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Comment by 51lver | Hacker News Reader

I understand including more examples of unacceptable harassment for clarity, but I think they should not have included "level of experience".

It plays too well into some large companies "Embrace, extend, extinguish" strategies for dealing with open technologies. By being hospitable to people that obviously should not be contributing (eg, people who submit PRs through github) the talented contributors are allowing themselves to be open to a DDOS. There are many more bad programmers than good ones, and the dealing with the legions of unskilled programmers hired by "tech innovators" in their efforts to cut cost could grind kernel development to a halt. Then poof.

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"maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of...level of experience" https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/7876320f88802b22d4e2d...

The code doesn't say they have to work with people of low levels of experience. It simply says they won't harass people for their lack of experience. Rejecting PRs submitted through github doesn't have to be abusive can simply be "We don't accept PRs via github, please read the contributor docs"

The effort of dealing with legions of unskilled programmers isn't made easier with harassment or abuse. It's made easier with documentation, tooling and a legion of patient programmers you can delegate management work to.

Yes, being an asshole is really easy, when you can get away with it. Being nice can be too, however some people prefer the feeling of lashing out.

> however some people prefer the feeling of lashing out.

usually they are on twitter trying to cause people to loose their jobs.

I understand how this could happen in theory, but is there historical evidence to show that this sort of DDOS would be in any way likely?

I'm not finding anything historical about companies abusing the free software community, but that chapter of history is still being written. There are examples of playing unfairly to gain dominance from the 90s through 2000s here though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I am simply proposing that they are now in the "extend" phase with linux. It has been embraced. Now they will extend it (via the dev process, not the codebase) until it is unsustainable, and then it will be extinguished.

MS WSL might be a subtle step in this direction.

"It plays too well into some large companies "Embrace, extend, extinguish" strategies for dealing with open technologies."

No companies have that strategy. Get over the slashdot meme from 20 years ago.

It's not a meme, it's legal evidence, and that's a very bold claim.

No it isn’t. Likely zero of the people who worked at MS then still work there now. It has no relevance.

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