"You will be prevented from grumbling about the software"
"Users must all patch or fork the software"
"Everybody will be forced to use the software"
"You will be punished if you express opinions"
"You are not allowed to mute or block others"
"You must not think about the opinions of others, but you must pay attention"
Parsing out all the bizarrely obvious stuff from this post, if we try to distill it down to an opinion, what's hidden in there? It should be expressed in terms of good and bad, not liberty. The liberty is obvious. What's it saying about what people ought to do?
* Devs ought to respect their grumbling users. They ought not be pissy about users who grumble but don't contribute. They ought not have some insular concept of loyalty where users who use other software are outsiders or splitters.
* Devs ought to selectively ignore their grumbling users, though, and contributors, instead of acting like slaves and getting burnt out. In this there's an implication that it's right to think you own your (version of your) project, and that you should control it if that pleases you.
* We should communicate our opinions, should not harass anyone, and should stop listening when bored or annoyed.
It all makes more sense when couched in moralistic terms, I think. Because it's not in fact about freedoms.
Why should we respect grumbling users? Why should we listen, or selectively stop listening when we’re annoyed? You’re not my real dad.
After all, being grumpy is fun. It also serves lots of needs - for the individual and for the community. Grumping is a soft way of expressing a perceived break of community norms and expectations, and it draws attention to the break. We have evolved emotions like this for a reason. “Negative” emotions like grumpiness exists to serve us and serve our tribes.
Our emotions are not very well adapted to the internet environment with millions of strangers, echo chambers and so on. But the internet does allow to just ignore unwanted communication. Makes sense to use that when necessary.
Most of our emotions are adapted just fine. The things that get in the way are:
- People suppress some of their feelings. Especially people in certain cultures with certain feelings (Californians & Canadians with anger, Australians & Brits with pride, etc). Suppression also means nobody knows how to receive that feeling and they get weird.
- When you suppress certain emotions, they don’t get a chance to “grow up” from a childish expression to an adult expression. Adult anger looks different from child anger.
Ignore things if you want. But I think that’s a lower skill, worse outcome choice in general.
"it is compulsory to like free software"
"You will be prevented from grumbling about the software"
"Users must all patch or fork the software"
"Everybody will be forced to use the software"
"You will be punished if you express opinions"
"You are not allowed to mute or block others"
"You must not think about the opinions of others, but you must pay attention"
Parsing out all the bizarrely obvious stuff from this post, if we try to distill it down to an opinion, what's hidden in there? It should be expressed in terms of good and bad, not liberty. The liberty is obvious. What's it saying about what people ought to do?
* Devs ought to respect their grumbling users. They ought not be pissy about users who grumble but don't contribute. They ought not have some insular concept of loyalty where users who use other software are outsiders or splitters.
* Devs ought to selectively ignore their grumbling users, though, and contributors, instead of acting like slaves and getting burnt out. In this there's an implication that it's right to think you own your (version of your) project, and that you should control it if that pleases you.
* We should communicate our opinions, should not harass anyone, and should stop listening when bored or annoyed.
It all makes more sense when couched in moralistic terms, I think. Because it's not in fact about freedoms.