Nathan Sidwell <nat...@acm.org>: > I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place unwelcoming.
I understand the impulse. The problem is that there is actually a value conflict between being "welcoming" in that sense and the actual purpose of this list, which is to ship code. It's a much more direct conflict in the hacker culture than elsewhere because so many potential contributors are high-functioning autists. That makes the downstream consequences of politeness enforcement a lot more damaging to the project's ability to ship code than they would otherwise be. There is a hypothetical world, of course, in which jerks and assholes are such a huge problem that they interfere measurably with shipping code. But contemplete the amount of angry verbiage on this list recently from people who could have been using their fingers typing code, and I think it's clear that the amount of social friction oroduced by attempts to eject the jerks will be far higher than if you simply continued to tolerate them. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>