Criticism as a measure of strength?

Just on my first day of playing with Eclipse I stumble upon Mike Milinkovich’s blog entry in which he seems to loose patience with a persistent criticizer of the Eclipse community.

I feel that I received much more explicit, ehhh, feedback when I ran the Java Community Process than Bjorn’s writings on his blog. But it seems there’s more history between the two gentlemen than just the exchanges between their two blogs and their comments. If nothing else Bjorn’s tag line for his blog is a hint. I admire Mike for speaking from the heart in his blog entry. During my JCP days there were certainly one or two times that I wanted to say to some to go away.

Yesterday evening I spent an hour or two reading Bjorn Freeman-Benson’s blog, Doug Schaefer’s blog and comments by Ed Merks, Mik Kersten and others. The tragedy of the commons features a number of times which is an inherent risk in any collaborative community: how to balance short term vs long terms needs, opportunity for one vs opportunity for all.

While there is clearly more water under the bridge between Bjorn and Mike I would argue that the existence of blogs like these are actually a measure of strength and health of the Eclipse community. That there is room and space for participants in a community to talk about what they don’t like and that they do indeed express this indicates the matureness in character of a community just as Mike’s airing of his irritation and his decision to keep such blogs as part of Planet Eclipse do.