It's my opinion that when you call a Thunderbird developer "some simian" and when you tell them to "Die die die die" and "Seriously, screw you" and you say things like "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code..." and when you're warned in a very civil tone with a clear explanation of why your approach is hurting rather than helping https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c3 and you still come back with more of that same approach, I think being banned from Bugzilla is a perfectly reasonable thing.
OK, so I read this bug report. I think it says a lot that the focus from you (and, it looks like, the representative rest of Mozilla) is on the perceived "bullying" (it's not bullying) and the "incivility" (give me a break), and not on the actual problem being reported by the user.
You want us to consider context when talking about his most recent bug report being banned? OK, then we should also consider context when reading the "...every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer]..." bug report too, because it's clear that this guy has had his objections and bug reports ignored a couple too many times.
Changing Command-F is broken ui. Period. You just don't do that. To an experienced, battle-weary developer, it's one of those blatantly obvious things that makes them want to scream at the sky.
Me? I would have just cussed at the software -- like I do every day at Firefox -- and then thrown my hands up, decided there wasn't much I could do because there isn't yet another option available, and gone on with my day. This guy is speaking for a ton of users who, like me, gave up the battle of communicating this kind of stuff over and over again.
I'm not writing this for you, though, because that would be a waste of my time. I'm writing it more as a caution to any other businesses that haven't yet fallen victim to this trap: listen to your customers, even when they're pissed off.
Most other people here are discussing the degree to which he was/was not a bully. You've actually hit the nail on the head: this bug submitter is _absolutely right_ (old bug and new bug). Why not also remap ctrl-c to paste and ctrl-v to delete line?
I'm not sure if it is a sense of humor thing, but I don't get anger from his bugs at all. A bit of frustration, and colorful language. But that's not rage.
He's profoundly wasting his time by bothering to talk to Mozilla developers. I learned long ago that they are extremely cliquish, and don't care what you think. They will do whatever they feel like doing, whether or not it makes sense. Personally I quit using thunderbird when they pushed an updated, it broke the client, and their reply on the forum was more or less "too bad, sucker".
No one deleted his bug reports. This isn't about whether or not Thunderbird has bugs. The Thunderbird developers are not ignoring the substance of his reports (mostly duplicates which have already been reported by people spewing far less venom.)
This is about this particular individual and whether he was adding more value than he was taking from the project. The decision was made that he was hurting more than helping and so he was kicked out.
The comment you reference was made in July 2010. The bug report that triggered the banning was made a week ago, and just sounded petulant. It didn't make any personal statements about anyone.
Nursing a grudge against someone for a year, banning him for a grumpy bug report, then spamming discussion threads with hand-wringing about what a toxic abusive bully he was really seems like a waste of time to me. I guess you can "coordinate" your community however you like, though.
It was not simply two bug reports a year apart. There were many more reports and multiple warnings given. I highlighted some of the most egregious but it's not an exhaustive list.
In defense of the bully, at least he is completely clear about his feelings, and it is obvious that he is just insulting.
I know from experience that is is extremly frustrating and deeply insulting when a developer marks a valid bug report as "NOTABUG" or "WONTFIX", no matter how friendly he is while doing so. When somebody closes a bug report without taking any action whatsoever, without even acknowledging the problem, this feels to me just as if he said: "Shut the fuck up, we developers have better things to do than care about stupid users." It doesn't matter if the developer uses polite wording, I'm still insulted.
> It doesn't matter if the developer uses polite wording, I'm still insulted.
The drama you generate inside your own head is not the developer's responsibility.
Closing a bug as "NOTABUG" is not an insult. Closing a bug as "NOTABUG" means the developer does not think there is a bug. If you take it as an insult, then take responsibility for your own feelings. Don't blame the developer.
Yes, I take responsibility for my own feelings. I know what it's like from the other side too: as a software developer I can't accomodate every user request. It's difficult to tell a customer that I think they are wrong, or that their problem is not important enough in some grand scheme of things. And it is very easy to insult someone without using any expletives.
I'm not saying that a developer should leave bug reports open to avoid any possible offense. But they must be aware that the act of ignoring a perfectly valid issue reported by a passionate user can be demeaning in itself.
Yes, abrasive behavior exists. That does not mean that any project has to tolerate people who bring it regularly. Normal on the Internet is not the standard by which I want the projects I work on to be managed.
Because sometimes actually helpful bug reports come packaged with snarky people. I see little problem with that. There's guys like zedshaw who always flame and get flamed, yet still provide lots of value. Plus it livens things up a bit. Nothing wrong with a little sarcastic banter here and there. Some people have their panties in a tight knot sometimes over some silly things.
Not everything has to be so srs bznss all the time folks.
From this banning, Mozilla has just lost a useful bug reporter and one of the founding fathers of GNU.
Being a founding father of GNU does not give you the right to be a bully. Telling a developer that you want to cut off his hands so he can't program is not helpful and people who behave like that are not useful bug reporters. They are bullies and they are toxic to an open source project. No project should tolerate personal attacks like that.
Enjoyment is in absolutely no way a necessary condition for bullying. Bullying is abusive treatment, often directed repeatedly at specific individuals. That's what was happening here. "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code" That is about as clear a case of bullying I've seen in the 13 years I've been involved in Mozilla.
You can make all the excuses you want for him, and you can re-define bullying if you like, but he has gone well beyond "not seeing the need to spare people's feelings" here. He has verbally attacked people and he thinks he can get away with it because of his hacker credibility. "Because I'm a great programmer and you're a nobody programmer, I can call you names and tell you to die die die and tell you I'd like to cut off your fingers so you can't code any more. That's about as crisp a case of bullying as I can think of.
I've been a participant in GNU since 1990. I've been a maintainer of GNU Emacs, GDB, Guile, and (briefly) EGLIBC, but many others have contributed a lot more than I have. Mlynarik's contributions to GNU are relatively minor. Calling him a "founding father of GNU" is a bit rich; it was pretty gratuitous of him to bring it up.
Note that Mlynarik could have made every single one of his contributions without verbally abusing anyone. It's not like you have to swear at someone to explain why you think something is a bug. He freely chose to add the abuse to his technical content. Since the abuse is utterly inessential, there's no reason to put up with it.
The abuse doesn't even express depth of feeling. He's always written like that, to pretty much everyone, in all circumstances. It's noise in his signal.
I think Mozilla is absolutely right to ban him from its sites. As someone said, "Sure, you have the right to be a jerk --- just not on my web site."
I'm amazed that HN readers are so backwards on this.
If you let people treat you this way because they also happen to provide some value, then you're enabling them and encouraging the behaviour. People who behave in this manner should be ostracised.
Be careful about who you may have just ostracized. To play devil's advocate, do you have any idea where we would be without Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper?
They are somewhat known for their public moments sounding just like this guy.
Personalities are complex. We can't just cherry pick the attributes of a person and separate those from those which we perceive to deviate from the ideal.
Whether this particular guy is a net gain for the community isn't for me to decide (though I do love emacs, and use a lot of core GNU software), but if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer.
Anecdote: many of the brilliant developers I've worked near (the major outliers, 100x productivity types) have some kind of quirk. This could be that they snap sometimes, or that they don't shower, or that they neglect their paperwork. Give them some feedback, grow a thick skin, but don't ostracize them.
How many brilliant developers have you not worked with, because they looked at that kind of comment, and decided that they would rather spend their spare time working on a project where they _wouldn't_ get told that their fingers should be cut off to prevent them ever writing any code?
" if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer."
Except that you're not paying any price at all. It's the Thunderbird community paying that price and there is no reason for them to do so. If your list of his accomplishments included making Thunderbird a great piece of software, we might be having a slightly different conversation. Also, kicking him out of Mozilla's bug system very likely has zero impact on your emacs and core GNU software.
IMO, being a hero on one project does not give you the right to be a bully on another.
You're right, he is being a little abrasive there, but I'd take it in stride and enjoy; this sort of thing is normal on the Internet.
That doesn't mean it needs to be tolerated. While such behaviour might be common on places like Xbox Live, I haven't seen anything like that on HN, for instance.
You complain about Mlynarik being a bully, and yet here you are, with your comments on this one post at about 18 now, all saying what a horrible person Mlynarik is, and how you think no developer should have to put up with him, and yet, I don't believe you've disclosed your role, or why you have such a dog in this race....
I haven't read each of your posts, so maybe I missed where you told everyone what your role is in this.
Anyway, I do see Richard, a user, being blunt and creative and passionate in the bug reports he gives to the developers. But I do not see how a user bug report should actually offend or bother a developer.... At all.
And I do see you wandering around this post making sure everyone understands your point of view, that Richard's behavior is intolerable anywhere, and you can confidently say that since you are such a tolerant guy. I guess you're passionate too, but I think it's borderline speech policing and gate-keeping behaviors.
Boo hoo, a user calls the developers simians. I actually thought that was pretty funny, along with the imagery of Richard reaching through the computer.
I hadn't realized that the Firefox developers, developers of one of the utmost free speech tools of the 20th and 21st centuries were such wilted flowers that they could not handle the frankly amusing, sarcastic, accurate, precise, correct bug reports from one of their more knowledgeable users.
Richard Mlynarik is a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation. And sometimes he has a sharp tongue which in context can be both enjoyable and terrifying.
But here's the important part for entrepreneurs: what percentage of users of mozilla products or any product bother to submit bug reports?
What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. I am always amazed at the projects and companies that hold their users in contempt and get upset when bug reports or forum messages express a user's frustration. What they should be doing is sincerely expressing their thanks that the user would give them any message at all, and not just switch to a competitor, or just badmouth them to their friends.
I see nothing in this bug report that deserves banning, and it is certainly Mozilla's loss and their user's loss that they would ban Mlynarik instead of listening to him.
And to make matters worse, he's absolutely correct here too.
I am amazed at projects that allow toxic people to disrupt and mistreat other project members. I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility.
Not having to listen to "a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation" say he'd like to cut off your hands so you can't code any more is absolutely not a loss to the project. It's a proper and right kind of excision to remove toxic bullies like that no matter how correct was the substance of their report.
(And as it turns out, the overwhelming majority of his reports were duplicates of existing reports, so it's not even a loss of the actual bug reports, just the nasty name calling and abusive and threatening behavior. I call that a win for the project.)
" I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility."
I actually said nothing like this, did I?
What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate.
For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more.
I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are.
But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
There is a decided difference between emotion and reason. Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report.
A bug report should factually describe a problem and the steps a dev can take to reproduce them.
Your frustration is a symptom of your own unmet expectations. The problem with _any_ expectation is that (being constant) it is bound to be unmet, eventually, given that the world is in a state of continuous change. So you can either lose your cool, or understand that this is the nature of the world, adapt and move on.
The title of this post has "click bait" plastered all over it, and that single post takes the whole thing out of context. I'm sorry I fell for it.
Google _all_ his bug reports and understand in the context.
I agree with you that the title of this post is click bait, however, this statement:
" Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report."
Again, you're right, and again, you're wrong. Now we need moderators and rules and timeouts and bannination and more rules on how what as developers expect from bug reports?
It's hard enough for users to make bug reports.
What I want from bug reports is accuracy, precision, specification, and oh my god, a reproducible test case.
If after registering for a bug account, after taking the time to create a reproducible test case, after taking the time to enter that in my reporting system, if they want to call me a simian -- I'm okay with that.
I'm not sure how the effort required by a user to file a bug report entitles him to use that system in a way not intended by the system itself. Effort != entitlement.
I'm not suggesting rules/moderation/banning, but a little private introspection by individuals before they act.
He was being a complete idiot in his bug report. The moderator stated that he has been warned many times before. He completely deserved to be banned after being warned that his actions will result in being banned.
Sure, he is submitting bug reports, but his childish behavior shouldn't have to be tolerated because of this.
If this report is representative, I don't think a thousand similar reports would deserve a ban. There's some exasperation, some sarcasm, some foot-stomping while expressing strong opinions. But there's no profanity or insults. The strongest negative word used is 'stupid', and it's applied to a question in the UI, not any person. The details and rationale for considering the software's behavior an interaction faux pas are strong.
It's hard to even see which part of 'Bugzilla Etiquette' this report violates:
If other reports are worse, that's another matter. But if so, it seems odd this relatively mild report would be the final trigger that brings down the banhammer. (If there's a reliable pattern of abuse, just wait for the next non-mild incident.)
You missed the reports where he called developers simians, shouted "screw you" and said he'd like to cut off a specific developers hands so he couldn't code any more. (by the way, bugzilla is totally searchable, so if you want, you can see this stuff for yourself before you step up to defend a bully.)
Then why not announce the ban after those blatant transgressions, or the next blatant one if they arrive reliably, rather than after a mild one?
BTW, a simple Bugzilla search for [Richard Mlynarik] returns "Zarro Boogs found". Similarly, a Google search for [site:bugzilla.mozilla.org Mlynarik simian] returns nothing.
I'm sure I'll find the right kind of search eventually – I did find a Mlynarik 'screw you' comment via Google – but if the action is justified by examples with exact quotes, you might as well supply links rather than leave many people searching.
And why personalize this by accusing me of "stepping up to defend a bully"? I've addressed the exact action and manner of action taken in the above-referenced report, with the caveat that other examples would change the analysis. I've defended the precise comment in the 'compact dialog' report, not the person's history.
He was given a warning and a second chance after the awful behavior in other bugs. When he failed to heed that warning he was banned. If you had read the report, you'd have seen that he had been given a previous warning. That's key information. Weren't you curious about the previous warning? Didn't it occur to you that he might have already been treading on really thin ice and continued misbehavior, even minor might be enough to tip the balance? It doesn't seem to me that you were. It seemed to me you were stepping up to his defense without all the facts. That's a dangerous thing to do because you might find that you're defending someone that's you'd rather not be.
"if you had read the report"? "weren't you curious"?
It should have been clear from my conditionals ("If this report is representative…"; "If other reports are worse…") that I was curious about the alluded-to prior history, and my analysis was contingent upon the (at the time unlinked) specifics.
The concern I still have is that this latest comment was so mild and non-insulting that one possible interpretation is that the previous warning(s) were working. He depersonalized his criticisms into the zone where, if judged dispassionately, they could be more more helpful than hurtful.
Now, you've also been quoting other incidents ("simians", "die die die") that might be more recent and salient. I can't find the context for those. (Searches only turn up this thread.)
But I am only opining on the exact comments and actions referenced here. I'm not defending any particular person (who I don't know), but one most recent comment. And I'm not criticizing a general policy of exiling recidivist assholes, only the act of pulling the trigger after a comment that, standing alone, is innocuous.
If someone else over the years posted a thousand comments with the same level of sarcasm and exasperation, but also the same level of actual useful info (and no insults), as in Mlynarik's most recent comment, would they get a ban? Or even a warning? I suspect not. They'd just be considered a cranky but useful bug reporter.
This, exactly. I don't know Richard but this thread has triggered my curiosity, so I've looked at a few of his bug comments and the pattern is that they are funny and strongly worded, but the strong language isn't directed at a person - it's squarely aimed at the problem.
Morendil, his comments are often very much directed at individuals and not at features or bugs.
Calling a developer a "simian" and shouting "screw you" and actually saying "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code" are all direct and personal attacks that should not be tolerated in any forum.
There's nothing "funny" about that. It's the behavior of a bully and someone who thinks that because he's big bad programmer with a long history that he can verbally abuse other programmers when ever he feels like it.
I'm quite sensitive to bullying, having often been a victim, online and off.
Part of me wants to agree with you. Richard does "name names" and directly voice an opinion of another person's abilities and a judgement of their actions.
One of the comments in this HN thread reads: "Get off your high horse you fucking moron". That is abusive. Never mind that this comment is in response to someone I happen to disagree with.
On the other hand I did not find the "cutting off his fingers" comment abusive. It comes across an elaborate, possibly overwrought, way of saying "This guy is making me angry". It is OK in my book to give people feedback on how their actions are making you feel. The imagery is violent, the tone is not.
What I do find abusive is the phrase "people like you" which Richard uses in the same comment. So my considered opinion of these comments would be yes, they are somewhat abusive. But I would stop well short of "bullying".
Richard's attacks have a clear object-level target, which is not a person: he is clearly making legitimate (not necessarily true, but legitimate) claims about the TB development process - that it breaks features that worked, that the concerns of some users are being summarily dismissed, and that there is a pattern of these things happening over and over again.
Yes, the tone he uses for saying those things sometimes crosses a line. But on balance, the impression I'm taking away from this dispute is that Richard is being banned not so much for his tone, but more for saying things that are true and that the people wielding the power to censor him are unwilling to hear.
That aspect of the whole mess, the way the power asymmetry plays out, is what I suspect has people coming out in Richard's defense. People with ban buttons should usually err on the side of tolerance.
The success of open source rests on participation, and participation is a two-way street. When you open a bug reporting system, the intended message is "we care about your concerns". Marking a bug as "won't fix" sends the exact opposite message. That makes it, too, a power not to be used lightly: someone wielding that power indiscriminately can easily turn into what I'd not hesitate to call a "bully".
At some point these tensions stopped being about mere civility, and started being about the power politics of open source. At least, that's how it looks to this outside observer.
"the impression I'm taking away from this dispute is that Richard is being banned not so much for his tone, but more for saying things that are true and that the people wielding the power to censor him are unwilling to hear."
I'm saddened that you have this impression, given that most of the things he complains about are duplicates of bugs that other people were able to report in a civil manner. As a developer, I know my software has bugs, and am appreciative when users let me know what they are. As a person, I don't feel I should have to put up with sarcastic, snarky bullshit when finding out about the bugs, or when trying to fix them.
"The success of open source rests on participation, and participation is a two-way street."
I know of at least one Thunderbird developer who quit because the atmosphere in Bugzilla was hostile. I don't know how many people decided not to participate because of comments like Richard's. Participation isn't the same as welcoming everybody, no matter what their effect on the community.
Also, I would totally read a blog post about the power politics of open source. :)
If they need to punish obscene reports, punish for those, specifically. When they happen. Don't punish a mild, non-obscene report some other time.
edit for your edit: Thanks for finding an earlier clearer example. That comment was unnecessarily personal and abusive. It deserved reprimand or censure. And if the reprimand(s) are responsible for the less-personal tone of the 2011-06-30 comment, compared to the 2010-07-21 comment, they're working to increase the signal-to-emotional-noise ratio. But the controversy of a hard ban for a lesser transgression now introduces new emotional noise.
I couldn't agree with that. Imagine what the landscape of software would look like without all those abrasive "bullies" that Mozilla is wringing their hands about: no Theo, no Zed, no Steve, no Richard ... hell, no Linus, for that matter.
So any open-source community would be better without them, eh?
I don't know about other open source communities. Perhaps they thrive on toxic environments full of bullies. But I do know quite a bit about the Mozilla community and I'm quite certain that we are better off without him.
I expect my users to be thirteen-year-old immature brats with no concept of the effort required to write code nor the time constraints which adults generally have to work within, but I think I'm a special case. :3
Open-source community would surely be better without people being bullies. It's not like anyone's creative ability or technical excellence comes from bullying other people.
The worst thus-far-linked example of Mlynarik's Bugzilla comments is from July 2010, after which one or more warnings were made. The June 2011 example that got him banned shows him as sarcastic and excessively dramatic, but he refrains from personal insults.
So the idea that he is rehabilitating, after warnings, is one interpretation of the linked reports.
Asa Dotzler has mentioned other quotes, but without dates/links for ontext. Perhaps they were in-person incidents? If so, that would change the calculus a lot (in favor of hair-trigger banning).
But part of a fair "next strike and you're gone" policy is being clear about what a 'strike' is. Was he warned not to use sarcasm, CAPS-YELLING, and excessive emotion? If so, he had fair warning. If instead he was warned not to be uncivil and insulting, then this latest comment didn't prove his incorrigibility.
I understand what you are saying, and it sounds reasonable, but I disagree. Your basically suggesting that in every case of a banning, they need to publicly shine the light on every infraction. They also need to spell out an exhaustive list of "strikes," and beware if they forget to include CAPS-YELLING in the list.
No. This is an adult we are referring to here. We can reasonably expect that he knew exactly what he was doing, and was merely pushing the line as far as he could go, and just happened to cross it. This wasn't the first time; he was a repeated offender. This wasn't the start of the problem. It was the final straw (which, in my experience, is usually a minor straw when compared to the haystack beneath it).
Edit: Thank you for responding with a more clear comment than you original, btw. =)
But you could look if you wanted to. How about when he called Thunderbird developers simians and said he wanted to cut off their hands so they couldn't program any more? Is that out of line enough for you? What about saying "screw you" and calling developers children. I consider all of that out of line. He was being a bully and he got banned for it. Good on Dan Mosedale. Bullies suck and we shouldn't let them pollute our communities with their abuse.
Yes, I saw one in a link posted above. Definitely out of line. No second thoughts on that. If the ban had happened in reply to one such post, it would have been unquestioned by many.
Yeah, unfortunately for everyone he was only warned on the worst of the interactions and given a second chance. Sometimes a ban on the first offense is better. Still, a ban after a failure to heed a warning seems completely reasonable. Heck, a re-evaluation of the original interaction with the knowledge of how he behaved after the warning would have worked too. But again, the important thing isn't where the ban happened, it's that the project rejected a bully.
The important thing is exactly when and why the ban happened. As others have pointed out, his latest bug report that got him banned was hugely better than his older bug report filled with personal insults that got him a warning. This shows that he took the warning seriously enough to stop the personal attacks.
Banning him now makes me think the developers of Thunderbird are ego maniacs.
Absolutely! His was the pefect bug report.
A chef cooks for his patrons, and a performer pleases his audience, just as a programmer codes for the user.
With his report you have a passionately described, no holds barred look into what you are causing the user to feel when using the software. Don't let it hurt your feelings, just take it on the chin and recognize that in trying to make something better, you have inadvertently forgotten the primary objective: user experience.
Oftentimes bug reports like this may just be a rant without relevant technical details, but the wonderful thing about this report, is that he gives you the best of both worlds: You have extremely insightful user experience along with the relevant technical details on how to address the issue.
Be grateful, and wish more reports exactly like this.
When they continue to be abusive after a warning it doesn't really matter where mechanically the actual trigger was pulled. It was the right call. It was a late call, in my opinion. I'd have banned him at the "cut off his hands" comment with no warning and now recourse. But again, late or not, it was the right call. No project should have to tolerate bullies. They are toxic to the project and they should be excised as soon as possible.
What Richard is doing here is investing his time into
making Mozilla better.
Unfortunately, no matter how awesome he is for investing his time and no matter how useful his bug reports are, his bug reports are also so offensive, unconstructive and discouraging that it's deemed better for the community to ban him. I can understand and support that decision, although I may have chosen otherwise.
Agreed. Any bug report from a user is valuable - the fact that he was frustrated enough to report it means that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Almost everyone files a bug report in frustration because you're filing an issue about something that doesn't work the way you think it should. But most people are considerably more civil about it.
I really don't like to play the "free" card. Too often developers say "well, it's open source so fix it or stop complaining." I don't think that's right at all . . . especially if you've advocated people use your software. However, having been involved with a lot of OSS projects, I can say that the bugs that get fixed the fastest are the ones that affect the developers themselves. Anything that gets fixed above and beyond that is a developer being a nice person in volunteering his time to help someone else. More to the point: it's hard to get people to work for free when they're demoralized and bug reports like this are demoralizing. If I were involved with the project, he's about the absolute last person I'd try to please no matter how right he may be.
So, while I'm neutral on the ban, the bug reporter has to realize this is a very ineffective way to win friends and get his issues resolved.
That's not strictly true. If you've already got a report of the issue from other more helpful users, then someone coming in and calling you names and threatening to physically harm you, that isn't necessarily adding value.
We're very fortunate at Mozilla to have tens of thousands of but reporters who aren't bullies and who don't think because they wrote some GNU code once that they can threaten you and deride you. This means that the cost of kicking out the bullies is either trivial, or a net win.
It took Mozilla 10 years to get Sunbird to version 1.0, not to mention how long it took them to iron out Thunderbird's "imperfections". As for FireFox, if it weren't for the extensions and the "open source" sticker no one would care about FireFox. They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get.
And I am..er... WAS a hard core FireFox user (switched to chrome a year ago) and still am a heavy Thunderbird user. Mozilla needs to haul ass.
> They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get.
Only if each Richard Mlynarik they have increases the quality of the product. Do you have any reason to think it does? This particular Richard Mlynarik wasn't writing code for Firefox or Thunderbird (which is too bad because i hear he's an excellent hacker). He was submitting bug reports, most of them allegedly duplicates, full of inflammatory language.
If you believe that bug reports filled with inflammatory language make a project work better than bug reports without it, then do please present your evidence for that. My own guess is that being rude to people may be effective in getting them to pay attention in the short term to your needs or wants rather than someone else's, but that it doesn't do anything to improve their overall productivity and may well make it worse by reducing their motivation.
I've had complete strangers on the the street tell me to my face that I was ugly. That's life. Oh well. Rude-ass Bug reports are better than no bug reports.
Emotion 101: When people are pissed they curse. I agree with you, it would be beneficial for them not to but they do. I have a feeling a lot of the people who don't tolerate his language have never worked in customer service or with the public. Emotion happens, a LOT, learn to ignore it. Don't want to deal with it? Write a greasemonkey script that changes all the language you don't like into encouraging statements.
All the programmers I know are very logical, stable people and it seems as a whole they're not used to erratic emotional behavior that people in customer service are used to seeing.
And that gives him the right to be a bully? To say he'd like to cut off a Thunderbird developers hands so he can't program any more? To call developers simians? Nothing gives anyone the right to come into Mozilla's Bugzilla and behave like that.
Simians include all old world monkeys and apes, including humans. While you might interpret it as being an insult, and it may have been meant as such, it is factually correct.
Good. When filing bug reports you should try to work with the team and be as helpful as possible in solving the issue. Being a dick does not help anyone.
Regardless of whether he was being a dick or not, the issue is still there. A helpful dick is still valuable, and banning him is really only hurting the project as a whole.
Most people don't tend to respond well to these types of complaints.
I used to work as customer service for a website and would constantly get sarcastic help requests. It made me hate them and I certainly didn't want to help them. In fact, I either ignored the ticket or just responded slowly as I handled tickets with more reasonable people.
The people saying this is a "great" ticket and wish more reports were given this way are full of it. You will very quickly get tired of it because you realize you are doing everything you can to help them and they really don't care enough to give you enough respect to speak with you as a human being in a conversation. Instead choosing to be sarcastic and insult your efforts to help.
I see this the other way around. I am thankful a huge bunch of volunteers spend many hours of their day creating software I use daily without having to pay for it. They don't deserve to be treated like this.
Even though it may be hard in some cases, having some self-control here will only help you. Bug reports (or helpdesks, for that matter) are not the place to express frustration.
If someone writes that kind of bug report for code that I write, the first thing I would do is take my shoe and beat myself to death. The man being frustrated is your fault. High chances there are million others who feel the same, at least he is conveying it to you. You're shooting the messenger here.
If your critics give up on you and stop telling you how much you suck and how much they hate you, that's a very bad place to be in.
If your critic is a bully and he comes into your workplace saying he'd like to physically maim you so you can't work any more and calls you names and think it's OK because he was, (in his own words, while he's verbally abusing you) "the second person after Stallman to ever write any GNU code" then I think you'd call him a bully, treat his attempts at participation as toxic, and kick him out of your workplace. You might even call the cops. Actually, you would call the cops. And you'd be right to.
But if he writes me a letter letting me know that I suck and that I should rather die than writing buggy code making millions of lives miserable everyday, I'd be fine.
He didn't throw stones at Mozilla labs, he filed and commented on a bug report. Its just text, not a man in their office. Virtual != Real.
Its a mind over matter issue. And as Twain would agree..if you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
If a frustrated user repeatedly sent me threats of physical violence packaged in a complaint letter, I'd turn it over to the police in a heartbeat. That's absolutely not a helpfully frustrated user, that's a real threat. This behavior is not just socially unacceptable, it's so unacceptable that there are longstanding legal structures in place that make it illegal. There are no distinctions between virtual and physical here, it's a real person communicating a threat to another real person using a digital medium instead of a physical one. Filming yourself committing a crime in digital format vs. physical tape/film is basically the same idea. "It's just bits" doesn't hold water or we'd not have most of the internet child porn laws, or most of the copyright and patent law cases going on, none of the internet censorship laws, Wikileaks wouldn't feel threatened, etc.
People are routinely arrested and convicted for basically the same type of behavior directed at public officials spawned from aggravations and frustrations of similar sources..."bugs" in laws, perceived unfairness, disagreements on important decisions, racism, xenophobia, etc, etc, etc (I suspect enforcement is greater in this situation because public officials tend to know the law and exercise their rights against this behavior more often).
I'm arguing that it's just as toxic in a bug report as in the real world (maybe even worse considering it's not ephemeral in a bug report and many more people are likely to be exposed to it.)
And I'm arguing that what's reasonable in the physical world, kicking people out who are abusive, is reasonable in our online meeting places like Bugzilla.
I may not personally mind, but I'm not easily bullied. I've got a pretty thick skin too. But that should not be a requirement for participating in our project.
I don't understand why so many commenters on this thread consider verbal abuse a mark of sincerity. You can say everything you need to say without it. Mlynarik has pursued this style of interaction with people for decades, so it doesn't express any particular intensity of feeling; he just likes crapping on people. Maybe you don't mind reading it when it's not directed at you, but why should the recipient put up with it?
Although Mozilla would be quite right to ban someone if this kind of behavior becomes repetitive, I do find these kind of bug reports extremely useful, because they also convey the impact it has on the user. I can easily identify with his reaction to this "feature", and if my software annoys people like that, I would really want to know.
In fact, this kind of irritating software behavior is one of the reasons I ditched TB a long time ago. I'm sure that was considerable less useful than actually filing a mildly offensive bug report.
I see this as the open source equivalent of firing your customer.
Just as there exists a certain kind of customer who increases the difficulty in running a business, so too there exists a certain kind of user who increases the difficulty in running an open source project. The project as a whole will be much healthier in the long run with the small percentage of users who generate the largest amount of grief removed from the equation.
Richard is deliberately making things difficult for Firefox. It doesn't matter that he's "taking the time to highlight a bug". It doesn't matter what his street cred is. He's behaving like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. If he started stomping his feet and screaming at someone in my house for serving the potatoes too soft, I'd throw him out.
I'm another Thunderbird user, who assumed its bugs will never get fixed and will jump to a better alternative when I see it.
I fully sympathize with that Richard guy, and share his discontent at this serious issue happening in too many open source projects: the "community before quality" meme. Some people just don't understand that without quality the project will just die. Slowly but surely. Some other people seem to just want to see their name in the credits, even if they essentially screw the project in the process. Screw them, if that's what they think.
Did anybody notice that the bug had been clinging there for +15 months and it had 12 duplicates submitted by users and there were being ignored???
Also, as an experienced developer I can't figure a reasonable justification to the injection of such bug in the first place, specially when a beta-tester reported it in due time. Breaking the behavior of Ctrl-F is an awesomely visible and annoying bug!!!
Regarding the insults, well, when you know that nothing will be done to improve things and you are essentially wasting your time there, you don't f*ing care about being banned.
Reminds me of Eric Naggum on comp.lang.lisp in the late 1990s. Although I have no memories of Eric's ever threatening anyone with violence, he wrote hundreds of very long very angry harangues, most containing insults and ad-hominems -- and (unlike Richard Mlynarik) he seemed to believe deep down that his debating opponents wanted to harm him.
As in the present case, people argued that for Eric to continue his abuse would harm Lisp by driving away contributors and adoptees. Difference is that it was very difficult to ban someone from a newsgroup, and Eric never was.
Yeah, they were really strong and aggresive, and I really would people not to be like this, but at least I do not recall him attacking anyone else first. When the issue at hand was purely technical, he was really civil and really to the point.
Mozilla is trying to be like Google with Thunderbird and Firefox, but they are failing.
This guy who's getting / who got banned deserved it, but the changes they keep making aren't all that good.
Firefox is eating a lot of memory, Thunderbird does odd things at times.
A friend has 500 corporate workstations which are running Firefox 3.6.x and Thunderbird 3.1.x. Will he upgrade them to the newer versions, in which they keep pouring poorly tested code? No, he will switch to something else.
I agree that he's impertinent and rude, but I wouldn't have banned him. The best way of dealing with certain people would be to patch bugzilla with the ability to block people for periods of time: a week, a couple of months, a year, forever.
Bugzilla has the ability to block a user from using his or her account. that's what "banning" is in this context. That block can be lifted at any time. I regularly disable accounts for abuse, have a long conversation with that person and end up re-instating their account because they've come to understand that what they were doing was counter-productive and agreed not to do it more.
Except that most companies don't. Abusive customers are bad for the whole company and the other customers. They lower morale, raise costs, and are generally not worth the money they bring in.
So if a company wouldn't do it for money, why would someone take that abuse for free?
You would accept one of your 100,000 paying customers who comes into your workplace shouting "die die die" and telling you he'd like to cut off your fingers so you can't work any more? After telling him that wasn't appropriate when he came back days or weeks later calling you a simian and shouting at you, you'd deal with it how? By inviting him into your office? I doubt it. I suspect you'd kick him out or call the cops to haul him off.
