removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
> I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place unwelcoming.

I understand the impulse.  The problem is that there is actually a value
conflict between being "welcoming" in that sense and the actual purpose
of this list, which is to ship code.

It's a much more direct conflict in the hacker culture than elsewhere
because so many potential contributors are high-functioning autists.
That makes the downstream consequences of politeness enforcement a lot more
damaging to the project's ability to ship code than they would otherwise be.

There is a hypothetical world, of course, in which jerks and assholes
are such a huge problem that they interfere measurably with shipping
code.  But contemplete the amount of angry verbiage on this list
recently from people who could have been using their fingers typing
code, and I think it's clear that the amount of social friction
oroduced by attempts to eject the jerks will be far higher than if
you simply continued to tolerate them.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>