> Sometimes you should be free to call a spade a spade.
"Sometimes" is the key word here. But people tend to take it too far - they start thinking if you yell "this is a fucking spade!!!" loud enough, that magically makes everything into a spade. Most of the times it's not. You can afford being blunt if you're genius, but if you want to emulate a rude genius, don't start with rudeness. Start with developing a new OS and making it worldwide success, then you can proceed to rudeness. Though I would rather you didn't, but after the OS part who cares what I think. But please don't start with the rudeness part. Actually, it would be nice if rude geniuses would be a bit less rude too, just to provide an example. But OK, nobody's perfect. I just feel there's a lot of rudeness out there in open source world, and after years of doing it - it starts to get old.
What I'm seeing is that 99.9% percent of people "calling spade a spade" do not contribute much by it and scare off people. And in open source people is the only capital the project has, so it's pretty much like business owner making a daily cash bonfire in the backyard. Yes, people make dumb suggestions, especially people that are new to the area. But it's not hard to treat them respectfully - or if one doesn't have time for it, just not respond and let others who have more time do it. Maybe the geniuses should get themselves a good PR person? :)
The point is in 99.9% of cases rudeness carries no value (most frequently negative value). The content of rude answer may carry one, but that would be preserved without the rudeness. Of course, in case of geniuses, their positive value is so immense that the negative part is completely overwhelmed by the positive one. But it still is a negative.
"Sometimes" is the key word here. But people tend to take it too far - they start thinking if you yell "this is a fucking spade!!!" loud enough, that magically makes everything into a spade. Most of the times it's not. You can afford being blunt if you're genius, but if you want to emulate a rude genius, don't start with rudeness. Start with developing a new OS and making it worldwide success, then you can proceed to rudeness. Though I would rather you didn't, but after the OS part who cares what I think. But please don't start with the rudeness part. Actually, it would be nice if rude geniuses would be a bit less rude too, just to provide an example. But OK, nobody's perfect. I just feel there's a lot of rudeness out there in open source world, and after years of doing it - it starts to get old.
What I'm seeing is that 99.9% percent of people "calling spade a spade" do not contribute much by it and scare off people. And in open source people is the only capital the project has, so it's pretty much like business owner making a daily cash bonfire in the backyard. Yes, people make dumb suggestions, especially people that are new to the area. But it's not hard to treat them respectfully - or if one doesn't have time for it, just not respond and let others who have more time do it. Maybe the geniuses should get themselves a good PR person? :)
The point is in 99.9% of cases rudeness carries no value (most frequently negative value). The content of rude answer may carry one, but that would be preserved without the rudeness. Of course, in case of geniuses, their positive value is so immense that the negative part is completely overwhelmed by the positive one. But it still is a negative.