Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk

This isn't restricted to open source project leaders, or even open source developers. You'll find the same childish elitism in pretty much every field of human endeavor.<p>Programmers certainly do it. Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken. Surfers do it. Climbers do it. I've even seen rocket scientists do it.<p>The interesting thing is watching which members of a given group behave this way.<p>It's not everybody. There's a certain skill range where you find this behavior. Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better than most people I know", and it grows exponentially in that range (though, again, only in people who are given to such behavior).<p>But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.<p>I live in the climbing mecca of Fontainebleau, and can watch first hand as 7a boulderers from around the world descend and act like jackasses trying to scootch their butts off the ground on problems that are hard (but not world class) while scowling with superiority at the lowly rabble that might dare touch the holds of their project. It's best to simply wait until they give up before going over and doing the problem.<p>But occasionally you see a guy working an 8a. That's pretty stout by anybody's definition (even at font), but he's not shouting or swearing at it. He's just calmly doing his thing, uninterested in being the center of attention, and more than happy to talk to anybody who walks up without the least hint of snoot.<p>I think you find the computer programming equivalent of that guy from time to time too. He's the "bourne shell" guy that another comment mentions downthread, and he's above the elite.<p>The cool thing is that you don't have to be as good as him to act like him. All you need do is not be a dick.

I've never seen an opensource leader make fun of an honest attempt at contribution. What I have seen is a lot of ignoring and rejecting attempts.<p>Miguel de Icaza had a blog post on this I think. The problem with large opensource projects is that they have a lot to do, and simply don't have time to thoroughly follow up on all the small contributions that are ridden with naieve errors and plain formatting issues. Not to mention the big ones that come with architectural changes without explanations.<p>I think it's unfair to call these charity workers jerks, just because they are trying to make light of a dire situation.<p>Yes it can hurt if your contribution is coldly cast aside, and yes it would be much better if they warmly took you in and taught you in their ways, but if the OSS project leaders don't keep up the constant stream of contributions, improving the project all the time the project will die and all work will have been in vain.<p>On a side note: which project will you be contributing to this christmas? It is charity time after all and a bunch of hem could use a commit or two from your hands :) just be sure to read their code-style documents ;)

Based on all the "I don't know what you're talking about. I've never seen this." comments I think the author should clarify that its not just the OS project leaders who are guilty of this. The smugness of core developers, and even contributors is worthy of a South Park episode.<p>If you're a young developer, or seasoned for that matter, and the urge to put down the work of someone else tugs at you, consider this;<p>I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steve Bourne, inventor of the Bourne Shell (as in, /bin/sh on every Unix system ever). Here is a guy who was literally sitting next to the guys who invented Unix WHILE THEY INVENTED IT. And all this time later he's surprisingly humble, friendly, and genuinely interested in what other, younger developers are doing.<p>If a guy who has earned the right to be smug several times over treats people with respect, what right do we have to do otherwise?

The author thinks an open source elite is someone with high visibility in a project that is "well known by tens or hundreds of thousands of people"? That's a pretty low bar. Personally, I'd call someone in that category a wannabe. On the internet, it doesn't take a lot to have that much recognition.<p>I consider people who are "the elite" to be folks like Larry Wall. Or Guido van Rossem. Or someone like Ian Lance Taylor (who has hacked on many things in the GCC/binutils toolchain). Their projects are known by a bit more than a mere "hundreds of thousands of people", and they are definitely not jerks.<p>The reality is if you want to be very successful, especially in a project where all of the contributors are volunteers, you can't be a jerk, because then people won't want to work with you. In the very early days of NetBSD, there were a quite a few people who were quite disagreeable to be around on the core team list. One of them was in my work and social circles, and it's one of the reasons I choose to work on Linux instead of NetBSD. But even NetBSD is known by more than "hundreds of thousands" of people.<p>And that's the key --- yes, being a jerk will probably be a strong negative factor if you want your project to be one of the really top, well-known, successful projects. But you can a jerk and still have a moderately successful OSS project. Because at the end of the day, for better or worse, people will overlook someone being a jerk if they have a good, solid product to offer. This is true outside of the OSS world as well, of course. As far as I'm concerned neither Larry Ellison nor Steve Jobs would win the nicest person of the year award. But their products were sufficiently good that people were willing to overlook their personality traits, and indeed even idolize them as positive examples of leaders in the Tech industry.

I couldn't agree more. I've seen this type of attitude from F/OSS "leaders" over the past couple of decades, and it always galls me to no end.<p>This is why I commit (no pun intended) to try my best to <i>not</i> be like that with any of my projects. Now, to be fair, none of the Fogbeam projects have a lot of outside contributions to date, but every time someone has contacted me, I've tried to respond in a polite, reasonable and appropriate manner.<p>One thing to consider, when interacting with people you don't know, is that <i>you don't know</i> what you're possibly getting. We got a request once, for permission to take our code, make it work with MySql, and use it for some academic research. Now that was already allowed by the license anyway, but I took the time to respond to the guy, and had a few chat/email interactions with him as worked on his project, even though I had no idea who he was, how important the project was, or if anything would ever come of it. A year or so later, I get an email saying "Hey, here's a pre-print of the paper we published, it's being presented at $PRESTIGIOUS_CONFERENCE, and we mention your project in the paper". That turns out to be a nice "feather in the bonnet" for us and helped get the project some visibility it would not have gotten otherwise.<p>Honestly, I don't see any value in being dismissive, insulting or demeaning towards anyone, just because they aren't already an expert in your project.

I've not seen this at all.<p>In my experience, most open source project leaders are very congenial and gracious that you're spending time on their project. I did some poking around and couldn't find <i></i>any<i></i> OSS leads that disparaged their contributors.<p>Not sure if the lack of examples was an attempt to not "name and blame" or if there aren't many good ones. OP, to be clear, this isn't merely leads saying "this code/feature/suggestion is inappropriate" to pull requests, but honest malice?

I played pull request with a framework recently. There was something that I wanted to do that could only be done if the framework had fully chained a JavaScript function (ie, forwarded all parameters, included "this", and returned the result). It was an easy fix, but it turned out that what appeared to be an omission was intentional due to very specific edge cases in JavaScript that prevented someone from doing something undocumented but maybe useful. A conflict between two users doing things that the framework did not intend seems like a tough decision, one that makes sense to roll with the status quo. Except that from the issues database, I can see that I was not the only person to ask for this change. My pull request was actually proposed 3 or 4 other times, and there were plenty of other people who had found a sort-of-workaround and were shipping code using this workaround. So I sat down and spent a good amount of time investigating the edge cases to figure out what should be done, wrote it all up, linked to the other people who were having problems or working around them, and submitted a new pull request. Again, the results were unsatisfying: closed because they didn't think people should be doing that. Except that they already are doing it in a hackier way. I guess that other lone guy who was doing something really strange but filed his bug report first wins after all. This whimsy is disrespectful, and pushes people to use something else, start their own, or spend time telling the world that you don't know how to play nicely. In the end, maybe that doesn't matter to some maintainers. They had their fame and their fun and they move on.

I expect a major driver of this is that people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using and so to assume that people who disagree with them are fundamentally stupid, malicious, or crazy when they're really just coming from a different background.<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...</a>

I've called out more than one "leader / boss" out in meetings / code-reviews for being excessively mean &#38; shaming noobs who are genuinely trying their best &#38; are hungry to learn.<p>Constructive criticism is a great thing, but telling someone they will never work again in this industry because they make a small CSS error on their first ever post-college project is another.<p>I've been fired from one job for standing up in a meeting and calling the boss a self-important asshole &#38; refusing to retract it.<p>Life is too short to let these type of people get you down, we are all just floating on a rock in space &#38; going to die in a few years....what's important: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14su4p/he_sang_to_her_every_night_before_bed_moments/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14su4p/he_sang_to_her_...</a>

There is an unfortunate flipside to this— people who show up with ALL CAPS demands, proclaiming your incompetence, because of some missing functionality that they believe to be so obvious but can't seem to completely explain on their own.<p>The best way to respond to that is to politely request what you need and then ignore if they won't be helpful. ... but humans don't always respond in the best way: Another possible response is to respond harshly and critically in order to generate a hierarchy: "I am not here to serve you. Your patches may be accepted if it suits my fancy.". Neither extreme of being high and mighty nor of allowing people to simply abuse you is ideal.

I thought this was exclusive to the Rails community - but it is good to see it's not.<p>I am glad someone is speaking out against it, because it sucks.<p>One of the major reasons people don't learn to be better developers is because of "elite developers" that have come before them that take pride in humiliating them.<p>This article is very on-point. I nearly stopped learning Rails because of the torment from #RubyOnRails on IRC. But then I remembered it is the internet and everybody is probably a dog.<p>I am glad I didn't stop learning - and I am very conscious of this with "noobs" now.

There are a lot of other angles we can look at this as well: The user ("I need.."), The cocky contributor ("This is right, accept my pull request!"), The belittled contributor ("I'm not sure.. but let me try.."), The helpful leader ("I can't accept this because it will break xyz.") The douche leader (As the article stated: "LOL!"), and the cocky leader ("No, that's wrong." - And then they realize later it's actually right, but they're attitude made them not look at a worthy contribution in the right light correctly.)<p>The article makes a good point - But there's a lot more we can take out of this, that being that for any community to succeed, it needs to be just that: A community. A place where others help each other grow.

I've seen this a couple of times but not after pull requests, but simple (verified even) bug reports or feature requests.<p>Let me quote a recent example from IRC:<p>&#62; XXXXX interesting how the number of new github issues went down since i started ignoring them :)<p>&#62; XXXXX could be coincidence, but i suspect having a few open tickets discourages the more frivolous requests we usually got there"<p>Nice attitude there! After reading several such comments and some diatribe on github (following a bug report), I really had difficulties justifying the use of the software developed by this guy, especially after having been warned about this earlier by a co-worker ("the project is fine, XXXXX is the only problem with it") and not taking it seriously because I thought he was exaggerating (I'm not really into personality cult etc.).

That this still happens is sad.<p>I was on the receiving end way back in 2002. I'd just written an RS232 library for the .NET Compact Framework that ended up in the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Core Reference[1]. It was also referenced by an MSDN article[2], so got a lot of attention.<p>I left a bug in there which broke anything that didn't use default settings. The abuse was astounding. It was the last code written on my own time that I ever published.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&#38;locale=en-us" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/book.aspx?ID=5960&#3...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446565.aspx</a>

I agree with others. This is useless without context - I have never seen this actually happen.<p>"stupid pull request of the day site:twitter.com" returns one result, and it isn't negative in any fashion.

A part of the hacker mindset ("hacker" as used in the jargon file, and in this site's title) is intolerance of stupidity. Ignorance is one thing, that can be learned away. Stupidity is wasting developer's time by asking questions that are addressed in the documentation or that can be instantly solved with five minutes on Google, or submitting pull requests that go against a published style guide, are plainly wrong or buggy, and so on.<p>I'm going to come right out and say this: Some people should not contribute to a FOSS project. Whether that's because they can't deal with other people or because they're not willing to put in even a modicum of effort to work effectively with other people. If you go up to a group of people who are used to doing things according to procedure X and you blithely ignore it, you <i>really should not be surprised</i> when your efforts are met with derision at best and hostility at worst.<p>While I understand the point the author is trying to make here, and even sympathize to a point, the mindset isn't going to change, nor should it. The bar to entry is a part of what make high quality projects high quality.

Glad that someone is talking about this. There are times when a little encouragement can go a long way. A novice maybe very excited about learning and being belittled at that stage can be deflating. This is especially true of people who come from a totally different field, or are young and enthusiastic about contributing.

I have to wonder how many people see Linus Torvald's behavior and think what he does is OK. Linus walks a VERY fine line, and his insults and demeaning comments are usually directed at people who "know better."<p>I have had a few drinks so it's hard to properly articulate what I mean, but maybe somebody else knows what I'm talking about.

Open source projects work best when they have a benevolent dictator. You need someone who isn't afraid to say "no" to bad ideas, or else you'll end up with a total clusterfuck. It's just as important not to forget the "benevolent" part. I'll always remember Brad Fitzpatrick telling me "no" to one of my dumb suggestions for PubSubHubbub. He explained his reasoning and took the time to tell me what I needed to fix. He knew he was smarter than me, but he gave me the chance to figure that out on my own instead of pushing me away.

Lots of sports analogies on here. I'll toss in mine. I've made a habit of trying new things and have gotten over the "you look stupid when you start" part. Skiing, Snowboarding, knitting, sewing, coaching, aussie rules. Everyone's a newb at some point. I have found that I compare myself to other skiiers / boarders a lot. But that is mainly a safety thing so I know if I should follow them down other parts of the mountain. So competitive but for a reason. I think I get more pissy about etiquette and safety, but generally from people who look like they should know better. 16 year old coming into the lift line at high speed, I see you. I'm a large large man, you're gonna get hurt if you hit me and I played college ball, I'm gonna make sure <i>I</i> don't get hit. Soooo... anyway. Unless you're trying to get ranked in real life, you're really just competing against yourself. You're the one who will decide if you have the time to put into whatever to be good enough to compete at a low national level. There are exceptions, but in sports you can use your brain and experience to make up for physical deficiencies. In Cerebral events you can use persistence and experience. And I've tailed off so Fin

this blog post has a major omission of any specifics whatsoever. I've never seen this kind of behavior, and I'm having a great urge to say something like, "oh well because PHP/Ruby/etc". But that is all prejudicial.<p>Won't we be given some specifics so that we don't have to guess what famous OSS author actually typed "HAHAHA" at a pull request ?

The worst behavior I have ever seen comes from a commercial open source project. I know they aren't paying customers...but they are bug finders and bug reporters, user experience testers, and even feature-expanding code contributors. I would be appalled if I employed the guy.

<i>Chances are, mr or mrs open source elite, you have been on the receiving end of this in your life.</i><p>Exactly, and that's why they do it to others! That may be their default (not consciously-chosen) behavior because it's what they got used to.

useless without pointer to the actual behavior.

When I was high school I had the opportunity to work with an aspiring music producer. It was great fun and a formative experience because he had a notably kind and supportive demeanor, coupled with focus. He went on to become a superstar producer and to this day when I run into him he has exactly the same demeanor.<p>This leads me to think some aspects of personality and how we treat others are innate. Jerks can be talented and successful too, and just remain Jerks. It takes all kinds.

From what I've seen, most of the contributors to large projects are one-time contributors who just want to implement their one cool idea for the project. Maintainers who want to encourage those sort of contributions need to do everything they can to lower the barrier of entry to contributing, which includes being positive towards new contributors.

My favorite comments I will never forget from my ex-CTO:<p>"you are wrong about this, because I say you are wrong." [turned out: he was dead wrong!]<p>"stay home if you want to answer phonecall from your dad." [knowing he is in the hospital]<p>"today you have been all day on the phone." [after talking with dad for 3 min 35 sec]<p>"stop pinging google to check if the net is working."<p>"ping doesn't tell you anything."<p>"I hate those Chrome tabs -- they are affecting my search results."<p>"I'm a CTO - I can be rude."<p>"Don't work here if you have family."<p>"If we succeed with this project [24-months period], we may get million dollars bonus" [perfectly knowing its impossible and simply not true]<p>"I fixed Asia!" -"Cool!" -"What did you do?" -"At 3am? I was with my wife and kids." -"Well, I hope that helped alot in your career." [next day, after he IT-supported Asia at 3am]<p>"You see my desk? Apple, Apple, Apple..."<p>"You are on a McDonalds French Fry Guy schedule, ha!" [after working 14 hours straight from 7am till 9pm]<p>"You work long hours and are not paid for those, because you are upper managment and should be proud of it". [after working 14 hours straight]<p>"Don't ask for that, you are not upper managment!" [when something failed to work and needed to figure the details to troubleshoot]<p>"You are upper managment, you should know this!" [when I didn't know something IT-related]<p>"You won't get the bonus, you are not upper managment!" [bonus question around Christmas time]<p>[email provider down; on the phone with support] "Why are you calling them? chat-support is faster!"<p>[days later, the same issue; on the chat] "Stop wasting time on chat, just grab a phone and call them!"<p>[after 12 hours straight work on 8hr schedule] "I completed the project, I am going home" -"Fine with me, as long as you are Symfony Framework specialist" [next day after staying extra 2 hours to understand basics of Symfony Framework] -"Never mind, we won't use them anyway!"<p>Those were the perks.. there were some better here and there, but honestly I started making notes way too late. But my tech-friends always loved to ask whats new with my CTO. They used to call him "Chief Toilet Officer", because frankly speaking he couldn't do shit right.

Just taking a second to thank you for all your work on Marionette, and your seemingly endless contributions to Backbone/Marionette questions on StackOverflow Derick - I'm nowhere near the level to be contributing to Marionette but your humbleness inspires me to use your code every day :)

This completely doesn't ring the bell for me, but maybe Python community that I typically interact with is different. Maybe we're such jerks that we don't even know how much of jerks we're.

I don't see this in GitHub projects (so far), but this is the usual experience when asking for help on Stack Overflow or Freenode.

Having used Dericks (the OP) Marionette package and interacted a few times with him, I can attest he practices what he preaches.

What major open source project is the harshest on newbies? I want to try to contribute to it.

What is this, I don’t even…