Transcript for:
Community Culture and Leadership in Open Source Projects

I'm sorry to ask this question almost but it's something that I think is a little bit important um how do you think it affects the culture of a community of a project when the leader is on that project's public mailing list telling people in response to patch reviews that they should be retroactively aborted right and maybe that you're surprised that they're still alive because they should have starved to death when they were children because they were too stupid to find a hit to suck on I I agree that some people might be put off by that but on the other hand you know what I in the end I don't care right I care about technology and I've actually seen projects that took the whole political correctness so far that that the project no longer is about the technology I actually so on my wow we're getting more I think I didn't want to moderate them so my take I actually am very happy to talk about this it's not a problem for me um my standpoint has always been that hey people are different I'm abrasive I grew up in a culture that I think is not quite as politically correct as the culture especially in the U.S today I also grew up in a family that was largely dysfunctional so I mean so people are different and some people take offense and some people give offense and we all have to live together but the living together is not by finding some lowest common denominator the living together and it has actually been fairly successful is to try realize that hey unlike your family you can actually pick your friends and you can pick the co-workers and open source is actually really good at that better so than many commercial software projects because in a commercial setting you're kind of stuck with your boss in open source find people you like find people you like working with um I I work directly with let's say 20 people closely and 50 people more or less right there's every release there's a thousand people involved find somebody you like better than Ami then that's fine right I'm not willing to be less honest because I know I'm abrasive right and quite often the whole like when I say something like I wonder how he grew to be an adult when he's so stupid that he I don't expect him to find food some people might realize that it's kind of Hyperbole and joking I'm not um I'm not saying something bad that you know it's not politically correct or whatever although certainly I would understand if people do say this it's more about treating other people with respect and maybe saying technical you know what I mean you can applaud everything you want but I don't respect people on this I think they deserve the respect there are people who think that respect is something that should be given and I happen to be one of the people who I'm perfectly happy saying no respect should be earned and without being earned you don't get it right it's really that simple and I not everybody agrees and that's fine too right there are people I refuse to work with right it's it cuts both ways and and I realize that right okay thank you okay