Re: Light on the issue?
That's a very poor analogy.
If someone throws manure over your wall, it's a destructive and deliberately adversarial act. There's no good will involved, they are not trying to help you. It doesn't take any real time or effort on their part (they probably just slipped a few quid to the guy that did it). Most importantly, the cleanup is time consuming, expensive, unpleasant and takes FAR MORE EFFORT than that expended by your adversaries who chucked it over your wall.
Paragon worked hard for a long time to get to the point when they first submitted their code. Twenty seven thousand lines of kernel level code of their own backs. They did it to help; to contribute to the biggest and most successful open source project on the planet. It was all about good will and collaboration, and they did it for free. Most importantly, the cleanup is trivial in the extreme, if it needs some attention that can be conveyed with a few words. There is NO requirement for the maintainers to clear loads of shit up from their garden, a simple polite email or two will suffice.
Think of it in terms of thermodynamics, Paragon created order out of disorder. That takes enormous effort, and requires next to no effort to reverse. Leave it all alone and let the 2nd law do its stuff, entropy wins. Dumping loads of crap on you clean garden achieves the opposite, it turns your lovely ordered patio and plants and turns them into one big shit-smelling lump of entropic mess. The 2nd law won't help you there, which is why you need to put in MUCH more effort to get back to where you were.
The paragon guy (or guys) was naive in terms of his knowledge of the contribution process. We all are naive when joining a community and helping out, but in most communities you can expect to be welcomed; especially when you are working (hard) for them, for free.
The point is we are all human, and it's nice to be encouraged and appreciated. IT people are no different, and that includes you, my friend. Furthermore, some people have mental health issues and struggle with self-esteem. To be publicly castigated on a forum by people you respect - and likely feel inferior to - can be hugely damaging to them. You don't have to be a 'snowflake' to understand that, it's basic humanity.
Open source is fucking brilliant, the current prominence of OSS in the industry is best thing to happen in IT for decades. Contributors should be valued and nurtured, and if they make a mistake when they start out, they should be encouraged. If there are people acting like 14 year olds - accusing newbies of throwing manure over a wall, why will people do it?
Why the attitude? What's the point? And what does it do to help OSS? People need to start acting like adults. I know LT ain't perfect but he has definitely improved over the last couple of years, maybe you should take a leaf out of his book? Just sayin.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
