Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved
- Reference: 1652344210
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/12/not_all_opensource_leaders_are/
- Source link:
If you follow open-source at all, you know the stories about Linux's founder, [1]Linus Torvalds, giving Nvidia the finger for its lack of Linux support and his stomping all over developers on the Linux Kernel Mailing List when they blunder.
And let's not forget former director of The Perl Foundation Curtis "Ovid" Poe's [2]pronouncement on certain folks' behavior at TPF: "It's the online version of road rage. I know people who, at conferences, are absolutely lovely people ... face-to-face. But they're raging assholes online."
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Nor is this phenomenon limited to gray-haired developers. Recently, an argument over the [4]Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) dropping a requirement to wear Covid-19 masks at [5]KubeCon Europe 2022 saw Kat Cosgrove, a Pulumi Developer Advocate and CNCF Ambassador, lashing out at the CNCF executive director on Twitter.
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She wrote at the time: "This fucking sucks, Priyanka. [8]It's dangerous and shitty and does not at all speak to the CNCF caring about its community."
In the end, Cosgrove won her point. You will need to wear a mask at KubeCon. As someone who takes Covid-19 seriously, I approve. But, some hard feelings have been left in its wake.
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There's nothing extraordinary about any of these interactions. But, if you think this phenomenon is unique to open-source communities, you're wrong. Arrogance and rude behavior are rampant in technology circles.
Thanks to my work, I've known some of the biggest technology leaders of all time including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison. Compared to them – and far too many other tech CEOs and managers of companies large and small – even the most venomous open-source leaders are pussy cats. I've heard tech bosses abuse employees to the point of them breaking into tears and having panic attacks all too often.
Heck, I had my first panic attack after a boss threw a fit at me for leaving my job for another position that came with a 50 percent raise. All too often tech businesses are harsh.
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Besides, you don't work under open-source community leaders, you work with them. And, besides, the proprietary ones can, and did, fire you and make sure you never worked in the industry again. All-in-all, I'd rather just have Linus yell at me in an email.
But, people do change. While no one will ever mistake Torvalds for a meek, mild-mattered developer, in 2018 he realized he had to change his ways. He was chasing good developers away and getting on the nerves of even the best programmers who were still there. So, Torvalds actually stepped away from the [11]Linux developer community to change his personal behavior .
Do you know how rare this is? Just think about your own co-workers. How often do you admit to mistakes, apologize, and try to change? Next to never, right? You know what's even rarer? Anyone in the technology industry apologizing.
[12]Perl's Community Affairs Team chair quits as org put on ice by code language's foundation
[13]Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations
[14]Linus Torvalds went six days without electricity, swears smaller 5.12 kernel is co-incidental
[15]Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably
And, what's even more amazing? Torvalds came back and he changed. Oh, he can still get salty at times, but he's much better than he was and the community is better for it.
Indeed, the open-source community as a whole has been getting politer. Part of this was the rise of Code of Conducts. These have been based on Coraline Ada Ehmke, a software developer and open-source advocate, [16]Contributor Covenant . It's used by such projects as [17]Eclipse , [18]Kubernetes , and [19]Rails .
Some people hate this. The use of her Contributor Covenant has caused a bad-tempered outbreak on [20]Twitter and [21]Reddit .
There are also claims the Linux community is becoming politicized and is being taken over by so-called [22]Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) . Some examples concerning the new Code of Conduct include: "In practice [will be] abused [23]tools to hunt people SJWs don't like . And they don't like a lot of people."
And, "Yes as long as you are [24]authoritarian left wing minded, and/or censor yourself you can participate."
Despite all the whining, the Codes have been more successful than not. They're fostering civility and encouraging people to "be excellent to each other."
In addition, we're seeing more and more open-source leaders who don't make headlines for being rude. These leaders are bringing us a kinder, gentler open-source community.
That said, I think there will also be more rudeness in tech circles than other businesses. Many tech leaders are on the autism spectrum. While ASD can sometimes give people the superpower of being able to concentrate on code beyond the ability of most people, it often hinders them from working well in society. But, just as you can learn to be a great programmer, so people on the spectrum can learn to be great leaders.
Slowly but shortly, the open-source community is becoming a kinder, gentler, and better one. ®
Get our [25]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/18/torvalds_curses_nvidia/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/perl_resignations/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YnzaxRd8cwxfsXPBug2usgAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.cncf.io/
[5] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnzaxRd8cwxfsXPBug2usgAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YnzaxRd8cwxfsXPBug2usgAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://twitter.com/Dixie3Flatline/status/1517518167068712962
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YnzaxRd8cwxfsXPBug2usgAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YnzaxRd8cwxfsXPBug2usgAAAIM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/17/linus_torvalds_linux_apology_break/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/09/perl_foundation_cat_hiatus/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/05/mozilla_accepts_cryptocurrency/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/01/linux_5_12_rc1/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/03/who_me/
[16] https://www.contributor-covenant.org/
[17] https://www.eclipse.org/
[18] https://kubernetes.io/
[19] https://rubyonrails.org/
[20] https://twitter.com/?lang=en
[21] https://www.reddit.com/
[22] https://www.lifewire.com/what-does-sjw-mean-4150132
[23] https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1041524170331287552
[24] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9geb3n/the_linux_kernel_replaces_code_of_conflict_with/e64cp5v
[25] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Giving nvidia the finger
As always, there's a catch:
Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward.
NVIDIA's user-space libraries and OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenCL / CUDA drivers remain closed-source -- today's announcement is just about all the excitement in kernel space.
All GPU kernel modules do is little more than operate as a pipe between the userland driver and the GPU itself. It's the right way to do it but there's no real improvements that can be made by open-source contributors. And it probably took nvidia's developers a decade of screaming to corporate that there's no secret sauce in it because of course the first thing they think of is their special proprietary advantage over the competition (which is bollocks, it's just code).
But I guess Linus will be happy because he doesn't do userland.
Re: Giving nvidia the finger
That might be the case now, but back in the ATI days the problems that ATI had with their drivers were rather well known, and Nvidia probably didn't want to offer their only real competitor a graduate class in how to write better graphics driver code.
I think it's generally agreed that AMD has fixed the substantive majority of those problems now, so there is probably less in the way of reason for Nvidia to keep that code closed source.
Arrogance and rude behavior are rampant in just technology circles?
Particularly post-Covid, I'd argue that "Arrogance and rude behavior are rampant in many (most?) circles". I've seen some pretty appalling displays that have nothing to do with technology.
rude maintainers
For a while I worked to migrate off sendmail to another mta and subscribed to the mailing lists. It was staggeringly rude and contemptuous of newbies. I understand the need to look through the archives first and to post all relevant information but even then you asked a question at your peril. I really hope that these practises do die.
Re: rude maintainers
I'm fairly sure I know which one you meant - one that was technically quite good, and which I worked with for years at an ISP, but which a lot of people refused to touch due to the rude and contemptuous behaviour of its creator. His attitude was contagious, and one of the main reasons why that MTA never got as wide a userbase as might have deserved on a purely technical basis.
The lesson is that it doesn't matter how good your software is on a technical basis if you make it really unpleasant for people to find ways to use it.
Offensive and poorlt thought through
Can we stop saying autism causes assholery please? It's lazy, offensive, and untrue.
The reason why many people in tech behave poorly flows not from the 'fact' (largely unsupported by data) that disproportionately many of us are autistic, but from the way we approach finding solutions to technical problems. In general, we strive to redefine the problem, and exclude what has no direct bearing on it, so that we build a simplified mental model where the solution is apparent. Because collaborative relationships are not part of any technical problem domain, they are excluded from consideration, the work needed to maintain them becomes seen as a diversion of resources, and behaviour that damages collaboration is seen as harmless.
A fix for this is not obvious, but please stop blaming autistics. We struggle to cope only in real-world social situations, and are often overly careful not to cause offense because, even if undiagnosed, we are aware of our limitations. In online interactions, which are the core of this article, we function on an equal footing with our neurotypical peers.
This article seeks to conceal a lack of understanding of the problem with a shameful attack on a vulnerable group. Please do better.
Re: Offensive and poorlt thought through
"We struggle to cope only in real-world social situations,"
When I was working in a desktop support team we had one person drafted in as we were short-handed at the time. Now normally he was in the development team and was really good at his job. He was the "go-to guy" when there was any problem sorting out awkward software.
When it came to dealing with users he was way out of his depth, abrupt, argumentative and sometimes down-right rude. In the end he was more or less kept in the office and used as a liaison with the programmers, the network team and the sysadmins. They all knew him and he knew them so was much more at ease and he did a fine job.
I know that we desktop support people were regarded as lesser beings, sort of IT janitors, but you needed social skills, tact and above all patience and this guy did not, so he was placed in a very difficult position.
I have no idea if he was on the Autistic spectrum but from my observations he may very well have been.
Giving nvidia the finger
Giving nvidia the finger has obviously worked well as a strategy! They have just relented on their stubborn closed-source BLOB antics. That probably wouldn't have happened without Linus' ranting and raving.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-open-kernel&num=1
(although, they haven't released it yet. I'm sure when they do, Mr Torvalds will find something inside to rant about)