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Dissent is welcome, but bullying isn't...

That Tallef Fog Heen had to quit as a Debian systemd maintainer do to bulling as he explains on his blog, reflects badly on all the open source community. There is an urgent need to change the way dissent is shown, since it is only given in a negative way which is not beneficial to anyone.

Though dissent, and the debate that comes with it, make communities healthy, we can't allow it to descend into bulling when other don't agree with the other's side view point. Sometimes the project we support, makes the choices we agree with. While other times, it will make the choices we don't agree, or like, with.

Keep in mind that with any change comes to a project, it must come with consensus of the majority. This means that not everyone needs to agree with the change, if the majority comes to the agreement to make the change proposed.

By resorting to name calling, and bullying, those who don't agree with us, we are not creating the kind of environment really needed to move the projects forward on a healthy way. What's more, it scares away people from adopting open source because they don't feel comfortable coming to a place where they don't seem to be able to be treated in a friendly manner.

While there are projects that are friendly, and where the interaction is much more mature, it's hard to sell them when people come along with examples where people are mistreated much more often. We are metaphorically shooting our own foot every time a debate becomes a shouting match of name calling and abuse.

It's time to change the way we engage in debate, and stop being sour losers. Sometimes you get want you want, sometimes you don't. So grow up, and move forward and change things.

If in the past it was okay to be nasty, now we can't tolerate it any longer. It's okay to disagree, but let's make that disagreement heard in a way that helps the open source community grow.

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