But I wanted to take a few minutes to address some concerns of the last 4%. The people who feel like this might not be such a good idea. And in particular, the people who feel like it might not be such a good idea because of various things that I’ve said or done over the years.
There’s absolutely no pleasing everyone. You can’t and shouldn’t try to make everyone love you. The best you can do is make sure that they’re hating you for the right reasons. So let’s go through some of the reasons that at least in my mind are no longer valid.
I don’t see why it’s so hard for DHH just to say “i’m sorry i was a dick in the past. I realize that at least some of the stuff i did in the past was wrong (or at the very least, obnoxious). Hopefully we’re all now mature enough to move past that, because really we all want the same things.”
No one has ever asked DHH or rails-core to please everyone. That’s a total red herring. That’s also not what the concerns about the Merb-Rails merger are about.
Open Source Software, in general, being forkable, is not about code base. It is about human capital/resources. It is about the amount of effort being expended on behalf of common goals, and what future expectations are for more expenditure, both on common goals, and for each individual’s private goals.
The Merb guys have a philosophy about this, and they clearly care about their developers, and don’t want to screw them in the future. They listen to their developers/users and take their concerns seriously. The framework is really built around those principles. The things that we as developers build, should be expected to work in the future. That’s the point of having a public API, an extensible framework and the philosophy that if Merb can’t accommodate what you need, it’s a bug[2]. (no, i am not implying that Rails-Core doesn’t care about it’s developers).
What rails-core, and DHH in particular, as the… if not leader, then first-amongst-equals, needs to do is prove that they won’t be dicks to people (and no this is abso-fucking-lutely not about any goddamned swearing). More importantly, people need to know that they’ll be taken seriously, and not just written off when they disagree w/ rails-core (e.g. like what DHH just did, with people skeptical about the merge).
This is why there was a communications gap to begin with. Obnoxious behavior creates a chilling effect on one’s willingness to communicate.
Addendum:
As i point out in the comments, this isn’t really about DHH. I don’t care whether he personally apologizes. What i don’t want is to see things continue as they have been on the social & leadership side. Why? Because participating in a community like that sucks. And again contrition isn’t the issue. It’s about the attitude regarding community, dissent/disagreement and developers.
footnotes:
- 1) http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/imploding-rails-jesus-dhh-and-the-uncle-ben-principle/
- “I’m not in this world to create Rails for you. I’m in this world to create Rails for me and if you happen to like that version of Rails that I’m creating for me, than you are going to have a great time.”
- 2) Yehuda’s InfoQ interview from RubyFringe
- The vast majority of the code in Merb is actually internal code and we’re telling people that “This is not code you should be using in your application.” Again, it’s like the alias_method_chain thing – if you find yourself having to use it, it’s a bug! We will expose whatever public functionality is required for you to get your job done, for you to use Merb the way you want, for plug-ins to work.
