Olav's comment about google plus and mailing lists suggest to me that Felipe has been on a crusade about this topic and using and soap box he could find. As any sort of community or project admin, the behavior of being told no and the constantly raising the issue and trying to drum up support is really annoying and likely to result in this type of situation.
I mean, I haven't used gnome in years or followed the community, but just reading the OP's post defending himself made me want to ban him. We can argue all day about a platonic world of argument and enlightenment where tone doesn't matter... But we live in the real world with real people.
> I mean, I haven't used gnome in years or followed the community, but just reading the OP's post defending himself made me want to ban him. We can argue all day about a platonic world of argument and enlightenment where tone doesn't matter... But we live in the real world with real people.
And that is the moment someone who knows how to handle such a situation takes his fingers of the keyboard, gets a tea, takes a stroll or does whatever he needs to do to be able to handle the situation rationally later. The others? They behave like a three year old: "I will NEVER play with you again!!!!" and swing the ban hammer.
To be fair, they should both have taken your advice.
Felipe made is point in hist first post, refuting the arguments that needed to be. The following posts (by both Olav and Felipe) are just noise. The whole thread turns into a silly "I want the last word" dispute.
Yes, I didn't want to imply that Felipe is without fault here, but a ban is a real drastic measure, which should stay reserved for situations where there's no other way. And even then I stand by my assertion: Never ban in an emotionally charged situation. Taking a break and handling the situation later will almost always give better results.
(Just in case anyone wonders: I was - as far as I know - never on the receiving end of a ban hammer, but more than once on the giving end.)
A ban is not drastic at all. GNOME Bugzilla is for bugreports. There is no freedom of speech. If someone mostly contributes noise, does not want to listen, he's asked multiple times to please change his attitude, still continues, then the person will get banned.
Felipe is suggesting in some other comment that this should all be per conversation method. E.g. warn him very clearly on this topic in GNOME Bugzilla separately from private email, mailing lists as well as Google+. Wrong expectation to have.
A warning of what? If a person on the street tells you to "stop", your first reaction would be to ask "stop what?", and the answer is "stop chewing gum", to which you reply "but there's nothing wrong with chewing gum", and then you are thrown to jail for all time.
You see what's wrong here, don't you? First of all a warning should convey the punishment; maybe a fine, maybe jail time, etc. Secondly, you can't assume that anybody that tells you to stop doing something is some kind of authority. In my case Olav never made it clear he had the power to ban me, nor that he was contemplating using it. Thirdly, saying "there's nothing wrong with chewing gum" is argumentation, it's not a second offence.
And yeah, surely Olav might have been annoyed by comments I made in other forums, but comments in other forums shouldn't be used as reasons for a ban bugzilla. I always provided value in bugzilla for years, and was banned for a couple of comments. Seems a bit unfair.
I know this is tedious, but these guys don't leave any alternative. I couldn't comment in bugzilla any more, I didn't receive an email notification, and nobody from bugmaster@gnome.org wanted to hear my case. What am I supposed to do?
If GNOME was handled properly, none of this would have happened.
Felipe, I'm completely unsurprised you got banned. This post is just continuation of the behaviour you can't see.
People are human. It doesn't matter if you're technically in the right, or that you think things should be some way - if you piss people off, they are going to tell you to stop pissing them off and then eventually they will do something rash.
In this post you just drag out the dirty laundry again and go through it painstakingly, and then post it to a public forum (HN) for everyone to see.
Just learn to let things go, for God's sake. You wouldn't have been banned if you just said 'sorry' or 'ok, let's agree to disagree' and started talking constructively.
Your goal is to talk them round to your point of view, not make them never want to talk to you again for fear of you blowing things way out of proportion.
Sure, humans can react rash when emotions get involved; that's an explanation of what happened, NOT an excuse. I would hope that someone with power in such a big OSS project would have the self control to not act on his emotions and work off of objective facts instead.
He wasn't. He was acting the part of a self-entitle, self-centered know-it-all. Hell, if he held himself to his own standards, he'd have called himself out for being a hypocritical liar.
Not at all, and I didn't even remotely suggest as such. Supporting having user's feedback is an idea. Acting self-centered is the way you act, your attitude. One has nothing to do with the other.
I didn't act self-centered, I acted as if what I said was true, and I still believe it is.
If you say; I've never tried X, but it sucks. I'm pretty certain that's speculation, because you've never tried it, and that's exactly what I told GNOME developers.
It's speculation, and I'm pretty certain about it, that's why I acted so certain. What's wrong about acting so certain, when you are?
"Your goal is to talk them round to your point of view, not make them never want to talk to you again for fear of you blowing things way out of proportion."
I'd like to think that one's goal is to improve any ecosystem/community and talking them round to your point of view could be one of them. I say this because of one of many things: you _could_ be wrong, the community isn't ready to accept the idea, etc. If you're facing a lot of resistance, it never hurts to back off and reassess, because although you possess the knowledge and insight into how to make things better, it is probably your job as well to make sure everybody knows in the most efficient way possible.
And yes, I agree, scaring colleagues/peers off is never a good thing.
Felipe is obviously an aggressive dude. However, the only difference between him and whoever banned him and all those that refuse to even read his defence is the access to ban mechanisms.
All through the discussion, no participant managed to steer the discussion onto productive grounds. Heated arguments are important to produce good results. It comes a time, in any of these arguments, that the discussion must stop being divergent and start being convergent towards a goal. This step never happened.
If heated arguments never get resolved in the Gnome community, Gnome has a big, big problem. Worse, it will go unnoticed by those in the community because they are filtering out dissonant voices.
IMO if you are in charge of handling users in a community you shouldn't be taking down people due to ifference of opinion of even people you just don't like... If it is your own personal project, sure, but otherwise it should take something more then a few heated words (which personally I didn't find heated at all..) to be banned from something. Reading the post I felt that the admin was acting more childish.
Whatever happened outside bugzilla should have stayed outside bugzilla. In GNOME's bugzilla I always provided value, and to ban me because of a couple of comments that have nothing wrong is overkill.
Do you think it would be fair if a judge ordered jail time because you didn't clean the dishes? No. Domestic issues are domestic issues, and criminal issues are criminal issues.
But good riddance, I'm better served helping projects that don't ban a person just because (s)he has a different opinion. Like Linux, and Git.
No but would it be reasonable to be fired from a job if one was causing inconvenience to their higher-ups elsewhere so much that they didn't want to work with you? Probably.
Edit: not saying I think you should have been banned for this because frankly, I think you were right to begin with, just pointing out that your legality comparisons are not always reasonable.
Well, what did you expect? GNOME's processes and communication with users exactly represents the general state of the project, it's an uninspired big pile of shit, it always has been, it always will be.
And of course, if you argue against GNOME's dogmas, you will be sidetracked because of some bullshit like your tone (which IMHO was totally fine, and you even argued your case with sources, examples and all) and then banned because you took part in the off-topic discussion (or even for talking back). That's how every sneaky bastard on the internet with a ban-hammer proceeds.
There are clear rules on how to behave. You say it was fine, but you only judge on his version of his behaviour. He went on and on and on, various bugreports, various personal emails, etc. Eventually enough is enough.
I see that you are now perfectly happy to call me a sneaky bastard. Try going to a conference and talking to me in person instead of this anonymous internet.
The interaction escalated, but you were as much to blame for that as well. The problem is the ban hammer. An independent judge would either ban you both or neither. This is supposed to be a profesionally run project, not scriptkiddies in dome irc chatroom acting tough.
And i second the other remark. You wouldnt dare behave like this in public. Trying to get somebody removed from a conference for an opinion you do not agree with, nor are willing to discuss.
And lets be honest. The gnome bugzilla ban list, is likely bigger than the launchpad ban list, eventhough you guys have much less contributors. You guys are running a clubhouse with the self esteem of 13 year old boys. The highest standards for others, the lowest for yourself.
All the gnome hate can be summed up in one simple question: when are you guys going to behave profesionally. Be the better party in conflicts. Show some patience. Show some understanding for the relationship people have with your product, and just in general "play nice".
Because between the conflicts with canonical, kde, users, contributors .. The one constant is "gnome devs dont play nice". And its 99% of communication. Tone of voice, and socially handicapped individuals with little empathy and ban hammers.
Come on. Is your exchange, that resulted in a ban, not very typical for an IRC?
I get that you feel insulted. You should. And you can call me names if you want to. But on bugzilla you are representing a project, an organisation and a mission statement.
Yet you used the ban hammer as a personal dislike button. You do not see the difference? You do not see the comparison to immature irc behavior vs being professional?
You saying they never show up as if it's directly related to your challenge rather than the fact that they probably have a billion things they'd rather be doing than going to a conference and getting in an argument is pretty laughable.
No comment on the rest, except to say that thinking you could have someone kicked out of a conference for their tone is a bit funny. Felipe is abrasive (though not incorrect, in my view) and not someone I would like to work with but you are not winning any friends for yourself or the project with your attitude.
Mostly off topic: is it just my filter bubble, or does this flavor of deep, hate-ridden flamewar only show up in OSS projects that touch end users?
I mean, on the server side, the worst kind of flamewar I've seen is TJ Holowaychuk disagreeing with Rails defaulting to CoffeeScript. It got us some drama and pictures of cats.
But end-user OSS? That's been a pit of hate and anger ever since Torvalds posted a kernel to some newsgroup.
In fact, it's one of the things that keep me from trying out stuff like Linux for real. If a question like 'which audio driver do i best install?' can only be answered by reading through a multi-year flamewar, why would I bother?
Now, since i've never really tried (or well, not in the past 14 years), the above might be entirely untrue. Still, to me, 'end-user FOSS' and 'hate and anger' are somehow symbolically linked.
Does this make sense? Do people recognise this? Or am I simply a closed-minded fool too fast in his judgment?
Flamewars are a result of touched emotions. If parts of my identity depend on the color of a desktop (e.g. because I've used it for 10 years) a color change will infuriate me and I may start a flamewar. This usually doesn't happen with server technology (most people couldn't care less about the internal workings of a server. They will never see it).
Additionally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshedding - server software looks far more complicated than desktop software, so many people will think they understand the topics at hand and will talk about changes in the desktop software. Greater participation increases the risk of flamewars.
It happens everywhere. OSS just gives you the chance to see all this in the public. It also gives end-users a way to directly communicate their pain and annoyances to developers.
Well, end-user support is hard, there's no way around it.
KDE has encountered its share of flamewars and even banned developers as well, though we normally seem to default to near the opposite end of the spectrum where we string a problem along and let it fester until finally someone will make the decision to utilize le banhammer. This has negative effects on our developer pool.
After the last major crisis a couple of years ago we formed a "Community Working Group", the team behind which seems to have done a good job of helping resolve issues behind-the-scenes before they become HN and /. headlines.
But to answer your question it has nothing to do with FOSS in particular, and everything to do with customer support. I used to work retail and that was way worse, at least here I can add someone to my killfile.
"In fact, it's one of the things that keep me from trying out stuff like Linux for real."
If you're even remotely involved in technology as a profession, this is a deficiency in your skillset. Linux now runs much of the world and isn't really a novelty.
"If a question like 'which audio driver do i best install?' can only be answered by reading through a multi-year flamewar, why would I bother?"
Unless you have specialist needs it's not really a question that should pop up any more, your distro of choice ought to make that decision for you.
"Still, to me, 'end-user FOSS' and 'hate and anger' are somehow symbolically linked."
Kinda. This is a bit different as it's not a war over "A or B" but the direction A is taking.
The problem, particularly with Gnome at present, is that the direction it's taking is not appreciated by most existing users. It's compounded by the fact that a lot of people liked Gnome 2, and the Gnome team basically canned that at short notice. Distributions then started to roll out Gnome 3 and remove Gnome 2. Gnome 3 forces them to work differently and takes away a lot of choice. So users were annoyed, the desktop environment they liked seemed to be being taken away from them and the new one seemed to be making a lot of stuff worse.
From the developers' perspective (as far as I can tell) the thought was basically that Gnome 2 was finished, stable, unexciting and old fashioned. A drive took place to create a new, modern desktop with a consistent experience. Logically then, this would bring new users to Linux. Some resistance from techies was to be expected, people don't like change, but they'll thank us for it in the end.
I'm not 100% sure why the distros ditched Gnome 2 quite so fast, but the announcement of support and development basically being dropped didn't help. The Gnome team also seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the two could not easily reside on the same system.
Anyway, these three things in confluence make people feel like the Gnome team have taken something from them (not really true) and the Gnome team think that naysayers are all entitled and change resistant (also not really true). So it's no wonder it's a rather heated area.
If you want to watch FOSS at its constructive best I recommend the debian mailing lists. You'll still find disagreement on there, but you'll also see people helping each other and getting stuff done.
I think part of the reason for your perception is probably that FOSS is done far more out in the open than something like MS Windows, and in a far less hierarchical way, so there's nobody to pull rank or to hush things up. Linus may well be in charge of the kernel, but only has a limited say over the user space (for example).
(This has become quite a bit longer than it was meant to be!)
Also, I'd be interested to know if you think the vitriol between FOSS advocates is any worse than, say, all the Mac/Windows shouting matches you see all over the net? Or Ps3/Xbox weenies? (BTW if you really want to see FOSS vitriol go observe a GPL vs BSD license freedom debate!)
I think people on the net just like to argue. I know I do. Free/Open software is developed out in the open through mass collaboration, which gives so much wonderful, flamey opportunity.
Good post, and I've little to add but the following:
First, the world isn't running on Linux. Webservers are, but software techology is a lot more than stuff on web servers. For example, i work in embedded software, mostly for relatively large machines (ATMs, multifunctional copiers, industrial machines that turn stuff into other stuff), and Linux isn't that common there. The most common setup is some (micro)controller with RTOS for the nitty-gritty stuff, hooked up to a Windows box for the display panel and outside communication. There's plenty other examples of tech that mostly isn't Linux. Cars? Sliding doors?
Second, to answer your question, i do think the FOSS flames are harder and nastier than the win/osx platform wars. I don't know about the consoles, since I don't game much.
A significant portion of it is now. Maybe not desktop linux with gnome/kde/xfce/whatever, but it is in a lot of places. It's on a lot of home networking gear (NAS, routers etc), it runs a lot of the server room and has even found a home on mainframes. It's also in supercomputers and in a lot of consumer electronics these days (Android phones, kindle touch and I assume paperwhite).
I too have worked in embedded software recently and can tell you that some of the newer credit card processing terminals run a fairly standard linux-on-arm with framebuffer display setup.
It may be a niche desktop OS at present, but it does a hell of a lot behind the scenes, webservers are no where near the extent of it.
--edit--
I wouldn't be surprised if you were right on the arguments, as they are often quite ideological in nature.
--edit2-- Smart TVs! Love 'em or hate 'em, Samsung Smart Tvs run Linux too...
--edit3-- Also the most popular laptop on amazon US, and third most popular on amazon.co.uk. Sure it's a chromebook, but that's just a cut down, restricted linux too.
--edit4--You mention cars, Jaguar Landrover, Nissan and Toyota have recently kicked off "Automotive Grade Linux"
(I swear I'll stop editing in a minute but boring day is boring...)
Hmm, good point. I blatantly assumed that you said what you said because you'd ascribe to the common HN idea that "tech == server + app/browser". My bad!
Nice list of examples.
Btw, I'm pretty familiar with using Linux as a server/embedded OS - the reluctance I uttered before was indeed very much about using it myself as a consumer OS - which is what these flamewars all seem to be about.
Ach, fair enough, if you can find your way around linux on the server you can have a stab at finding your way around it anywhere else.
What you use on your desktop comes down to personal preference and it's hard to think of many advantages to linux on the desktop compared to other environments, unless you're a habitual tinkerer like myself...
Crazy to see Felipe banned, but then he's always been one for expressing a strong opinion... strongly. Love his technical posts, been reading for over a year now.
Also, GNOME seems to be having a difference of opinion with the loud minority (or is it a majority? I honestly don't know), about how they run the project. Is that a problem? I think so, but then one of my favourite projects (Elementary OS) is run similarly... and it works well there.
The difference is, GNOME has been around forever, and I think end users feel invested in it. Over the past couple of years, it feels like it's been "taken away". Whether or not that is correct is up for you to decide. I'm not fussed either way: I use Unity ;)
It's hard to tell if GNOME developers are defensive because they are under attack or if they are under attack because they are defensive.
Bottom line: These people, weather they are arrogant, impolite or unsympathetic to users does not refute the fact that they are giving their time to the project.
GNOME has been under fire since the famous GNOME 3 release and I would understand the remaining developers to be a little touchy on the matter. At some point, you either stop - or you decide: Fuck this - I will just ignore user-input, because it sucks.
There is nothing more demotivating for developers (especially those working for free) than a loud group of people displeased with your work.
Do I agree with the way they communicate back to the community? Hell no! But they only deserve half of the shit storm they are getting.
FWIW, I totally agree that just a "No." is bad, entirely understand what it resulted in. However, going after a developer in a bugreport is not tolerable behaviour as well.
> FWIW, I totally agree that just a "No." is bad, entirely understand what it resulted in. However, going after a developer in a bugreport is not tolerable behaviour as well.
So why did you go after him?
(I realize that by "a developer" you meant yourself, not Felipe. I still consider this a fair question.)
> Bottom line: These people, [whether] they are arrogant, impolite or unsympathetic to users does not refute the fact that they are giving their time to the project.
> GNOME has been under fire since the famous GNOME 3 release and I would understand the remaining developers to be a little touchy on the matter. At some point, you either stop - or you decide: Fuck this - I will just ignore user-input, because it sucks.
To put it bluntly: if they've given up on making what users want, what's so special about their giving their time to the project?
Why should anyone care, other than for fear that the developers will continue to make things even worse?
Playing the devil's advocate in a way: I'm not surprised that he got the ban. After Olav wanted to stop polluting the topic with this meta discussion about "tone" and "speculation", Felipe kept going on anyway, about how complaining about "tone" is unsophisticated (which is actually getting personal). It made him come off as wanting the last word, and that, I think, made them trigger the ban.
Of course, whether or not Olav should be so concerned about "tone" in a text-based medium is another matter entirely and I'll refrain from making a judgment call on that.
Pretty easy: "please stop". Person does not. Then ok, bye from me.
And yeah, I'm the one you're talking about. And Felipe got banned by one of his best friends on Google+. Apparently really good friend in reality, terrible on Internet. Enough said IMO.
I was not the one that brought "done" to the discussion, it was Olav and others. That was pretty off-topic, he should have banned himself.
Speculation on the other hand is very relevant to the topic. If you accept you arrived at a conclusion through speculation, it opens the possibility that the conclusion might be wrong, and needed to be re-evaluated.
I really dislike this kind of flame. The author got banned over a year ago, and now, because of the recent threads on the "No." in the gnome-terminal bug, the author tries to fan the fire by bringing this up. Then, he posts his blog post on HN using the third person: "Another user/developer banned ..." If you are going to post your own blog post (nothing wrong with that usually), don't make the title look like someone else talking about you.
This was in September 2011. Are you really holding a grudge for this long ?
My suggestion would be to forget about this and move on. No offense to anyone but GNOME is just dreadful and there are so many other Linux/FOSS projects that desperately need people. Help them out instead.
FC seemingly goes out of his way to act like an ass, and he got himself banned from a bug reporting tool for it. According to another link in these comments, he was also banned from pidgin's IRC channel, and a friend of mine banned him from his G+ feeds.
FC getting banned from GNOME's bugzilla isn't a GNOME thing, it's an FC thing.
Nonsense. No project, open or closed, needs a non-contributing pain in the ass, injecting his (and it is always his) nonsense into every single discussion, forcing every conversation back onto whatever topic they felt they lost the last time, regardless of existing consensus, regardless of the lack of new information, and regardless of who is actually doing the work.
Also, I'd like to meet people that don't resort to emotional blackmail in order to try and force nerds to provide them free goods or services.
Does anyone personally know people in Red Hat's management or the GNOME foundation's board of directors?
If so, it would be a good idea to engage them and convince them to fix the problem.
Red Hat has the authority to fire the many GNOME developers they employ, and the GNOME Foundation owns the trademark and can thus ultimately remove commit rights and Bugzilla admin rights from the problematic developers.
It's clear that the issue is now so big that this is the level at which corrective action needs to be taken.
Red Hat doesn't run GNOME, though lately they've been hiring people for GNOME like crazy. The last time some GNOME contributor disagreed with one of my decisions, I make him a GNOME bugzilla admin. Any of the 4 admins are totally free to unban someone. If GNOME foundation board says someone should be unbanned it will be done as well.
I find it rather telling that instead of an unban or review, you're suggesting to completely remove me. Like everything I do is bad. Right...
There is a problem with developer communication. It's an unsolved problem. There's probably some interesting research to be done about it.
You have people who don't have English as a first language talking to people.
You have people with varying levels of interpersonal skills - some pretty poor. For example, people with Asperger's can be pretty blunt when talking to others. And they don't always have best modern help to sort that out.
People tend to be protective of work they've done. Especially when it's being "attacked".
And people can be unconstructive in their criticism - "that sucks!" "You're an idiot for doing it like that!"
People can be very attached to certain models.
These combine into a massive clusterfuck. The fact the world runs on so much open source software really is remarkable.
As to fixing this stuff:
1) Create clear divides between technical lists and things that anyone can comment on.
2) Create clear rules about expected behaviour. ("Only technical comments"; "patches get attention, whines don't"; "comment on the code, not the coder"; "polite is good, constructive is essential, flames get you banned".)
2a) Have people to enforces those
3) Have some kind of comment limiting mechanism to prevent flames breaking out. Mostly this is user behaviour, but slowing comments might help to prevent a few flames turning into a forest fire.
4) Have experienced community members acting as mediators. Often flames happen when two people mostly agree with each other but are mis-interpreting a small point, or there are language problems, or some such.
I don't get what you mean with "The fact the world runs on so much open source software really is remarkable". Could you clarify?
I also think that big part of the problem with developer communication comes from the fact that many/most of us taught ourselves how to code when young. That gives you a very high self-pride, as you were doing complicated stuff while your friends were watching DBZ. If you are lucky enough then you find out that you don't know a shit about programming, but that's not always the case.
As I see it, Felipe WAS being abrasive in tone, and I can see why people would be disturbed by that. But if I were the administrator, I would never have banned him for this without first giving specific, actionable feedback on how to say the same thing in a different tone. People have different strengths, and some may be brilliant programmers or have excellent UI design ideas while being rather poor in social and communication skills -- without actionable feedback they cannot improve. And "just stop the way you're acting" is not actionable feedback -- in fact, responding that way ALSO demonstrates poor communication skills.
I agree. In fact, a warning saying "don't continue this tone or I'll ban you" would have been more than enough. About the tone, I don't think there was any way I could have conveyed my message that their conclusions were wrong in a way they would like.
If somebody really cared, they could have tried to say the same thing I did, in different words, but the bug is still open. They are never going to change their minds.
2273 people starred this issue and may be notified of changes."
You are wrong. You ignored the second part of that statement: "or if they do, it's not nearly as visible as something like 'votes'." By ignoring that, it makes your declaration of "Wrong" wrong. Any assertions made by this are also "Wrong."
"In my experience however adding voting does not lead to annoying comments."
In my experience however adding voting does lead to annoying comments.
This completely proves my point, and I can now move on.
"I'm not acting in any way."
That's wrong. You have to be acting in some way. The lack of acting would mean you aren't participating in the flame war you started. Indeed, that statement is not only wrong, but makes you a liar.
Wow.
You know, it's so much easier to act like the OP. You don't have to think, or put for much effort. Just mouth off.
"And complaining about "tone" is not precisely considered a sophisticated way to engage in a discussion"
Sure, but acting like a self-entitled little bitch is much, much worse.
Olav's comment about google plus and mailing lists suggest to me that Felipe has been on a crusade about this topic and using and soap box he could find. As any sort of community or project admin, the behavior of being told no and the constantly raising the issue and trying to drum up support is really annoying and likely to result in this type of situation.
I mean, I haven't used gnome in years or followed the community, but just reading the OP's post defending himself made me want to ban him. We can argue all day about a platonic world of argument and enlightenment where tone doesn't matter... But we live in the real world with real people.