- cross-posted to:
- techtakes@awful.systems
- cross-posted to:
- techtakes@awful.systems
Personal opinion: Nathan seems to be really side-stepping a lot of concerns brought of up in the comments there. And referring to people coming together collectively in an open-letter when virtually all other channels are closed as ‘brigading’ is… Not cool. Edit: he retracted the use of brigading.
“various people on the internet”
“Two people unknown to any KDE contributors”
“Someone else outside of KDE”
“A bunch of people […] almost none of whom are known KDE contributors”
“A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE”
Geez, can you condescend your users any harder? Or, like me, people who want to continue recommending your shit to noobs?
It was clear he was referring to anyone involving themselves unnecessarily in the business of maintainers trying to create a policy. This tends to happen whenever maintainers discuss things openly.
It didn’t seem condescending to me. You have to accept that non-contributors simply don’t get as much weight as contributors in this kind of discussion. So when a lead maintainer starts seeing non-contributors starting debates and criticizing the project when they don’t have their facts straight and it really wasn’t any of their business to begin with, they have a right to call them out.
Ok, but how can it be called unnecessary involvement when it’s simply public comment, for which an avenue was provided? What is “the business of maintainers” only? Of course maintainers get more say… that does not mean everyone else who has a say should shut up if they don’t like it. If all of the public feedback was constructive towards the proposal without such severe disagreement on the basis, surely the author would welcome it. When popular disagreements like this come up it would be nice to have the crux of it addressed without being strawmanned to answer for the actions of some hooligan of the day.
The main point of OP is that this was a misunderstanding that turned into an overreaction. It sounds like there was never any confusion among the maintainers that they were trying to create a policy to prevent LLM slop PRs and reduce maintenance burden. Somehow non-maintainers derailed the discussion into an anti-AI tirade that was completely unproductive.
So basically: yes people should shut up if they don’t have anything productive to add to the discussion.
I did not like that condescending wording either, as I was also considering signing this “KDE for People” petition yesterday. (but I didn’t, because I’m not important, not a developer or anything)
I guess he just wanted to make clear, that KDE does not yet have an official stance, yet, and those movements (the akademy talk and KDE for People) are not official kde projects/opinions