[OT] does trolling improve open source projects?

[Robin Farine]

On Sunday September 11 2005 12:17, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

> Rob, *you* are 'the troll' here, ie an entity living under a
> bridge and causing general mischief (for instance, blocking bug
> fixes because of personal dislike of people that don't share some
> of your wrong beliefs [like the non-existence of display device
> that are not PC virtual consoles]).

I do not think Rob or anyone is in general rejecting a fix or a 
feature if it is sufficiently motivated. But as good as the 
proposed change can be, it all depends on the tone used to promote 
it.

You might well be more clever than most of us, no problem with this. 
If so, you should agree that to convince someone that your proposal 
is worth considering, you would be more successful if you 
demonstrate for instance how it realizes all the expected use cases 
and where the alternate solution fails in doing so, in a language 
limited to the functionality and the solution. If, on the other 
hand, you motivate your proposal by denigrating other solutions and 
their authors, chances are that others will react exactly the same 
with yours.

After all, open source development should be a cooperative effort to 
improve a piece of software rather than a battle field where 
competitors use any available mean to prove how good they are.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not mean to patronize or you name it 
as I make the same mistakes. We all have the childish tendency to 
make our mind on someone based on a few sentences written in an 
email and then judge anything coming from the person based on this 
preconceived idea. I find sad however when as grown up we do not 
notice and backtrack when we engage ourself in such a deadend.

Robin