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Comment by babyrainbow | Hacker News Reader

Sure. But sometime, you can take away only that. but the loss will be all yours.

I mean, somebody can give you a block on gold unpolished and unwrapped. Sure, you can say, "How dare you give me that gold unwrapped! There is no way I am taking it. I demand you give that wrapped up property in fancy paper and tied with a ribbon." Sure you can say that. But the loss will be all yours. You got the shit anyway and gained no gold...

So the point is, if it the speaker who has to gain something by getting their point across, sure. They will have to be diplomatic. But when someone, halfway across the world is teaching you something from their ridiculously singular experience, seemingly in a rude way...

You shut up and listen.

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I'm not sure gold is the right analogy in this case.. I think that is holding grsecurity's work in higher esteem than is necessary. Don't forget, the code is just part of the work. Ones attitude in contributing that code is another large part of what makes the work "gold".

A better analogy might person A be handing person B back an improvement on person B's own recipe. However, the improvement is written on a piece of paper drenched in piss.

Don't forget, the entire reason grsecurity is able to exist at all is because the Linux kernel is open source and because countless of volunteers and companies have dedicated their time and energy doing exactly what grsecurity fails to do, contributing back in a manner which makes live livable for the maintainers. Each and every one of them could've decided to not bother properly splitting up patches, to not bother documenting their changes properly, and they personally wouldn't have been worse off in a lot of cases. However, because they decided to use proper communication skills (eg. not be a dick), everyone wins.

I think the gold in the parent's analogy is Linus's criticism. And people want it wrapped up in kinder words.

> Ones attitude in contributing that code is another large part of what makes the work "gold".

Even if the analogy meant we were talking about the code being the gold, this wouldn't make sense. The machine only executes code, regardless of the attitude of who wrote it.

I don't think so. If you read uhhfcuvv's post it is about "the other guy", to which Diederich replies and speaks about the "toxic communication", to which babyrainbow seems to take offense.

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