Back in mid-2010s, there was a series of online controversies going on. In coding specifically, there was a push to include incredibly politically-motivated codes of conducts onto projects, written by people who couldn’t contribute anything of value to any of the projects if their life depended on it. Unfortunately, plenty of projects caved in — because the only thing the people pushing for said codes of conduct had was some clout on twitter … and you wouldn’t want to get labelled as sexist and/or racist on twitter, would you?
The negative side effect is that the success of the CoC people brought in similar grifters. Which ends up in spam like this finding its way into my e-mail inbox (and only e-mail inbox, because they deleted the issue from github immediately after creating it).
I find this e-mail incredibly problematic for several reasons, starting with the fact that it incorrectly believes Ultrawidify is “marked Open Source.” Ultrawidify is not open source — there’s no license allowing you to take my spaghetti and use it for your own extension or other purposes — the repository is set to public purely for transparency issues (so people can see what I’m doing with the permissions I ask of them).
The biggest issue with this e-mail is, of course, corpo-speak, tone policing and acting as if they have any authority. Yes, using language such as “we ask you to refrain from X and update your submission accordingly” indicates that they believe they’re in a place of power over us lowly hobbyists when in reality, they aren’t.
You kindly ask me to refrain for using “vulgar or inappropriate” language on your Christian Github? I kindly ask you to refrain from tone policing, to fuck off, and to jump off the nearest bridge while you’re at it.
Many — dare I say, the vast majority — of publicly available spaghetti on Github are personal side projects made by people who solve a problem that affects them, and share it with the community because they think it might be useful for others. Even Ultrawidify is an example of that: if Firefox01Chrome did have multiple extensions for cropping improperly encoded ultrawide videos at the time, but that’s not a good enough reason for me to stop using the superior browser and head over to Chrome had an extension for properly cropping Ultrawide videos when I got my first ultra-wide monitor, I’d simply install whatever existed, complain in reviews when things didn’t work properly, and wouldn’t have bothered with it.
Personal one-man side projects are often closer to being works of art12Before I make it to /r/DelusionalArtists: Nobody said they’re good art, mind you than they are to being a product. As such, such projects can also be considered a form of self-expression, as the language we use when coding conveys intent and feelings we feel at the moment — be it feelings in general, or feelings about the problem we’re trying to fix. In such projects, we may also choose to use colorful language to slightly entertain our future selves. Or because we know that seeing a funny but colorful — or frustrated and colorful — comment reinforces the idea that we’re working on this for fun, and not for a corporate boss that demands a lot but pays a lot less23I have never worked for proper corpo, but pay in my student job and my first full-time job was quite shit even for my country, let alone to what programmers can make in the USA..
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Stop acting like it is.
// by the way, let's do a quick sanity check whether video player is doing any fuckies wuckies
// fucky wucky examples:
//
// * video width is bigger than player width AND video height is bigger than player height
// * video width is smaller than player width AND video height is smaller than player height
//
// In both examples, at most one of the two conditions can be true at the same time. If both
// conditions are true at the same time, we need to go 'chinny reckon' and recheck our player
// element. Chances are our video is not getting aligned correctlyExample of a “vulgar or inappropriate” language in my code.
With that in mind, I don’t think it’s hard to see why receiving an issue laden that asks me to watch my language on this Christian Github, written completely in entitled corpo-speak, left me rather unsatisfied.
No. You don’t get to trample into my garden and tell me how you think I should run it. You don’t get to tell me I should sanitize my shit so it’s friendly for corporate consumption, and you don’t get to treat my language as a bug when it’s very much a welcome feature for 99% of people who spend 99% of the time working on the code34Though admittedly, as outlined in an earlier blog, there hasn’t been a lot of “working” on Ultrawidify lately for various reasons.
// [...] If site has dumb shit like 'max-width: 100%' and 'max-height: 100vh' in their CSS, that
// shit will prevent us from applying desired crop. This means we need to tell websites to fuck off with
// that crap. We know better.If you take an issue with this comment, you also seriously need to take a hike and fuck off.
Back when I was a kid, if the big-box CRT TV or monitor was misbehaving, you could smack it once or twice and it would stop working again. Perhaps contributors to ScanOSS responsible for this would benefit for a similar treatment, until they at least acknowledge being wrong … maybe even produce a sincere and honest apology.
But we all know this ain’t gonna happen.
Update (1. 10. 2024)
Turns out that there was an issue opened in ScanOSS repos about this spam problem, where people expressed their disapproval of the automated spam almost immediately. For three weeks since, not a single person associated with ScamOSS made any comments. That is, until yesterday evening, when the person who opened the issue tried to pull one of the contributors by the sleeve in order to get some answers:
First response by ScanOSS was to mark the by all standards polite and unabusive comment as “abuse,” followed by a canned corpo-speak “apology” that smells strongly of “It’s just a prank, bro”:
As Vega said in their comment: if you only get an apology after having to ask for it three weeks later, it has very little value as an apology. It’s also very hard to consider such an “apology” to be honest or sincere. Their actions — marking the generally polite comment asking for apology or any sort of response altogether as “abuse”, and subsequently blocking Vega from responding to the issue — make their insincerity pretty clear.
As far as I’m concerned — much like every other spam-producing entity, ScanOSS is still a heap of human trash.
Fuck them.
If only people went with “fuck them” before this kind of thing became seen as a legitimate way to force people to do shit.