On Sun, Oct 2, 2022 at 2:55 PM Tim Bray <tbray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
In many of these communities, there has been vigorous resistance to the cleanup efforts, with people making (to me, tired old) arguments about how their right to be rude is sacred, and that their input is being suppressed because of technical prejudice against their opinions from Those In Power. To all of them I say: You all have a right to free speech, but no particular right to anyone's attention.
While there have been a few folk who were forced out of leadership positions in open source on account of their behavior, I don't think any that left are exactly missed. I am not counting here the folk who realized they had created a toxic environment and walked it back.
Toxic behavior isn't just a problem in the standards world, it is a wider problem in the tech industry. Thing is, what is fashionable isn't always right. Ideas that go against established wisdom are sometimes the ideas we need. Remember that Tim's paper on the World Wide Web was rejected as 'uninteresting' by the conference who invited him to be the keynote the next year.
It is unfortunately rather easy to make it in tech by simply following whatever happens to be fashionable without questioning it and joining in the chorus of ridicule targeting anyone who points out the problems. The extreme version of this being the Crypto-Ponzi scheme which has absorbed roughly $2 trillion in VC investment of which investors can expect to see a return of $0. Anyone pointing out that 'decentralized finance' is actually a cartel run by a handful of insiders was shut down with ridicule and 'have fun being poor'.
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