> the security of all our computers depends on maintainers
Not getting paid anything, getting bullied and harassed while spending their free time maintaining things. Surely this isn't sustainable. And telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
> telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
That depends. In this case it's good actionable advice that should hopefully lower cognitive load. Politely suggest a fork, then if the nagging persists block and move on. Sure if you're in a position of authority you have a responsibility to the community but cutting ties with a stranger who is flagrantly violating social norms is perfectly acceptable. There's no expectation that you indefinitely burden yourself with their poor behavior.
Sometimes dropping the ban hammer really is in the best interests of both yourself and the project.
I don't really think it's actionable. It's like all those campaigns trying to steer behavior, pretty useless. Don't do drugs. Don't speed. Don't drink and drive. You can't just tell people something and expect it to happen. You need systems and guard rails in place.
Relying on maintainers to always do the right thing to ensure our security by telling them what to do is not the way.
It's not an attempt to steer behavior but rather intended as helpful advice. There are certainly cases of organizations disseminating "helpful advice" with the underhanded intent of steering behavior but that doesn't mean we should assume bad faith by default.
The advice is actionable because it is a concrete change that could be made. I believe it to be relevant to the context because someone in a position of authority who is badgered into accepting something would most likely benefit from reevaluating how he is interacting with the general public.
> telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
I'm just saying its ok to ignore overly enthusiastic contributors and tell them to just fork your project.
I think this does help, actually. In my early days of maintaining opensource software I felt burdened by open PRs - like I was letting someone down by ignoring their work. "Its ok, let them do whatever in their own fork" is advice I wish someone had given me.
>And telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
Indeed. For too long, maintainers were expected to be gracious, courteous, and polite at all costs lest they be labeled "problematic", except for a few who were too influential to be muzzled like Theo de Raadt or Linus.
Perhaps we need to normalize bullying people who submit obvious slop as PRs.
No, you absolutely should be gracious, courteous, and polite. But only at first. The duty of maintaining a functional community doesn't mean you're obligated to suffer unlimited abuse.
You can be if you want to but social skills should not be a requirement to lead an open source project. If you create something and share it that doesn't oblige you to even respond to anyone.
Of course, a hobbyist putting his code out there is under no obligation whatsoever. But we aren't talking about small time hobbyists here. These are professionals who are either paid as part of their job or else contribute their spare time to maintain important projects that are part of a large ecosystem that is relied on. There's a community and it necessarily has behavioral standards as part of the shared goal of maintaining group cohesion.
One thing I've seen a bit in Norway, and which is relevant this month, is opinion pieces by "concerned parents" that get their writing into national news, but a quick search show that they're often head of some bigoted organization. Of course they should be entitled to their opinion and be able to express it as any other, but the news papers not disclosing this is unethical imo.
There was recently in Swedish media an article about harassment of Jews in Sweden and the guy they talked to was a member of a Zionist organisation who advocates for that Jews should move to Israel. It is fine to interview him, but such a clear conflict of interest should have been disclosed.
Well of course, if you're a concerned parent or concerned person of any kind in Norway, the first thing you do is start an organization. There are even some who start many, in the hope of cross-pollination.
What's more extreme to me is people like NRK's economy commentator Cecilie Langum Becker, who I read today went over to a lucrative job as communication chief in Aker. A corporate PR person by trade, for 8 years, she had front page space every day to push austeritarian, interest-scold propaganda that would make The Economist blush. So good of our public broadcaster to promote voices we rarely hear from in the media /s.
Actual grass roots organizations, even for unsympathetic causes like anti-pride, worry me less than the whole Orkla-Schibsted consensus.
I think you are underestimating these grass roots groups. Some of them are supported by foreign inyerests who want to undermine trust in the government.
So we are told, but generally I don't buy it. Certainly not just for moustache-twirling "destabilization" purposes. If foreign interests bother with fringe Norwegian issues, it's because they get something directly from it. It may of course be that e.g. Israel gives support of various kinds to groups like SIAN or MIFF, or Russia to groups which are critical of Norwegian military support for Ukraine. But even that doesn't give us right to dismiss these groups as insincere - it's quite a way from that to actual front groups and astroturfing.
Either way, I think the focus should be on the "respectable" corruption, not on unhinged noisy attention seeking outsiders.
Why is it so hard to believe? The young adults now have grown up with short form media and instant gratification / dopamine hits from apps. It's vastly different than people of the same age just a few years ago.
Not saying everyone else is immune, but those a few years older have also had a period without it.
There was a "major" change in the agent roughly a decade ago. Dropbox went from being a simple folder sync tool to a much more bloated agent that never synced cleanly. I don't know if they just moved away from some modules that were written in C or something, but I gave up on it soon after.
The "viral" point was a good one, and which they solved quite cleverly: as a student I got 10 GB for free, but additional 10 GB for each recruited person. Everyone at campus was on a recruiting spree for a while, to bulk up free storage.
Of course, that doesn't make them money. But millions of users that then had all their files there and kept using it when no longer students (so paying), and recommended it to their places of work etc.
Google will often convert it to a gdrive thing instead. So you're not sending the file, just a link to the file uploaded somewhere. I'm not sure what heuristic it uses, but sometimes when mailing photos like half of them are included in the mail and half automagically uploaded to gdrive instead.
Yeah but it's the silent conversion that irks me. My email is no longer self contained or archivable. When I find it again in the future, the files might be gone.
I remember during covid, cyclists were the ones in my town in a poll answering they missed their commute. It's such a nice way of thinking things through and then clearing your mind, then arriving home not thinking more about work.
You sure? Haven't read the book / heard of the author. But after I started freediving and training holding my breath (also called static / dynamic apnea lol) and working a lot on related stuff, I realized I was mostly breathing shallow and with my chest, and not deep with my abdomen.
Now I notice it in others. I don't know if it matters in the end. But I breathe a couple of times a minute and then I hear people next to me quickly breathing in and out constantly like a rabbit. Seems stressful?
Considering how much we use them now it could change the default state significantly, and maybe we do have to consciously relearn the best way to breath.
Not getting paid anything, getting bullied and harassed while spending their free time maintaining things. Surely this isn't sustainable. And telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
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