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On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Christopher O'Connell <jwritec...@gmail.com
> wrote:

> Was: Re: Reducing tickets queue
>
> Hello Ansible Community,
>
> When we stop contributing to an open source community, common courtesy
> compels me to declare the causes of such action.
>


First off, Ansible is a top five project for the number of contributors
this year.   I'm not saying that because it's an accomplishment, I'm saying
that's because that's what we are dealing with in terms of inputs.  Massive
data inputs.   Huge flood.   Loving it (most of the time).  But that
affects decisions we make.

Let's go over the background involved in this controversy of responding to
a rant about how we had become all evil and corporate:

We recently made a move to implement GitHub issue templates that apparently
was controversial to some, but I think it's totally the right thing to do
as it saves a lot of repeated question entry.  We're keeping that system
and we had a thread to discuss it.  It was largely positive.

Another complaint is we almost always ask for discussion to happen on the
lists and bugs to go to GitHub -- as that's how we work.  There is much
more community here and it allows for a more open exchange.

There was another complaint in a way that seemed to be building up a case
for me sucking about with_items behavior.   We indicated our position on
this, I think some disagree, but we also proposed a solution we would
accept.   I think that's all fine.

And apparently I was a little efficient in various replies.  Note I'm being
crazy longwinded here.
There have been people who have gotten offended occasionally because I
wrote two sentences where I should have written four, but out of hundreds
of thousands of users, I can count them on one hand.   We don't use foul
language or resort to the things that often gets Linus in trouble, and we
don't call people stupid.

Nearly all percieved "slight" or "personal attack" that has been claimed
against me never was, but is usually due to one main problem -- we're
humans on the internet, lacking social or vocal queues about a problem.

I'd encourage people who have a laundry-list of disagreements to contact me
personally, rather than claiming the project is someone out for nasty
things and malice, and yes, I did try to nip that in the bud.   I realize
people react negatively to having diatribes removed at times, and that's
probably not the way to deal with a problem.  This is my fault.

However, I also view Ansible as a community, and I like to clean up
graffiti.   We don't clean up "this could be better", but I don't think --
as a resource I put a lot of my time into maintaining -- this particular
list is the place to accuse us of being nasty and evil, which is what
happened last week.

While open source communities are communities, these communities are not
neccessarily open for free reign.   There is a social contract that is
required to participate.

And ultimately, when folks make it an unhappy and unwelcome place, and I
dread checking my email in the morning, we try to find and work with the
folks we can work with.

It doesn't apply 1:1, but there was a decent article about the takedown of
Flappy Bird this morning that I liked.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-indie-developers-go-insane.html

Ansible isn't going anywhere of course!

But I think that may help you understand what he feels, and I feel sometime.

And the assumption that I'm somehow out for blood is totally not the case,
and when we say "you should talk about this on the list", it's because we
believe in multicast communication as opposed to 1:1, so everybody can
benefit and be involved.

That being said, we're also not going to agree all of the time, and we will
make judgement calls.  That needs to be understood too, and that's how we
try to keep ansible consistent.

I think a lot of long term contributors will know we do debate things back
and forth, and we can be made to come around given sufficient logic.

So, while I hope you would contribute to Ansible, it's your prerogative to
not to.  And if any of the above makes me seem hypocritical, then I'd
probably ask that you not to, as I don't like people assuming I'm being
hypocritical when I'm trying to do the right thing in the face of a
ginormous tidal wave.

I will say straight up that we don't want all the code contributions coming
in -- I think our accept rate is 65% or something like that.  We ask for
things to be revised.  And that's why it's the software it is.

For contributors that are new, I think they have to realize this is the
community that created it, and it's never really been much different.

We're going to make calls here and there -- because we've seen thousands of
users doing different things and are acting in the interests of thousands
of users, and some of those will be controversial.

They are never done with anything but the best interests of the community
at mind -- the whole community as an average.

As Spock said, "the good of the many outweighs the needs of the one, or the
few".

In such cases, part of that, to me, is spending time writing good software
and helping people versus dealing with drama from percieved slights that
distract from creating good software.

And I suspect most people here would believe that to be understandable and
should at least be happy I'm not Linus (though I bet he's a great guy in
person too) :)

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