message screenshot is super passive aggressive ("just a little reminder you're not a maintainer" when obviously both parties are aware, "you're welcome to send us patches that we will review if we want to" very implying that the patches might just be ignored). It's possible the libreboot author also wasn't communicating professionally either, but I don't think that really warrants a response like that either. If you actually want to convince someone to cease doing something, it seems better to just to stick to cold, formal language; writing something like this makes it seem more like an attempt to rile someone up rather than an attempt at legal enforcement.

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I have to remind myself not to read too much into such things, for three reasons that we all know, but which may bear repeating to ourselves:

1. Open source is global, and not everyone is a native speaker of English.

2. Among English speakers, not everyone has the same cultural conventions and nuances. Even within US cities, you can drive 15 minutes, and find very different conventions. And culture in Boston isn't the same as in the Bay Area, isn't the same as in Bolivia.

3. Even within the same culture, not everyone picks up on signals in language to the same degree (whether perceiving or sending). And some people who think they're picking up on signals are conflating with biases more than some others do.

I say I have to remind myself, because this still hits me. For example, when I'm searching certain bug databases, trying to solve an annoying problem, and some prolific volunteer commenting on a bug report there speaks in a manner that comes off as brusque or dismissive. Where they're from (across the Atlantic from me), maybe it's interpreted as professional or capable, and is even reassuring.

That's an essential point. At the same time the interpretation isn't completely random or unpredictable; we're all humans, with the same emotions, the same physiological expressions of them, and the same internal responses to others' emotions. If you yell at someone anywhere, you can expect a certain range of emotional responses.

Anecdotal counterpoint about "yelling". I was having a conversation with my mother at a Cafe. After 15mins the lady next to us, very genuinely and nicely, asked if we were ok because we were yelling at each other. We're Italian. That was our normal conversation!

Someone's definition of aggressive discourse is definitely not everyone's.

That's why "Sir, please don't raise your voice" is so condescending and just a way to make it look like the other party is escalating.

It's not just a way to do that. There's no point imputing a motivation you made up to the other person. It's doing exactly what you're saying they're guilty of: assuming.

I get what they’re saying though. It often has an accompanying tone that’s borderline meme-like. It’s this thing we say the moment somebody takes a tone we take any issue with - or we think we can publicly proclaim we take issue with to get those around us on our side. I think many of us were guilty of this at least once and would acknowledge it if we really sat back and thought about it.

The number of times I’ve seen people having a discussion with somebody online and they respond with “bro, calm down“ when the person has used no caps lock, no exclamation points, no particularly vitriolic language, is staggering and incredibly irritating.

The obvious solution to this: spend less time reading pointless online arguments, and go outside and touch grass.

to keep in line with the topic of communication styles and assumptions, this reads (to me) like a long version "bro, calm down" :).

I’m not quite sure why what I said warranted such an incredibly rude response.

Unfortunately words may be interpreted differently to how they are intended. My apologies if you took offence, as that wasn't my intention. I do often make snarky remarks on here but this wasn't meant to be one of them.

I think this is part of what I'm getting at, text conversations are missing eye contact, body language cues etc, and along with the anonymity of the internet, a lot of things can be misinterpeted and disagreements can escalate quickly.

I normally try not to engage in it too much - when the sun is shining and it's a beautiful day I'd rather be out exercising and patting peoples dogs than engaging in Internet drama. That is all.

Yep. The reason a lot of people do it is not to de-escalate. Quite the opposite. It's to give the appearance of de-escalation to outsiders while at the same time escalating the argument by using a fallacy to attempt to irritate the other person.

My mom’s side of the family is descendent from Italians. Sunday barbecues were always full of yelling, shouting and cursing at each other.

I miss those times. By the end of the day, everybody would hug and kiss and say goodbye until next Sunday.

Yes, a good example. That's what I meant by a "range of emotional responses" (emphasis added).

Also, our interpretation depends on context, such as in your example, and many other things. It's a bit argumentative to treat a short HN comment as a roadmap of every human interaction and find flaws.

You know, sometimes it's very hard to judge.

I'm of xUSSR descent, and sometimes when I see a group of chinese colleagues speaking together loudly, it is very weird to me, as soometimes they are so loud that if it was in Russian it would mean that the brawl could start any second. It is hard to judge sometimes.

Even in written communication it is was told to me many times that many Russians, especially those with B1/B2 levels, as well as Jewish people are extremely direct, and it may be perceived as native speakers as rude, although it isn't meant to.

That expectation of sameness is exactly the problem.

We don't all express ourselves or react in the same ways, despite whatever our HR training videos claim.

When someone "yells at me," I tend to think they're excited and it piques my interest in what they're saying. At the same time, they're excited so I expect them to omit some details and not give me a complete picture - I'm less discerning about the details. Was that one of the responses I'm supposed to feel?

> We don't all express ourselves or react in the same ways

I didn't say we did. I said there is a range of responses we can reasonably expect.

> some prolific volunteer commenting on a bug report there speaks in a manner that comes off as brusque or dismissive

Maybe they are being brusque and dismissive. Maybe they're allowed to. I know I use a somewhat different tone when I'm filing bugs against a project I've been submitting bug reports and patches to for ten years, run by a developer who I've known personally for 20 ;-)

I've had to referee disagreements between East Coast USians and Germans a few times before now, mostly in terms of acting as a protocol translation layer until they were both sufficiently calmed down to underail themselves and focus on the technical side again rather than being distracted by their differing communication styles.

Generally once I'd helped them unpick that they collaborated happily and came up with something good that they both liked, it's just once people are locked in to talking past each other it's often non-trivial to break out of that.

It would be interesting to read more about this. You should start a blog :)

I can highly recommend https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/ on the topic of cultural communication styles.

The fact that the person who sent the C&D email allegedly tried to "take over" the Libreboot name (according to TFA) is also not a good look.

I found this: https://libreboot.at

> Who are we? Denis ‘GNUtoo’ Carikli and Adrien ‘neox’ Bourmault. We created this and maintain it.

> take a stand for fully free software is to change URLs across the web from <libreboot.org> to <libreboot.at>, and to let people know that no other version of Libreboot is reliably free software

I'm not up to date on these events yet, but GNUtoo is a Guix contributor I see around a fair bit on the mailing list and IRC, which makes this seem more interesting. It's not just a random person who got mad about stuff, but someone very involved in other official GNU stuff. Not familiar with neox, but wouldn't surprise me if they're similarly involved in free software stuff elsewhere.

I don't understand the frackas about a library that reboots your computer being free or not....

I read it that way too.

Lib reboot.

Always have, but it took LibreOffice becoming mainstream to make the correction mostly unnoticeable.

My favorite is the GNU libiberty library, which is picked up when you pass the -liberty option to gcc. :D

I hadn't heard about this drama before, but as I can piece things together, Leah has been maintaining Libreboot and another boot system for years. Denis and Adrien disagreed with Leah's decision to include binaries, created their own version of Libreboot without those binaries and published it under the same name on a very similar domain trying to claim the existing Libreboot name for their version.

Then I suspect Leah disagreed with that fork both on technical merits (it's based on old code) and with the stealing of the name, but she agreed with the need for a version without the binaries, so she made that and published it under the name GNUboot, intended for Denis and Adrien to base their work on, and now Denis and Adrien are complaining that she's misusing the GNU name.

Is that roughly a correct summary?

Because if it is, it sounds to me like both sides do have valid points, but handled the disagreement very poorly. Denis and Adrien complaining that Leah stole the GNU name when they just stole the Libreboot name, sounds very hypocritical. The whole thing would be a lot better if both sides stopped the drama and powergames and just worked together to create the best possible boot systems; one with the binaries and one without.

I often wonder if someone is whispering in people's ears, to destroy such projects.

For example, a long email history on any of these people(and even if you don't use, people you email do use gmail), from a central store such as gmail, would provide immense insight into personality traits, etc.

Which means external motivaters could be used as handy leavers to drive dissent.

Little spats like this, erode project trust, and just divert energy.

Anyhow, no idea if this is happening. I guess if you really do want to destroy something, just let Oracle buy it, so maybe I'm off here.

Most FOSS projects are unpaid, and the only reward is nerd-fame. That's why maintainers are often petty about credits and "ownership".

Seems like a faster route to destruction would be letting Elon buy it.

But yeah, this does seem to happen painfully often. The particulars of this specific incident remind me a lot of the FFmpeg vs LibAV split (or the LibAV+Debian vs. FFmpeg+Everyone Else split).

A maintainer shouldn't be directly sending a C&D, they'd likely have their lawyers do it.

GNU will probably back pedal

Actually, it is likely the libreboot person is in the wrong, she has been involved in a lot of drama

But this isn't really a C&D letter. It's just a request to stop using their name. Feels like Rowe is assigning it the C&D label, probably since it makes things sound more dramatic, when it really isn't.

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