Open Source projects need for sure multiple things to be beneficial to the project members as well as to communities of users.
And without skilled programmers who do a lot of development work there would not be Free Software to share. But do we need people with special priviledges in responsible positions like Christoph Berg aka Myon who make public statements about other developers like this: df7cb.de/blog/2007/Sadness.html:
Sven Luther, you suck. I desperately hope Debian will recover from these months. PS: Please go see a psychologist. Really.
Such public statements are not surprising since Sam Hocevar was elected as new Debian Project Leader back in April after many public defacements were targeted at Sven Luther by him during the electoral campaign. To people with a social conciousness that shows the real spirit of many debian developers. Christoph Berg, Sam Hocevar and other developers should take the time to re-read the Social Contract they signed when they applied to become a debian developer. The Debian Social Contract makes a few very interesting and important statements. Christoph Berg and other developers wrote great code and did a good job in technical regards. But on the other side they are lacking empathy for other people and intuition for conflict situations. And from people with their special priviledges and such responsibilities I expect these essential social skills. If the conflict around the person of Sven Luther indirectly did some harm to the Debian Project, then it happened due to a non-existent conflict management. The situation started to become a problem for Sven Luther when decisions were taken against his person by Frans Pop and other people. Both sides had problems to communicate to the other party what their problem is in such a way, that bigger conflicts could have been avoided. And that was the pivotal moment. A proper conflict management strategy could have taken care of the desires of both conflict parties. A proper conflict management could have assisted in a better communication. That was not existent and because Sven Luther was obsessed about his work for Debian like many others he tried to get help in all kinds of places. What you guys deface as "trolling" is a helpless attempt to find a solution to his problems. And every single person out there who joked about Sven Luther, who defaced and attacked him was actively escalating the situation. Christoph Berg and Sam Hocevar are two of these people who actively escalated the situation. It is a hell of a cheap trick to blame one single person now for many months of drama that many of you people influenced in a negative way. -- greetings, Patrick Frank
