Choosing to stay out of the community
IMHO Some of the responses here are missing the point. That seems to be a common theme as of late: &quot;I don&#x27;t like the argument or I&#x27;m already on side &#x27;X&#x27; in this fight, so I&#x27;m going to setup a straw-man to attack so I can avoid engaging the core premise of the article.&quot;<p>Her post isn&#x27;t about keeping a private repo or being selfish. It&#x27;s about &quot;I am not your therapist or punching bag, nor is it my job to educate you, so why would I waste my time submitting my patch and dealing with a toxic community? What am I supposed to gain from that interaction, other than being insulted, belittled, <i>and</i> having my patches ignored?&quot;<p>She is hardly the only person who stays far away from contributing to the Linux kernel (and other projects) thanks to certain nasty and emotional segments of &quot;community&quot;. Those people don&#x27;t show up in stats. No one knows they exist. The project just has a reputation for being full of assholes, so many really talented people choose to stay away (or strictly limit their involvement). This can become a self-reinforcing cycle where only assholes can be heard, resulting in design-by-asshole rather than design based on technical merit. Assholes (by virtue of being assholes) usually immediately dismiss this by claiming anyone making such complaints is technically inferior (or is intrinsically unsuited to contributing because of their age, gender, or other attribute).<p>I&#x27;ll also point out that acting out like this is purely emotional knee-jerk behavior - the exact <i>opposite</i> of merit or technical arguments. Linus is perfectly capable of criticizing patches on technical merits without calling people morons in the process. In the past he has chosen to lash out emotionally for one reason or another. Perhaps he had a bad day. Perhaps he just enjoyed insulting other people. Perhaps he thought he was better than them and wanted to show off how superior he was. None of us can really know the underlying reason, but at the end of the day it hardly matters.<p>I really want to stress my last point: lots of people (including here on HN) are trying to make a self-evidently Orwellian case that adopting a CoC and setting community standards is somehow trading technical merit for soothing people&#x27;s feelings... in defense of another contributor&#x27;s ability to lash out emotionally. One has to engage in some especially motivated reasoning to make such prima-facia false claims.<p>A code-of-conduct basically boils down to &quot;don&#x27;t attack people personally and don&#x27;t belittle, harass or intimidate other contributors&quot;. Or perhaps in simpler terms: &quot;act like a professional&quot;.<p>Being professional means giving direct and honest feedback. Lying to avoid hurt feelings is the opposite of professional!