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This aspect of the community is one of the biggest turnoffs to me. There are a lot of people who formulate these really over the top narratives about everything, which lead to (for example) writing long seething angry personal rants about people like Lennart (Miguel de Icaza was another lightning rod back in the day). The sheer emotion expressed invalidates whatever point they're trying to make, but at the end of the day nobody forces anyone to use anyone's software, and nowhere is that more true than in the Linux world. I hate to use the possibly overloaded term 'virtue signaling', but I definitely see a lot of this as a form of virtue signaling within the communities that posters sometime imagine exist, or imagine that they're part of. I've seen so much of it over the years that it almost has a smell to it. A very vocal and bitter personal hatred towards Lennart and Lennart-related projects is sometimes a leading indicator, especially when it's presented not in the context of meaningful discussion of technology, but simply as "init was perfect and never needed to change and people who think otherwise don't understand what makes Linux Linux", stated as a truism. I think a lot of people really like the community aspect of Linux, reading and posting to forums all the time, and latch on to certain mindsets as being the mindsets of who they imagine the insiders to be- you're supposed to love this person unconditionally, you're supposed to hate this person unconditionally, this company is good, that company is evil, this software is good, that software is evil, and if you're a true insider in the community you'll parrot all the same lines as everyone else. But when I see it, no one involved appears to be an insider. It comes across more as teenagers arguing on Reddit about iOS vs. Android, where basically they've decided that whatever phone their mom got them is the best thing ever, and the other thing is terrible, and it's their duty to go online and spew vitriol about it. They think they're arguing stuff that's much much deeper and more technical than what they're actually arguing about, and no one involved has any actual understanding of the technology or industries or communities or histories of the things they're screaming at each other about. It's almost like vitriol for the sake of vitriol, and people just let it seep out as a demonstration of their in-groupness. Which is not to say that there are plenty of valid reasons and places and ways to argue about the merits of Lennart and his software, as one example. I'm really not talking about Lennart in particular though. I'm not talking about people having valid arguments about valid issues. What I'm talking about the FLOSS equivalent of those teenagers and their "the phone my mom got me is better than the phone your mom got me, and that makes me a good person and you a bad person" sorts of arguments. It just all seems very petty and immature sometimes, and that is not a positive aspect of the community. |