Re: The importance of civil communication on the list (was Re: Fucked up gnustep-make)

[Jeff Teunissen]

Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> All,
> 
> While I realize this is an open forum, it makes us look really unprofessional
> to have profanity in the subject lines or in the messages.   I would 
> appreciate
> it if we all could please make our communications on the list free of 
> profanity.

Why, why WHY in the name of all that is good should anyone in a Free Software
project act professional? It's not a company, it's a hobby. Nobody's getting
paid by FSF to write GNUstep code. Should we all censor ourselves, putting
more effort into the _protocol_ of communicating with each other than into the
content of that communication?

I'm not defending cbv's message; it was stupid, but understandable--people say
stupid things when they're angry. Note, here, that I'm not calling Chris
stupid, just angry. Should he not be angry? And if he is, why shouldn't he
express it--because it was written by volunteers? Bah, you (generic "you", not
any particular person) don't work for him any more than he works for you.

And hell, professionals argue too. I've seen fistfights break out over
technical problems, because of a too-constrained atmosphere. When you're not
allowed to express your strong feelings about technical matters, you have a
situation where instead of resolving the technical problems you get building
PERSONAL problems. People wind up hating each other over shit that only needs
a quick argument to solve.

Personal attacks are unacceptable no matter who does it, or in what
situation...but technical stuff is fair game no matter what language is used
about it.

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen -=- Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing -=- deek at d2dc.net
| GPG: 1024D/9840105A 7102 808A 7733 C2F3 097B 161B 9222 DAB8 9840 105A
| Core developer, The QuakeForge Project     http://www.quakeforge.net/
| Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux           http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/