<div class="xblock xblock-public_view xblock-public_view-vertical" data-course-id="course-v1:MOOC-FLOSS+101+2021_1" data-init="VerticalStudentView" data-runtime-class="LmsRuntime" data-runtime-version="1" data-block-type="vertical" data-usage-id="block-v1:MOOC-FLOSS+101+2021_1+type@vertical+block@chap-04-seq-04-ver-01" data-request-token="b64102a2902e11ee8c631237928d7ffd" data-graded="False" data-has-score="False">
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<div class="edit-link-wrapper"><div class="edit-link"><p style="text-align: right;"><a href="https://gitlab.com/-/ide/project/mooc-floss/mooc-floss/edit/master/-/course/html/chap-04-seq-04-ver-01-html-01.html" target="_blank"><i class="fa fa-pencil mr-1"></i> Edit on Gitlab</a></p></div><div class="edit-link-original-content"><p>The collaborative aspects of FLOSS implies that in any project, there will be discussions and debates around various topics. People in a project will often have different views on project directions, or on project management, or even on tools that the project should use or recommend.</p>
<p>Discussions around licenses (or economic models) will typically arise at the beginning of projects and rarely after that in established projects, especially those who have several <em>actors</em> (as it is not easy to relicense a program), but as those discussions will have long-lasting impact on the project future, people participating in them can be more emotionally implicated. There still exist lots of (heated) discussions about relative benefits of licenses in general, or about the evolution of the definitions of free software, which sometimes translate into legal battles around what specific paragraphs mean in licenses (example of such discussions can be about the "Server-Side Public License", "Common Clause", "Ethical Licenses", etc.).</p>
<p>We will discuss more in detail in the next module what it implies in terms of communication, and how code of conduct can be useful, but if you're a new contributor, a practical advice we could give is to not get involved in debates or conflicts for as long as you're not accustomed to the culture of the project or the history of the particular discussions you witness: coming into those without a deep knowledge of a project's history or how previous debates were solved will likely give you less information than watching it unfold and learning how the project deals with it.</p>
<h3>Trolls</h3>
<p>In particular, one common characteristic of online debates (and of the internet culture in general) is the presence of <em>trolls</em>, and the FLOSS world is no exception to it: discussions where the primary goal of the participant is not to engage with others in good faith in order to reach a conclusion, but to create disruption or conflict to have fun or attract attention, in general at the expense of others.</p>
<p>Many topics are a great source of pointless discussions and could be seen as <em>historic troll topics</em>, like the "best" choice for text editors (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war" target="_blank" rel="noopener">vim vs emacs</a>), the relative usability of operating systems, tabs vs spaces, etc. Engaging in these discussions (which is <em>not recommended</em> as it is a waste of time) is best done ironically, and starting a "troll" discussion yourself is the best way to be categorized as a person willing to waste other people's time.</p>
<p>"<em>Do not feed the troll</em>" is the standard quote to tell people to not engage in pointless discussions.</p>
<h3>Resolving conflicts</h3>
<p>Just like for in-person discussions, different projects have different ways of resolving conflicts: some mostly work by trying to reach <em>consensus</em> (the most famous example is wikipedia), some are what we could call <em>do-ocracy</em> (the person doing the work is right), or "dictatorship" where the project manager has the final word, or any other methods.</p></div></div>
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