Should we do rants about other people’s Open Source projects that they have spent a lot of time on?

(I’m writing this in the light of the fact that a few days ago, someone released a new version of their software with a change that lots of people disliked, someone complained loudly, people got hurt. I won’t bother linking to the drama for those who missed it, these things happen quite a bit).

I think yes. Rants are a way to bemoan the awful state of reality without the normal rules of being polite, or reasonable, or even completely true, and I think the Open Source community benefits from them.

We need this because we get used to things being terrible.

• WAT

• eevee - PHP

• Django sucks keynotes

https://archive.org/details/pyvideo_44___why-django-sucks-and-how-we-can-fix-it https://pyvideo.org/djangocon-us-2008/djangocon-2008-keynote-cal-henderson.html

Bad examples:

Rules for ranting?

I think it kind of defeats the object to have rules about ranting. They are emotional tirades where you are allowed to not be reasonable. So instead:

Suggestions for ranting

1. Make it clear that it’s a rant.

• Zed Shaw The Case Against Python 3

  It’s full of complaints about Python 3, which I think is fine. But it’s written like it’s legitimate criticism, when a lot of it is nonsense. I’m guessing Zed probably knew that a lot of it was nonsense, but many people who read it did not. I think it would have been much better if it had been written as a rant instead.