What could cause the captain of such a well-received vessel abandon the helm and move ashore so soon after launch?
The answer, alas, is a familiar one: people.
“Recently, I had an unpleasant experience […] where I was accused of distributing malware. Although I explained that the issue wasn’t caused by the app, the conversation escalated into personal attacks and harsh words directed at me.”
For a space fundamentally built on collaboration and a more pro social approach to building things together, it’s very frustrating how common anti-social, antagonistic behavior is in open source, free license spaces.
To me it feels like a real and significant hinderance to FOSS, and I really hope we can collectively develop more awareness about this issue so we can hopefully address it :/
I fully agree, although I do have to wonder how frequently these gratuitous attacks are astroturfed and paid for.
If you can get rid of a pesky open source competitor by paying off some troll to make unsubstantiated accusations and personal attacks, it’s a great investment. Especially if the rest of the open source world doesn’t come to the rescue and supports the open source developer vocally.
Unfortunately I really don’t think they are. Maybe it’s a small part of it, but it feels like there are a lot of similar social issues that follow the same pattern
I feel like it’s tempting to just tell ourselves it’s an outside evil, but I don’t think that helps us do anything about the problem
I’ve heard people say that in academia, the competition is fierce because the stakes are so low. I think FOSS is the same.
Thats an interesting idea. That contrasts against how I’d kind of thought of it as being similar to the internal toxicity and infighting of the political left
Some of the toxic patterns kind of remind me of purity testing and the same attacking people for being “one of the bad guys” when there isn’t truly good reasons tho think they are
I appreciate another perspective to consider, thank you for sharing your thoughts
That’s a pretty shitty outcome. And the LoucheBear character doesn’t seem to contribute anything of value, just ignorant abuse.
Sounds like he should have demanded that they pay the asshole rate for support
Was there no easy way for the developer to block a random asshole?
Since clamav itself shows no signs of vanishing, this frontend going away might add a bit to the friction some people experience in using it, but the software itself wasn’t that noteworthy. The treatment of the developer, though, was just wrong.
the software itself wasn’t that noteworthy
I always find the value of working software made by volunteers. That’s always noteworthy, imo. I’m a software engineer. It’s not like I have that many completed projects that have people using them. It’s incredibly hard to make software that people want to use, and it’s incredibly unfortunate to lose someone who wants to do that unthanked work. This guy is still catching strays when he’s actually doing shit for people.
