Hi Jay, Jay Williams wrote on Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 05:17:05PM -0600:
> As a new user to OpenBSD, who is trying to learn as much as I can, > seeing a message like this is very disheartening. Please do not worry about this particular case. The user who wrote this message contributed almost nothing - a few very simple bug reports at best - but caused several developers (myself included) to waste time because they answered his mails. Besides, he vastly overestimated his own importance. Yes, it did happen in the past that developers left for reasons that were sad in various ways. Some of them came back later. Some of them i still miss. OpenBSD uses an extremely terse communication style. That style is useful to keep technical communication concise in a very small group doing huge amounts of work (i'm one of the few developers who are notorious for being wordy at times and blunt at others). One downside of this efficient style is that it will unavoidably seem impolite to many cultural expectations, in particular in instances where it comes together with people getting upset, and when it comes together with the well-known effect that email communication usually appears more aggressive than face-to-face comminucation, even when that isn't intended. The concise communication style also has the side effect of attracting people to the list - not developers! - who misinterpret the terse style as a license for being disrespectful. That is not OK, mutual respect is essential even in strong disagreement. Admittedly, if you look at the list of developers, it is impossible to deny that OpenBSD is not the most succcessful project ever with respect to inclusiveness. I think it would be good to do a bit better in that respect, in particular since technical merit and inclusiveness are in no way a hindrance to each other, but it is well-known that improvement in that respect is with necessity a very slow process in a project that, by its stated goals and unwritten culture, has an exlusive focus on technical innovation and a general consensus to avoid all formalities. That said, i'm convinced that all developers try to judge contributions solely by their technical merit, and without regard to the person submitting them, and welcome contributions by everybody, which is one of the necessary conditions to slowly improve inclusiveness. Yours, Ingo
