So the big news today on Twitter was Chris Hughes’ talk at TED. He got just under 2 minutes on stage and showed off some augmented reality stuff using Papervision 3D and the FLARtoolkit. Unfortunately he said some stuff along the lines of “I wrote” and “we converted” and didn’t mention the actual projects themselves by name. Understandably, some of the Flash community, who have contributed or use these projects, were pretty upset about this. A lot of people have put a lot of time in on these projects and then to see them on stage at a big name conference like TED, without being mentioned by name, and in a way that implies that another person did it all… yeah, not fun.
Now, I happened to meet Chris out at 360iDev earlier this year in San Jose. We didn’t become good friends or anything, but we had several conversations and hung out a bit. I liked him. Interestingly enough, the one thing we talked about, pretty much exclusively, was open source. Now, I’m all for open source, but Chris actually struck me as an open source fanatic. He’s created open source projects and actively contributes to others. He’s very serious about it. In fact, we wound up talking to the 360 organizers and set up an impromptu lunch discussion panel one day to talk about open source and how it fit in with the iPhone platform.
So my initial reaction was that it didn’t make sense that he’d be up there maliciously trying to claim other people’s work as his own. It just seemed incongruous to me. However, he said what he said, and it definitely comes off sounding like he created this whole thing. I could go into saying how he only had 2 minutes, and little preparation, and whatever. My point is not to stand up for him or defend him or apologize for him. He can do that for himself. And for the record, he did post on his blog the fact that he used Papervision and FLARtoolkit – before all the uproar – and has since blogged explaining himself.
My real reason for writing this is that it really depressed me how ugly things got in the community. I must have gotten 100 or more tweets about the situation. There were blog posts, jokes. People were posting photoshopped photos of Chris. Someone even started printing tshirts!!! For god’s sake! And before that, nobody even talked to the guy, asked him what was up.
Now, again, I want to re-iterate: I’m not here to defend him. And I totally understand why certain people would be upset. But this whole thing got way more ugly and disturbing than it really should have. I compared it to a lynch mob, and to me, that’s really how it felt.
How can I not compare this to last week’s Hoss/Flashbelt turmoil. The sad thing was that many of the same people who were decrying the whole “bandwagon jumping” to defame Hoss were now jumping on that same bandwagon to defame Chris. I know, I know, “it’s different.” Well the facts are, but the reaction is not.
My one question was, why not just talk to him first? Several people answered that simply talking to people does not always work. Frankly, that scares the crap out of me. “I don’t like what Joe is doing. I’m not going to talk to him because that might not work, so I’m going to start a massive PR campaign against him.” I’m not naming names, because most of the people who were going on about this are actually very good friends. People who I have massive respect for.
I’m not sure what to make of it all. It gets me down though. 🙁