[flagged]
Sooo.... "be more professional in your writing"?
Why does this person owe you "professional writing" on their personal comment?
No, just more precise. It seems absurd to brand an entire community as "assholes" based on some disagreement with a blog post by one member. I suspect great GP didn't mean it that way, but it would help to have some clarification.
You’re really just helping to confirm his diagnosis.
What? So let me get this straight--if my open source project which I have given away for free becomes "major" (for some definition) then all of a sudden I have to filter my writing through some kind of average acceptableness test? Come on. [edit] It would be one thing if this was published on Zig letterhead, but it was the guy's personal blog...
In the last decade, we've seen rampant abuses and exploitation of open source projects and of maintainers. So much individual good will and generous efforts wasted because of corporate malfeasanse.
AND YET. If you "open source" a project, if you actually invest in BUILDING a community, you then become a PART Of that community - with the benefits and obligations that come with it.
You don't want the obligations? Fine. But then you don't really get to keep participating in the community. And if you act like "This is MY community, I get to do whatever I want", people are free to shrug, and say "maybe i'll go find a different community".
Which is exactly how I see people reacting to Zig right now. They're seeing that an active member of this community (which, as you said, keeps insisting "he owes them nothing because the community wouldn't exist without them") treats people he doesn't like, and they think "Oof i don't want that to one day be me."
If they want to write a maybe slightly unhinged blog post excoriating someone they had an unpleasant time with... that's a choice! It's their choice. I don't think we get to demand a different one. We can agree or disagree with what they said, but we can't demand they say something else.
If you want that kind of power over someone you need to ensnare them in a binding contract. No such contract exists here.
This has been everyone's point the entire time. You agree with everyone here. No one is suggesting a binding contract exists, but a _social_ contract does exist -- and you concede that with the above recognition of how clearly this post violates it.
For example, you don’t want the director of a science outreach organization to privately uptake all manner of pseudoscience, because they cannot be trusted to carry out the organization’s ostensible mission. When these sentiments come to light, said directory is morally obliged to step down.
A personal blog is definitionally public, ergo by extension reflects upon whatever organizations that person is a member of.
I say all this as someone that does not even feel the posted article is particularly incendiary.