On 10/28/06, Breen Ouellette wrote:
That same behaviour of expecting magic fixes, if it were applied to a larger community like that of North America (sorry if you aren't from this continent), would not be shameful in the least. People in North American culture whine and complain for fixes from higher authorities (governments, legal systems, corporations, gods, employers, unions, and on and on) all the time without being shamed by those around them. In fact, in most cases those around them agree wholeheartedly. How many people in North America are proactive in their daily lives? I believe the number is very few.
Is your position then that people in North Americans who are not proactive in their daily lives should not be ashamed, because they act in accordance with the cultural expectations of their society?
[...] if we define new ways to shame those who deserve it, beyond badmouthing them on this list, it could be beneficial to. the OpenBSD project. Theo has shown some success in shaming companies about their restrictive policies.
It seems to me that he has shown some success in convincing companies (rather, the people who control companies) that it is in their interest to change their restrictive policies. It is not clear to me that shame, whether the emotion or the action, has anything to do with it.
Perhaps there are other ways to use shaming to the advantage of the project. Of course, it is a dangerous tool and could become a major problem for the project as well.
Perhaps so. I would say that perhaps there are ways to using shaming to the advantage of the project, since I am not convinced that anyone ha used shaming to the advantage of the project so far. It seems to me that the primary effect of shaming on the lists has been to convince people that it is in their interests to oppose the OpenBSD project. Arguably, shaming people on the lists has the positive effect of underscoring that the OpenBSD project doesn't embrace the kind of niceness that has become associated with ideologically hypocritical (or ideologically non-serious) software ventures. But this positive impact, if real, is not a result of shaming per se. Another possibility is that shaming people has an effect on OpenBSD similar to the effect of recreational drug use on many rock artists. (Highly idealized example follows.) Being perceived as correlated with success, some artists might think that it results in or aids success, which might be true under some rare, highly specialized circumstances--for instance, it might inspire some compositions. But in actuality, other factors tend to account for success, and the drug use mostly interferes both by taking up time better used for other ventures and by impairing the acts of practice and performance. Such rock artists may believe that their drug use leads people to like them and act in accordance with their goals, which is sometimes true, but probably doesn't outweigh the negative effects--and often people who like them and/or act in accordance with their goals do it in spite of the drug use, rather than because of it. And many people, many of them other rock artists or people valuable to rock artists in their advancement of artistic (and sometimes political, and sometimes economic) goals, simply disregard such rock artists as not worth their time. Due to lack of information and experience, I do not consider myself competent to evaluate any of these suggestions definitively. But perhaps some people here could. -Eliah
