That said, he has a history of... rash? impulsive? reactions to situations that might have been resolved with less bad blood if he had stepped away from the keyboard until he was less upset. The classic example is when he got upset about people wanting to unofficially add favicons to the Gemini protocol, and he threatened to blackhole any IP address which requests a favicon. https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I do not know if there is some specific recent event triggering vitriol, but the way this post is written, it sounds like Drew thinks it is resulting from less recent actions like the favicon threat.
In Drew's defense, he has made (limited) apologies and I do believe he is trying to do better. https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas... has a note at the bottom, saying:
> I realize that my blog has been a source of a lot of negativity in the past, and I regret how harsh I've been with some of the projects I've criticised. I will make my arguments by example going forward: if I think we can do better, I'll do it better, instead of criticising those who are just earnestly trying their best.
But it is also true that many people will not be quick to forgive him, and some people never will. It will take him time to undo the negative image he has created with some people, but after seeing Linus Torvald's positive changes, I am optimistic that Drew can change for the better if he wants to, and help create a welcoming community for everyone. If he doesn't give up first.
> Congratulations to Rust for its first (but not its last) supply-chain attack this week! They join a growing club of broken-by-design package managers which publish packages uploaded by vendors directly, with no review step, and ship those packages directly to users with no further scrutiny. [1]
And in the post where he's complaining about GoModuleProxy, he manages to self-righteously insult the entire Go team for no good reason:
> I will say that if I was in their position, and my service was mistakenly sending an excessive amount of traffic to someone else, I would make it my first priority to fix it. But I suppose no one will get promoted for prioritizing that at Google. [2]
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/12/Supply-chain-when-will-we...
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/25/Google-has-been-DDoSing-s...
You're seeing the posts in his blogs. His timeline was full of bashing devs of other open source projects. Never a constructive criticism, just plain bashing (with occasional self-congratulatory comment for his own decision).
PS: I think part of his Rust criticism was towards the attempt to make Sway use wlroots-rs and it not fitting his idea. So, instead of saying "Sorry, it didn't work", he jumped into full bashing Rust for not doing what he was trying to do.
But more generally, I think he has a negative reputation largely because of his blogging. He has criticized others in strong terms, in blog posts that get a lot of attention. We aren't that into reading another criticism when the previous ones didn't seem that well thought out.
Sometimes the advocacy for his own work is also based on strong criticism of others for doing it wrong. It's "my way is good and other projects are harmful" rather than "I think my way is better, but other projects have different goals and people have their reasons for preferring their workflows."
But he's getting attention because people keep sharing his blog posts in various forums, and he's not responsible for that. (Including this blog post appearing in Hacker News.)
However if you’re going to traffic in language war melodrama and controversy-for-clicks (let’s be real, it’s a deliberate content strategy), then it’s sort of weak to cry about others not being nice enough in their criticisms of your own stuff. Pot meet kettle and all that /shrug.
Regardless, I hope he gets through the rough patch and I look forward to reading more of his posts that may or may not eloquently shit all over some of my favorite programming tools :)
That said, I don' t know and couldn't tell you.
I once made a trivial PR to sway that was maybe 6 chars in total but Drew made sure I felt welcomed and even mentioned me in the list of contributors.
I find it a bit puzzling why someone who contributes so much to the community gets so much hate. Even if the opinions might not always be popular, the volume and quality of his work should speak much louder than words.
Watch out, because even this self-pitying blog post manages to find time to reach out and troll the Rust community.
Internet troll gets back internet hate is not exactly unexpected right? And we all know Drew says some trollish things sometimes. I don't think the way that some handle it and him is anywhere near correct, but Drew might consider the way he presents himself isn't always conducive to good faith disagreement.
Well, at least it made me sure I’ll never use their services.
Drew didn't like Rust very much, and criticized it a lot for it's complexity. He is also a very vocal supporter of open-source, going so far as to disable NVIDIA's non-free driver support in his wayland window manager/compositor Sway.
On top of that, he made SourceHut, an alternative to GitHub/Gitlab and some other innovative projects, like Gemini.
EDIT: Drew did not make Gemini, but he is still one of it's most vocal promoters. /EDIT
Recently, he even disclosed a new systems language, much simpler than Rust and more flexible than Golang.
Suffice to say, he's made some enemies that don't want him and his team to succeed.
AFAIK this is backwards. It was NVIDIA developers that decided to invent their own thing (EGL Streams) instead of supporting Mesa GBM. This meant open source projects had to support a special backend for wayland specifically for NVIDIA harware. KDE also refused to support it until an NVIDIA dev stepped up to do the work for them.
Sway works on Nouveau (the severely limited open source NVIDIA driver) with the wonderfully named flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia".
Drew didn't make Gemini, at least not if "make" means started the project or came up with the idea. See also, the Gemini FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
I think he has been involved in the Gemini community at some level(?); I expect he's made a server and/or client, but lots of people have done that. Indeed, making the protocol simple enough for ~anyone to implement it is one of the goals of Gemini as far as I understand it.
Drew has built some great gemini software, but he didn't make Gemini, it is a community project led by Solderpunk.
This is the "Donald Trump is an American politician..." take.
Drew is most well-known as a high-profile FOSS troll. You should view some other entries in his blog.
My first experience with Drew was "Developers shouldn't distribute their own software." That post goes directly to the heart of the question, "Why would you call him a troll?" Because he has glib and self-serving answers for every seemingly hard question in software.
It's no reason for hate or any kind of personal attacks of course, but saying "then don't contribute" is not an option for most project leads that want to build successful open source software today. You have to choose your audience and the size of it.
Anecdotally, the quality:quantity ratio in regards to both contributions and contributors is far higher if you use a service like SourceHut. There are no activity charts so there's no reason to game the system with low effort pull requests and features.
The vibe I got from sourcehut is that it's built by peers for peers, they are remarkably open about everything. The service is straightforward and doesn't force you to a particular workflow. It's a solid hosted version control with a no-nonsense web UI - open source to boot. What's not to like?
It blows my mind that someone would actively hate on such a project. Oh well, internet.
(I signed up for srht and pay a small amount for my personal non-work stuff.)
I've never actually used it, but isn't that exactly what it does? As far as I know, it only allows submitting patches using emails, not using the "pull request"/"merge request"/etc workflow of most other big hosted Git solutions. But it's very possible I just don't have the whole picture here.
Like a nice buffet that just does not have a particular (albeit popular) dish on offer. Where you can bring your own bottle or even an appetizer and nobody will mind.
It's not the internet, it is our whole society.
We are living a very strange moment in our society where people actively hates everything that is not mainstream. It is not only on the internet, it is everywhere. You should conform to whatever is mainstream or face hate.
Now that he was involved in a new language he seems to get more bad press with it, I think mostly because he is someone that is Internet semi-famous.
I think he has his niche and people should just leave him be. As it is the question of popularity it is sad that work he was involved with also suffers, making this spiral that gets back to him. Probably what would help the most would be to go a little under the radar. It is unfair, but the Internet drain pipe must forget that he's a subject to pin things to. In his place I would limit writing to things not easily consumed by masses or associated with him - like mailing lists. It sucks, because who wouldn't like to be free to express himself and to advertise his work, but there is no spam filter for the public Internet.
When you are working on yourself and reach new milestones, then it will take time until even your closest will recognize and really trust the observed changes. And I assume public / anonymous people will take even longer.
This can feel unfair, because these things are very hard like improving, changing your habits, getting a bit wiser, or learning a new skill. But it is how it is. People have an image of you and it changes in a delayed manner. It's even doubly unfair if that image is distorted in the first place.
Also people like jumping on negativity bandwagons. It seems to be one of the really stupid parts of human nature. I do it too, most people do it even if we try to avoid it most of the time. It sucks.
In my observation it's quite the opposite. Those closest to you have the longest history with whatever was the "old way" and will therefore take the longest to believe that any change is for real.
The rustacean cries out in pain as it pinches you.
I have survived through my awesome power of not having to use them.
this a thousand times. i didn't care when people insulted or criticized me, but when they went against my team, then that hurt deeply and i really took that personal.
shrugging off attacks directed at me is kind of doable, but when others are attacked because of me, then i want to be able to protect them. sometimes it works to redirect the attention to me, but when it doesn't it makes me feel helpless.
I have used Sway and fell in love with it, it was such a discovery of simplicity and beautiful design. I read about your new language many months ago, even then realizing the potential behind it. They want to silence you because you are a beacon of new hope and ideas. They fear your potential. Don't let anyone to belittle your talent and skill.
Imagine just 10% of the revenue involving software globally would go into supporting all excellent open source projects that millions of people depend on on a daily basis. What a beautiful world that could be.
I most certainly can't provide an answer here but doesn't the medium (IRC, mailing lists, forums, etc) facilitate this toxic environment too? People whose sole intent is to manufacture a narrative in order to harass someone, or their project(s), are a lot more comfortable doing so online. They are guaranteed a wide audience, lots of views and publicity which in turn maximizes the damage. Rarely do I encounter this behavior in workplace meetings, conferences or venues that require physical attendance.
I also don't get how someone would get out of their way just to be toxic against a free, open and community-oriented project. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Take it as a compliment, Drew. :)
SourceHut turned out to be a company which values i very much share
i wasn't aware about the harassment-campaign, but i wish a soon recovery!
consider going off-line for a while and start talking to a therapist
I consider drew a prolific coder who seems to be focused on all aspects relating to getting good code out of our brains. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he would come out with a new keyboard next.
Why not point this hate to corporations that are destroying our society with their unethical business practices?
The haters are always going to have a louder voice because hate is an emotion that provokes people to be loud and outspoken. Appreciation is usually silent.
