OStatic

After a long search, the Linux Foundation has found its community manager for its LSB Developer Network. The Linux Foundation has tapped Brian Proffitt, longtime managing editor of Linux Today, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux.

OStatic: For readers who aren't familiar with Linux Today, could you give a bit of background on the site and yourself?

Brian Proffitt: Wait, who's not familiar with Linux Today? Are you kidding me? Have you been talking to those people at SourceForge again? Boy, what characters...

Iﾒm a bit taken aback by this post by Jason Harris over on the KDE Developerﾒs Journals site. Harris says that ﾔ KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesnﾒt really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.ﾔ

Now, a qualifier ﾗ Harris' post is provoked by a discussion of ﾓpoisonousﾔ users, i.e., those select few users who turn up and (intentionally or not) do ﾓcontributeﾔ to the project in the form of dissonance and conflict, but the idea that open source doesnﾒt need users is one that should be strongly refuted.I think virtually everyone agrees that projects would be better off without the trolls, griefers, and assorted characters whose presence adds up to a drag on the project rather than just a passive consumer of code or fan of the project.