'DOS" retro pseudo-hackers [crackers] always have been a cancer like this, sadly. Elitism, tons of gatekeeping that would even blush most *BSD users, code stealing, non-acreditation... basically the opposite of the public FOSS/Nix/Lisp world.
They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems.
Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too.
In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX.
A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.
It's a reference to Eric S. Raymond's famous article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux.
Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
I don’t see how it’s foolish. When you mention a bazaar essentially no one thinks of the closed door meetings of the merchant guilds. Instead, they think of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace where all manner of goods, services, and ideas are openly exchanged.
This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
Yeah, "foolish" maybe wasn't the right word. All metaphors fall short in some way (hence why they're metaphors). I just, knowing something of the history of that part of the world, like to use the opportunity to share the knowledge that, despite the appearances of a chaotic, random aggregation of humans, Bazaars often had a significant structure under the surface (perhaps another lesson about open source to be had there).
Shoot, you're absolutely right! It's been a long while since I last re-read the article, and I had forgotten how "targeted" (for lack of a better term) it was at certain specific individuals.
I was there, I'm personally convinced it's much worse now. Perhaps I'm suffering from rose colored glasses, wouldn't be the first time.
My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion.
Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
It's just because there are more people online compared to the 90s. If 1% of people are extremely excessively unpleasant, then with 100 people that's one person. With 1,000 people then that's 10 people, with 10,000 people that's 100 people, etc. There's maybe 10 million developers involved today? So that's 100,000 people.
It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
I agree that scale is the bigger factor, but the infrastructure matters too: Consider invite only vs writable-by-everyone default. Open source development moved from a lot more invite based in the mid 90s to a strong writable-by-everyone social media model particularly with the adoption of Github vs svn/cvs. But the scale issue is an argument that open source should have been going in the opposite direction. More unpleasant actors means more justification for reducing participation.
I suppose the thing that changed with GitHub is that 1) issue trackers became widely available, and 2) the concept of pull requests (and "drive-by" contributions). Before that, it was basically "email me" for most smaller projects (or maybe an email list on SourceForge).
I suppose "ignore some asshole in your email" is easier, and also hard to pile on comments in a private email box. But beyond that, I'd say having an issue tracker is a net positive, as is the ability to create PRs easily.
I wouldn't say that "social media-izing" is a good way to describe any of that, but I understand what you mean.
The main problem is probably more "brigading" from Twitter/X/Mastodon/Facebook/whatnot.
There were trackers before github for sure-- but like it's a pretty ordinary setup to make issues private to project members until triaged... that sort of thing pretty much kills brigading dead and it's a thing you can't do on github.
There is a continuum between totally private and what github provides, with self hosted tools you could hit a number of different spots on that spectrum. Cynically one reason for the lack of flexibility is that the maximally permissive side is probably better for the expansion of Github's business.
The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed.
It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.
Comments
The social media-izing of open source has been a massive blow. Projects and contributors across the board are randomly bombarded with mob harassment.
Return to Cathedral.
'DOS" retro pseudo-hackers [crackers] always have been a cancer like this, sadly. Elitism, tons of gatekeeping that would even blush most *BSD users, code stealing, non-acreditation... basically the opposite of the public FOSS/Nix/Lisp world.
They were like that in the 90's, and tons of them never acknowleckged their mediocrity against, well, serious systems.
Amiga diehard fanboys and microcomputer owners were like that with tons of 'secretive' software, too.
In my country (Spain) tons of people tolk about the 'Golden Age' of the Spanish software, were 90% of it was pure crap against what the French and the Brits where producing even for the ZX, not to mention what the Japanese did with the MSX.
A community built on snobbism and spoiled kids. Then when the international scene (the serious one) compares their IF 'work' against The Hobbit or, worse, isometric games (not the ones made with an infamous engine, the ones with amazing artwork and free roaming), the whole deck of cards collapses.
> Return to Cathedral.
What does this mean?
It's a reference to Eric S. Raymond's famous article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", where he compares the rather top-down, leader driven culture of Unix development to the free-for-all style of Linux.
Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.
I don’t see how it’s foolish. When you mention a bazaar essentially no one thinks of the closed door meetings of the merchant guilds. Instead, they think of the hustle and bustle of a busy marketplace where all manner of goods, services, and ideas are openly exchanged.
This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.
Yeah, "foolish" maybe wasn't the right word. All metaphors fall short in some way (hence why they're metaphors). I just, knowing something of the history of that part of the world, like to use the opportunity to share the knowledge that, despite the appearances of a chaotic, random aggregation of humans, Bazaars often had a significant structure under the surface (perhaps another lesson about open source to be had there).
The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).
Shoot, you're absolutely right! It's been a long while since I last re-read the article, and I had forgotten how "targeted" (for lack of a better term) it was at certain specific individuals.
A closed-off development team releases what they want, and you take it or leave it, like sqlite.
FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Or just put a fence around the bazaar.
Eh, it was never any different. Have you seen the mailing lists of the 90s? There were lots of very bitter, vitriolic, long-running feuds going on.
I was there, I'm personally convinced it's much worse now. Perhaps I'm suffering from rose colored glasses, wouldn't be the first time.
My general impression is that the abuse in the past tended to concentrate in a few well known figures, who often got banned on sight or at least generally carried little to no real influence. Or it concentrated in particular toxic projects which you could just avoid. A little bit of abuse wrangling contributed to project cohesion.
Today it's more like an intermittent firehose, with clueless mobs being weaponized from other platforms. Performances being made in issue trackers and pull requests for offsite audiences, and just a particular depth and relentlessness of harassment that was uncommon decades past.
It's just because there are more people online compared to the 90s. If 1% of people are extremely excessively unpleasant, then with 100 people that's one person. With 1,000 people then that's 10 people, with 10,000 people that's 100 people, etc. There's maybe 10 million developers involved today? So that's 100,000 people.
It's the scale that makes banning the "few well known figures" on sight hard. The method of communication (mailing list vs. GitHub vs. Discord vs. whatever) doesn't really matter all that much, at least not for this particular problem.
I agree that scale is the bigger factor, but the infrastructure matters too: Consider invite only vs writable-by-everyone default. Open source development moved from a lot more invite based in the mid 90s to a strong writable-by-everyone social media model particularly with the adoption of Github vs svn/cvs. But the scale issue is an argument that open source should have been going in the opposite direction. More unpleasant actors means more justification for reducing participation.
I suppose the thing that changed with GitHub is that 1) issue trackers became widely available, and 2) the concept of pull requests (and "drive-by" contributions). Before that, it was basically "email me" for most smaller projects (or maybe an email list on SourceForge).
I suppose "ignore some asshole in your email" is easier, and also hard to pile on comments in a private email box. But beyond that, I'd say having an issue tracker is a net positive, as is the ability to create PRs easily.
I wouldn't say that "social media-izing" is a good way to describe any of that, but I understand what you mean.
The main problem is probably more "brigading" from Twitter/X/Mastodon/Facebook/whatnot.
There were trackers before github for sure-- but like it's a pretty ordinary setup to make issues private to project members until triaged... that sort of thing pretty much kills brigading dead and it's a thing you can't do on github.
There is a continuum between totally private and what github provides, with self hosted tools you could hit a number of different spots on that spectrum. Cynically one reason for the lack of flexibility is that the maximally permissive side is probably better for the expansion of Github's business.
It's an intentionally edgy statement, got it...
The major problem: With any idea around decreasing all that social media circus, and coming back to the actual things a bit more, you lose entire generations of human beings nowadays whose only reason to exist, whose only driver, whose only source of energy, is their smartphone with the right social media silo apps installed.
It's at least a decade too late to stop that apocalypse. It will not get better before a big boom suddenly forces them from outside. Our societies are obviously not strong and not resilient enough for more than a few decades of existance before it makes boom.