This is an interesting Google Tech Talk about how to survive poisonous people in F/LOSS communities. I probably find it interesting at least in part because there are a couple of very loud poisonous people constantly attacking the GNOME and Mono projects (both of which I'm involved with), but it's a great talk to listen to anyway.
I personally love the "Hostility" slide at around 29 minutes into the talk:
Hostility
- Insults the status quo
- Angrily demands help
- Attempts to blackmail
- Attempts to deliberately rile
- Makes accusations of conspiracy (paranoia)
The bold/italic bit is a big hint-hint to the handful of people (not that they aren't also guilty of some of the others points) I'm referring to as the poisonous people around GNOME and Mono ;)
12 comments:
Funny how you talk about GNOME *and* Mono.
Did you use MICROSOFT WORD to make that italics and bold? Traitor!
;-)
Ian
Thumbs up for almost equating Mono to Gnome.
yevgen and andreas: awesome demonstration of that last point about conspiracy/paranoia!
I don't think Jeff's language is terribly ambiguous...he sees poisonous people attacking two projects he's involved in: GNOME and Mono. There is no other implied link. ::sigh::
IMHO, people who are not part of a project should not be considered poisonous. They are just in the opposite camp :-)
Sankar: There's opposite camp and there are overly hostile people from the opposite camp. Overly hostile people are the poisonous ones.
Ian: lol! You found me out! ;-)
Sankar: I don't specifically know who Jeff's talking about here...but if people are in your IRC channels and on your mailing lists, causing trouble and taking up time, then they are part of the community, and they are poisonous.
I know this is pretty common in the vaguely-Mono-related IRC channels I frequent.
Jeff: May be we should discount some people's natural cheek-in-tongue style comments, before considering poisonous ;-) But yeah I got your point.
Sandy: Yup. Agreed. If it is in IRC, m-ls, it is poisoning :-)
This video is a must for everyone to watch.
I've just linked the Ubuntu devs to this as it applies so well to some current events ;-)
The people claiming you're "almost equating" mono and gnome here are funny.
I sometimes write software. I also sometimes drink orange juice. There, I suppose that means that writing software now equals drinking orange juice to those people.
Yea, they drink a little too much of a certain poisonous person's kool-aide.
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