LUGRadio episode 11 “Melodious maladorous” is out today so I command you to go and grab it.
What is really interesting in this episode is the discussion about the number of arseholes in the Free Software community and what exactly the rest of us can do about them. I’m pretty sure I know who the LUGRadio guys were referring to, but I won’t mention his name here. The guy who I was thinking of was the leader of a very popular and exciting project and quickly achieved arsehole status. He was almost certainly scaring away enough potential (and existing) users that it was outweighing his usefulness to the project. So what can we do about people like that? The answer is simple: ignore him. He annoyed his fellow developers too so the project forked and many of the users went with it. He became more and more of an outcast in the community as more and more people began to simply ignore him and now he has gone away. Well, when I say gone away I mean that I’ve not so much as heard his name for several years now and I believe he is no longer hands-on with the project.
So that’s it, one arsehole removed. If an arsehole is running a project, you can just fork it and cut him out completely, as has happened several times in the past. That’s the beauty of open source.
Then there’s the other type of arsehole. The kind who infest mailing lists and forums, hiding under some dirty rock until an unsuspecting newbie posts a question, which will cause him to jump out from under his rock and scream RTFM or similar before disappearing again. The easy solution to this kind of arsehole is to, again, ignore him. If you’re on a mailing list and somebody asks a question and gets flamed, don’t reply to the arsehole as that will obviously just start a flame war, but reply to the original poster with a solution to whatever it is they’re asking. You then don’t have to engage with the arsehole at all, but the new user will be able to see that not everyone in the community is an arsehole and hopefully won’t be scared off. Again the arsehole will become an outcast and even when they are posting sensible things, they’ll be ignored anyway because everyone will know that he’s an arsehole and won’t want to help him.
That’s how I choose to deal with such people anyway. And as long as enough people do it, it seems quite effective. Once they cross that line between being useful and being a liability nobody has to actually do anything, they are just dealt with naturally. So all is not lost, and we do not have to tolerate such people in our community.
