Reading the Slashdot comments on Mozilla Firebird 0.6 and the Mozillazine comments on the same, I am struck by the number of conversations which look like this:
Person trying Mozilla Firebird 0.6: "This, this, and this seem to be problem areas that could use some work."
Mozilla Firebird 0.6 user: "If you don't like it, don't use it! We don't need your stinkin' kind around here!" (I wish I were making this up, but this is nearly word-for-word what I've seen people post in reply to a number of comments.)
I asked one of these Mozilla Firebird users who this mythical "we" was that did not need to hear criticism, since he did not seem to be involved in the project in any visible way (as measured by CVS logs, Bugzilla activity, etc). His response, removing the profanity, personal attacks, and attempts to insult me, was that he was involved in "helping newbies install it" and "spreading the word".
I love his methods of spreading the word, and I'm sure that all the Mozilla Firebird front-end developers and all Mozilla back end developers are simply overjoyed to have such an effective group of advocates speaking for them in the first person plural.
Posted by bzbarsky at May 18, 2003 12:45 AM>We don't need your stinkin' kind around here!
Boris, you ask where it does come from? If a sr writes in a bug (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206055#c6)
>I don't have cvs access to toolkit/;
Please tell me the difference, else that the first sentence is very rude.
I think the limit to a core developer team has been the basis of the phoenix/FB success but also promoted this kind of attitude.
Haha. yeah, unfortunatly this is how most of the lamer 14-20's mozilla groupies are... That's life.
Glad you contacted a few of them, put their ego and ass back in place.
um... I'll address both of these points in order:
Bernd: How is bz's statement rude? He is stating that he cannot assist with the checkin of that patch because he is not able to work with toolkit, and then he gave a list of a large group of people who could help review the patch. Now, it would be very rude if he had said: "Bite me and get your stinkin' patch out of my sight. How dare you ask me about something I can't help with!" However, that's not exactly what happened. mozilla.org wants to assure code quality and that is the purpose of the sr system. If you disagree with the way the review process works, then why not write up a well thought-out essay explaining your ideas and post it up someplace. I'm sure the process can be improved as I personally think it puts off new contributors as well, but it's a little far fetched to liken what bz said in that bug with the comment he mentioned from slashdot...
Jed: Well, I happen to fall into the category of "14-20's mozilla groupies" and am more than a little bit offended. Let's not blame age ranges for our problems and make sterotypes. Maybe instead of doing this, you could reply to a "Person trying Mozilla Firebird 0.6" on slashdot and thank them for their ideas and recomend that they get involved with mozilla.org. You could try steering them to http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html and mozilla.org/quality/help not to mention #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. However, age-based sterotypes are really quite rude and unnecessary.
Posted by: zach on May 19, 2003 7:59 PMI too will attempt to address points in order... ;)
Bernd, I haven't paid much attention to Firebird development, so I cannot speak to developer attitudes. But we have plenty of restricted partitions in mozilla.org CVS (the mozilla.org front page, JS engine, NSS come to mind right away) and none of those restrictions are indicative of attitude problems; they are just attempts by module owners to exert some oversight over their modules (which is something we need more of, not less, imo). So I don't think we should be reading anything into the CVS access issue....
Jed, I don't think the people I "talked" to did very much listening to what I said....
Zach, I think you misunderstood Bernd's point. He was saying that the restricted CVS partition is indicative of the attitude of the Firebird developers and that this attitude trickles down to the users. As for age, a person's maturity is often referred to in terms of an age at which the average human exhibits the same level of maturity... The correlation is not perfect, of course, and physical age and "mental age" can at times differ wildly (one of the most mature and responsible people I knew in college was 4-5 years younger than most of the students; this was only an issue when she needed a "parent or legal guardian" to sign off on some stupid paperwork (e.g. to work at the nuclear reactor) because she was not 18).
Posted by: Boris on May 19, 2003 10:28 PMMy bad.
Zack, I too fall into the 14-21 category. I did not mean to creat a "Stereotype" at all. Like Boris said, "..a person's maturity is often referred to in terms of an age...".
What gets to me is the inmature (forget ages) Moz/FB fans who think they know all and respond for the whole community. Unfortunatly we are surrounded by 15 year-old Mentality, who fight and scramble over critizism towards Moz/Fb.
If you look at the Mozillazine forums, any newbie that has any problems with Mz/Fb get's flamed right away.. what a sucky community. Luckily we are not all that way. But I wish people would just lighten up. NOthing is perfect.
Posted by: Jed on May 19, 2003 10:46 PMWhat I had in mind is the attitude at http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/browser/README.html
(see Q3 and Q6, Q7) and the corresponding thread at http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2438 . While this is/was perfectly valid for developers ( and hey who wants really to work on UI mess?) it has side effects on some younger folks. Probably there is also some sort of underdog mentality: fb versus the well established browser suite.
Boris, what is the number of people engaging in rude or insulting posts that stuck you? 2? 5? Out of how many total people participating?
It's easy to pull out a few examples from any sufficiently long thread at slashdot or mozillazine that make just about any point one wants to make but I could only find two or three rude commenters in the 350 or so on-topic posts I read at /. and only a couple people participating in the 120+ posts I read at mozillazine that were as rude or close to as your paraphrasing - what's that work out to percentagewise? That's striking to you?
Nice to see that a small handful of rude or unhelpful comments so easily trump the hundreds of not-rude comments in the same thread or the literally tens of thousands of friendly and helpful comments by firebird users elsewhere on mozillazine http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/index.php?c=4
I've been reading and participating in the mozillazine Firebird boards since they were created and I can say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of postings have been friendly and helpful and I'm convinced that the 'user support' offered up in those forums has been considerably better than the general attitude toward 'users' in all of the other mozillazine and mozilla.org hosted forums since this project was kicked off.
There is no doubt in my mind that the attitude of the "firebird" user community is different than that of the seamonkey community and I think that's because the firebird user community is just that, a user community - with a lot less of the "if you don't like it then hack up a fix" attitude (which I happen to think is a fine attitude for a development community) and a lot more of the "you're gonna love this - here's how you do it. now ain't that cool!" attitude.
There are certainly some disagreements that keep popping up between what SeaMonkey users want and need and what Firebird users want and need and that discussion seems to me to be too polarized, sometimes leading to combative or otherwise unproductive exchanges. That's unfortunate because I don't think the two groups of users are really that far apart on most issues but it's certainly not the majority case and I read your blog as suggesting that it's "shockingly" common or something. I don't share that view. I think that the vast majority of folks posting in support of firebird are posting useful and friendly comments and that it's leading to a lot of happy new users. I think they're doing pretty well for a community, most of which has only existed for a handful of months.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa on May 20, 2003 3:38 AM"I'm convinced that the 'user support' offered up in those forums has been considerably better than the general attitude toward 'users' in all of the other mozillazine and mozilla.org hosted forums since this project was kicked off."
My experince is that that simply isn't true. In general people on the Mozillazine Mozilla forums are just as helpful as the people on the Mozilla Firebird forums. In general people on both boards are nice, but I've seen people get flamed on the for saying 'disenting' things about Firebird. In one notable incident someone (a regular poster in fact) was basically told that they were idiotic (not the exact words used) for suggesting that there would be a business market for an integrated communications tool that handled web, mail addresses, calendar, messanging and so on.
I'm sure that I could find more examples if I looked, so please don't suggest that Mozilla Firebird users are generally more friendly than Seamonkey users. In general most people who use either browser are helpful and friendly, whilst some of them, sometimes, are not. In either case the percentage of bad comments is very low.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the attitude of the "firebird" user community is different than that of the seamonkey community and I think that's because the firebird user community is just that, a user community - with a lot less of the "if you don't like it then hack up a fix" attitude (which I happen to think is a fine attitude for a development community) and a lot more of the "you're gonna love this - here's how you do it. now ain't that cool!" attitude."
That doesn't fit with my experience either. Say you don't like something in Firebird (the lack of a way of resetting your helper apps prefs say). If you go and say that on the forums, there's a good chance that you'll be told that "you're missing the point of Firebird" and "Firebird isn't supposed to be bloated like Mozilla". The best case is that someone will agree with you and there will be a long drawn out discussion about which prefs panel should be removed. Ironically, if you then ask about tabs, you'll be told to install TBE which is the antithesis of that Firebird design ethic. It's true that this happens with Mozilla too. If you go and ask why you can't sort bookmarks in the bookmark menu then you might well be told "it's a known issue - if you really want it fixed you'll need to code it" (that question comes up a lot). Which is true - there is no magic solution that anyone can offer. If Firebird users seem to have more of a 'can fix' attitude then it's only because Firebird inherently has more customistation and so the early adopters are likely to be those people who value customisation.
My point is not that all Firebird users are evil and unhelpful (they're not), but that making sweeping statements about the two communities is unhelpful and often incorrect. Challenging what you percieve to be unfair generalisations with alternative unfair generalisations doesn't help make your point.
(For what it's worth, I think that you've misinterpreted Boris's original post, but nevermind).
Posted by: jgraham on May 20, 2003 7:30 AMAsa, would you please stop perceiving everything in sight as an attack on your precious Firebird? "I read your blog as suggesting that it's 'shockingly' common or something," indeed! I can't help it if you're reading all Firebird-related writing with such a paranoid mindset, man! Your comment suggests that I was trying to make a point with my blog entry. I was not—it was just a nearly-stream-of-consciousness blog entry about a strong visceral reaction I had. No point involved, and I'd appreciate not having a point ascribed to me.
Trust me, when I make a post that tries to make a point you will know.
I was shocked not by the fact that there were "so many" instances of the behavior described, but by the fact that there were any at all. I had never seen such comments in previous Mozilla-related threads on Slashdot before, and the reaction of these people, who are obviously tenuously affiliated with the project at best, to being called on it was sickening. I was struck by how rude some people are, unnecessarily, and by how clueless they act (above and beyond the expected Slashdot level, which is saying something).
None of which has anything to do with Firebird, its vaunted user community, its worth as a browser, or anyone's ego. Or so I thought.
Posted by: Boris on May 20, 2003 10:07 AMAsa: No one is complaining. This is just an issue that some of us have noticed and we need to help the community fix. No-one is bashing the community, and saying ill-things about it. It's just constructive critizism in my opinion.
Anyhow, a perfect example from just today of what I was saying about a newbie's question turning into a flame discussion. (in which I have participated [bad me]) http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11048
Ah, yes. I remember like it was yesTURDay. I am one of those who enjoys posting in MZ Fb forums quite regularly although I would never give a toss about what gets said on /. and don't speak up there. You'd have to have been born yesTURDay to not have noticed that the Fb side of MZ is much more active in recent months than the Mozilla side and there must be a reason. Hmmm...?
Why do I care if anyone uses Moz or Fb? I don't know. As long as it does good things for me and my lusers I don't care if the rest of the world changes their ways. I think it would be better to keep such nifty things sorta secret so that they don't get too popular.
Folks, this guy wasn't a newbie, he was a newborn. MZ!=Firebird Kindergarten and those of us who do help [over and over with the same questions] get fed up trying to coddle every milksop who could have read any number of resources before posting a whine and pushing it.
My next step? Avoid the extensionroom forevermore (adding to hosts file;) and get all my stuff from djst. He's cool.
Posted by: Spewey on May 20, 2003 6:07 PMHow about just not saying anything to the "newborn" if the only things you have to say are hurtful and will make him never use Firebird again? As Tom Lehrer says, "If they can't communicate, the least they can do is to SHUT UP." (Or as people's mothers used to say, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything.")
Gotta say, I love your reasoning for keeping Firebird sekrit so that you and your r4d kool h4xor lusers can be more 1337 than everyone else.
Maybe bernd was right after all....
And next time you file a layout bug, should I just make sure to assign it to you, since you could do a bit of reading of source yourself just as well as this "newborn" could do a bit of reading of documentation...
Reason #3 why I should just stop working on Mozilla entirely, here you are.
Posted by: Boris on May 20, 2003 8:47 PMLook. By my accounting, I figure if I help 10 people use Firebird I get a Get Out Of Jail/STFU card. Since I have helped 20 people and used one on the last jackass, I still have one left. Bam.
Stop coding, see if I care.
Sourpuss.
Posted by: Spewey on May 20, 2003 8:59 PMSo by "your accounting", if I'm nice to 10 people on the street today, I should be able to walk up to the 11th one and punch him in the face?
Sorry, that's not how real mature human interaction works.
And yes, it's quite clear to me that you in fact do not care, about Firebird, about Mozilla, or about anything else associated with mozilla.org. It was clear from your MozillaZine forum comments, in fact.... If you cared, you'd be a little more considerate in dealing with people who have questions.
Posted by: Boris on May 20, 2003 9:08 PM>>""My next step? Avoid the extensionroom forevermore (adding to hosts file;) and get all my stuff from djst. He's cool.""
I'm not sure where you are coming from. (!!???)
But I will agree with you that Djst is an awesome guy, he's doing sh*t loads for the community, hat goes off to him with respect.
Boris: sorry you have to put up with this shit. Now I know why you don't read bugmail anymore =)
But thanks for hanging in there, Gecko is frick'n awesome and allot of it is thanks to you! Cheers for that!
Posted by: Jed on May 21, 2003 12:58 AMReading this makes me want to vent a little....Why is everyone so damned rude in the world? I swear, everytime I drive, someone is impatient or just selfish and acts like a total knob. People are tied on so tight. People asking legitimate questions get flamed. People asking stupid questions get flamed. I wish people would just not say anything when it has no intentional content. venting done...
Boris: You are a valuable member of mozilla development. I know it can be disappointing be when someone sends lame comments in forums or bugzilla, but at the end of the day you have made many users happy. Don't let a few bad apples ruin it for you.
-Tom
Posted by: modok on May 27, 2003 6:14 PM