Leaving Chef because of death threats for open source contributions | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Chef because of death threats for open source contributions

sethvargo.com

36 pointsdavid_xia11 comments

God, hearing stuff like this is sickening. I understand that tensions can run high and people disagree, but nobody working on any project should have to put up with that sort of nonsense.

On a related tangent, I have to wonder how much of this is reflective of the community of contributors around Chef or of the OSS community as a whole. I've never experienced the sort of vitriol Seth seems to have run into, but such behavior should not be tolerated in any sort of environment.

Welcome back, Seth! This post was from last summer. He's back and rocking hard: consul-template is awesome. Thanks Seth!

Death threats for OSS contributions are insane, can anyone shed some light on the backstory here?

A bit more detail from a GigaOM piece [1] on this:

According to Noah Kantrowitz, a former Chef colleague and a recent critic of how the company has been managing its open source community, Vargo’s work on the Chef-centric workflow management tool Berkshelf caused some commotion among certain Chef tool users who advocated using a different workflow method; these people supposedly felt that Berkshelf had somehow affected their daily work habits and routines and their frustrations drove them to react harshly. Vargo apparently “ended up at the center of this storm of disagreements.”

“There have been people who have gotten very far over the line and it has made me sad,” said Kantrowitz. “Hurling terrible epithets at people is unacceptable.”

[1] https://gigaom.com/2014/08/27/chef-engineer-leaves-the-compa...

BTW, in case it's worth mentioning, this stuff happened last summer (i.e. end of Aug. 2014).

FWIW, the story seems to have made it to HN around that time, though it only got 2 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8236027

Guessing based on the stuff people have said to and about me (more than I'd wish on anyone, much less than Seth got), it's one part strong feelings, one part callousness and two parts entropy.

Feelings run high, callousness prevents even a veneer of politeness or moderation, randomness inflates either the feelings or their expression. The sum can be awful.

Death threats are more than callousness.

Let me try it differently.

What people choose to type, when they go into cloud cuckoo land while still sitting at their keyboards, doesn't seem rational. It seems random. Detached from thought.

You can read it and even while the grammar is fine, the writer doesn't seem to be a sentient, rational human being. Reading it feels like reading static, not human signal. The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that once someone takes the step to write such things, the actual content is largely random.

Perhaps that makes it more scary.

Death threats are the new background radiation of the internet. Too many parts of the subculture accept negative hyperbole; people accustom themselves to torrents of abuse as regular communication in a dark corner, then step out and apply that to other situations.

Damn well said.

I suspect it more due to the frustrations of those who bought into Chef, and now suffer a horrible mess of open source unmaintained half broken stuff ... seriously something seems very odd in the Chef community, its like all work has stopped on github ... I wonder if its because so many people have jumped ship to docker?

Obviously I don't condone death threats and other nonsense, but then not sure how seriously I would take an anonymous threat from a nerd ;)

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