While a few developers have the chance to be paid for their job on Debian, most of us are doing it on our spare time, for fun. Yes, we are making the best operating system out there, for fun. Yet a large number of developers are taking this project way too seriously. To say it in other words, they have a carrot up the ass. I happen to prefer the French expression though, since it conveys better the rigidity of their attitude: they have a broomstick up the ass.

Recently, when I launched the idea of the Bug Sprint, someone wrote to me to propose, instead of rewarding people with cookies, to send them money. This is the best example of broomstick behavior: taking the fun out of people by bringing back rampantly the very idea that almost split the project in two the last time it was introduced. The very same person, when faced with a sarcastic email sent to an announcement mailing list, immediately rushed in to send a ban request to list masters (a totally useless one, since I don’t have the habit to make the same joke twice). That person happens to be the project leader. So it seems the only thing the DPL has to do, at a time when we’d rather need people to fix RC bugs, is to protect the project from seditious members who don’t share their love for broomsticks.

When someone makes a bad-taste joke, you are not forced to laugh. But you are not forced to impose your rigid and moralist views either. And on top of that, throwing random accusations of sexism without any kind of justification does not improve the mood. This is even very close to defamation, but since I don’t have a broomstick in the ass myself, I prefer to just laugh at them with the help of some fellow developers.

I will go on shocking these people. And they won’t like it more than in the past. Every time one of them climbs on her high horse to take a pathetic and patronizing stance while totally missing the point, it will bring a bit of fun.

Edited to add (22 dec) : when I said “I will go on shocking these people”, I didn’t mean “I will purposely shock these people”. They shouldn’t expect to obtain enough of my attention for that to happen.

Bonus #1: as for the promised statistics, we are, at the time of writing, at 493 599 unique IPs who clicked on the trap. Quite a good investment for someone who’d want to make money from smelly geeks.

Bonus #2: here is a sexist picture.