I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of "registered" modules on cpan imo )
The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source stuff to the world. Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face.
I am referencing names of individuals so that people can lookup these events and see the truth in what I'm saying; NOT to shame these people. They are all good developers, and I value their contributions ( don't necessarily like these people but what does that matter ). There should be respect in the community regardless of whether you like or dislike people's projects.
What's worse, the fact that this scares off contributors is hard to spot, because you by definition cannot easily measure contributions that would have happened but didn't because of a community problem.
If you look at non-technical forums like Facebook, newspaper comment sections etc there's usually some form of moderation that imposes house rules like "be civil". This sort of thing can clean up individual forums but the wider problem remains: some people are just nasty and they often believe they can influence the development of their favourite project by being sufficiently nasty to developers they disagree with. If they can't do that in the project's own forums they'll do it elsewhere.
The Bitcoin community has pretty severe problems with this too, it's not just a Linux thing.
Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken.
About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent web archive.
[Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century, and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can be configured.]
- you sent 2 e-mails to the Varnish-misc mailing list in Feb 2011 about the ESI-related bug you found (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2... https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), which then remained unanswered
- but then you also tried to "help" another user in an unrelated thread "Lots of config" in March 2011 (starting here, https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...), and PHK had a knee-jerk reaction (https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2...) to one of your "suggestions", a reaction that was indeed a bit vitriolic, but when read in the context of your other contributions to that thread, it makes a little bit of sense.
There's no excuse for the language in that post.
Really? My contributions to the open source world are certainly modest, but I get thank you emails perhaps once a month for applications I've released. People are quite pleasant.
Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more.
The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the distributed discs ). Several people benchmarked it and said it was amazingly fast. I'm pretty sure it is used by a fair amount of people, but since it is mainly distributed through CPAN I have no idea who really uses it or how many.
I think this is the case for what I wrote because it is a component. People in general I think appreciate tools much more than components, especially if the component is one of many somewhat inter-compatible other options. There is little love for "another thing added to the pile" even if it is different in fundamental ways.
I've also had people thank me for a FOSS app, but that was also a consumer application. The fact that it was open-source was actually incidental though, I don't think anyone have actually forked or looked at the code. If they did, maybe I'd have gotten some hate mail ;)
If I have voiced some criticism of your code it is certainly not because I wished to belittle your efforts or to make any value judgements about your worth as a person.
I named you simply because you are the first person to state that my XML parser is "invalid", despite my having worked very hard to ensure that it does parse XML meaningfully.
I do acknowledge freely that I am disregarding the specs to some extent for the sake of raw speed. You will see that I have altered the documentation to make this clear so there is no confusion.
For myself, with your apology I consider that extremely adequate to address the past. I don't really remember clearly, but I know that it was a very rough entry into the open source world to have my parser attacked ( considering it is the first meaningful thing I contributed to the community )
I would like to point out that communication and understanding between members of the community is exactly what I am asking for. I thank you for stepping out and attempting to resolve this. There is no way I would ever know that you felt this way without you expressing it, and unless I did I would have lived forever thinking you have bad feelings towards myself and the code I have created.
For all the people who imply that I was attacking any of the named people, including Grant, see that was and is not my intention, and I am very happy today to have some of these things addressed.
I will throw this out there for consideration; it boggles my mind how wikipedia has banned the article on my parser, considering there are entries for many other equivalent parsers. The article was up for years then removed suddenly for no legitimate reason imo... Do you have any opinion on the clear favoring of certain parsers in the information community? ( such as on wikipedia or in excluding specific parsers from being mentioned as related codebases )
"Gamer" is a hobby, but it can also refer to a community that is much, much different from the broad spectrum of people who just play video games.
> me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge
Sometimes this is a perspective thing. It's not always a bug just because some user reports it as a bug in their opinion. Don't know the story behind that anecdote, but perhaps you didn't understand the codebase like you thought you did, or what the expected behavior should of been?
In any regard, if the project maintainer does not consider it a bug and won't accept a PR, then that is their prerogative. You are [usually] free to fork the codebase and fix it yourself if you had a PR that wasn't accepted. With closed source, that isn't even a remote possibility.
I reported this behavior properly, and I was told that I don't know what I am talking about and there was no problem. The bug I filed was then closed without the issue being fixed or addressed in any way.
I can and will make a competing reverse proxy; because ESI is important IMO, and disregarding supporting it properly is silly.
I think Varnish is great; I'm happy it exists; I think it is silly to close a reported bug on the codebase without addressing it properly. The proper address to it is to simply say "No we don't really support ESI", just as I have said "No my parser is not really an 'XML' parser, because it doesn't really follow the spec."
He's been in this game years longer than most and perhaps he's tired of defending the right way nicely.
To this day I'm unclear why he didn't understand the problem with ESI include files being invalidated not forcing the main including file out of the cache as well. ( in Varnish ) I think he was just in a bad mood and didn't have the time nor care to understand what I was pointing out at the time.
He was pretty mean though, and refused to play nicely to the bitter end of that particular argument. Just google "Lots of Configs" if you want to read the whole silly debate.
Here is what I want: A cache where it supports ESI... File A ESI includes file B. Both A and B are in the cache. If I forcibly tell the cache to invalidate file B, I expect that file A will automatically be invalidated as well, since the cache should know that file B was included into file A. Varnish does not do this. That was my statement to PHK, but apparently he doesn't want to hear it and somehow things this is an unreasonable request.
Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about.
"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F✦CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML.
(p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?)
It's not that we "can't" discuss it, you just have to be prepared for the discomfort of disagreement from both reasonable and unreasonable positions. Bad positions will be argued well, and good positions will be argued poorly.
The empathy to understand issues from stances you disagree with is necessary to make arguments that sway people to your position. The ability to be as critical of your own positions as those you disagree with is how you ditch silly ideas and improve the defense of your good ideas.
The reader has to put in more effort than looking at a salty conversation and coming out the other end saying "gee, that was frosty, therefore I don't have to think about the issue seriously and can conclude the position I had going in was right all along." It may not be ideal, but making the best of a bad situation is a practical approach often necessary to get anything useful done. Do you want to change minds or do you want to indulge in the comfort of showing everyone just how right you are?
This has the side effect of divisive issues not getting the same exposure as stuff everyone agrees on.
Linus do not seems to be a person one should quote, as context seem to be critical important for anything he says.
It is intensely but shallowly interesting. Previous attempts to discuss it devolve into bad tempered argument.
No one learns anything from these discussions. No one has their mind changed.
The question is, is this method of selection conducive and is the use of obsessive aggression costing open forum projects like OSS through selective acceptance? There may have never been an alternative to the extremely abusive nature of white-male dominated cultures in the first place in regards to projects in open forums.
The vast majority of OSS projects that don't start from a strong core fail miserably and it's because of this. People extrapolate their real life professional behaviour to a virtual, open scene where assumptions of competence and commitment fall flat massively.
If anything, OSS needs more people like Linus Torvalds and Theo de Raadt managing projects and not post modern clowns with "white male" guilt. It's not by chance that Linux is possibly the biggest success in OSS history with real community contribution, and most of the others have been carried out by their respective cores with very little external output.
American PC behaviour is a disaster for OSS and that's why a lot of OSS is "awful" where it matters, which is in quality, in competitiveness and in leading the industry. Companies like Google and Mozilla lord it over OSS projects that are basically "glass house" corporative projects with extremely little external contribution (other than forking code from Linux, Apache, BSD, etc).
If anything the OSS is not dismissive enough of shit and this is holding us back.
Linus Torvalds is not a bully. He's in charge of one of the biggest and most successful project out there. And this project is open-source, and anyone can contribute to it. Anyone. Even your cat. Imagine the Windows codebase being opened to anyone, with anyone being able to suggest fixes and send patches, or ask questions, or make suggestions.
You do not want any idiot to commit insane things. You need to have some barriers. And these barriers are related to technical skills.
You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills, just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time and more importantly (2) do damages to millions of users.
So I am personally very glad Linus is "abrasive", because when someone screw up, he makes it perfectly clear, and this is totally appropriate considering how critical the linux kernel is nowadays.
And yes, if you want to live in a politically correct, nice, cheerful project, this is not the project you need to work for.
[Having said that, I do not think Linus has ever been dishonest (such as refusing a patch only because he did not like its author, unlike some C-library guy), which is precisely the reason why his abrasiveness is perfectly fine to me]
I think this notion - which Linus pushes - that the alternative to yelling at people and generally being short tempered is always "political correctness" ... well it's quite harmful. Yes, it CAN get that way, if people interpret criticism of their work as personal criticism and try to shut it down by complaining about it. I've seen that happen before. Some people don't know how to handle someone implying, even if politely, that their work sucks and can't handle it. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way and well functioning teams manage to avoid it.
For example, this is what Linus wrote:
"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
Linus"
"It is a very bad idea to read one byte at a time with a system call, for a variety of reasons, including and especially performance."
I would love to hear how being an abusive asshole actually does any good? I see it as a way to artificially limit the size and diversity of the potential contributor pool.
I personally don't think that a reasonable person who is familiar with such emails could honestly say that Linus is not a bully or that such behaviour is ever acceptable.
Being in charge of a very important project doesn't make it OK to tell people that they're so stupid they should have been aborted.
This is a false dichotomy. You can tell people to go away or get better without telling them it'd be better if they'd never been born or wishing violence upon them. I honestly don't have a problem with Linus telling somebody their code is terrible. Linus has often taken it to another level in belittling and abusing the people around him.
Linus has a pattern where his first (or second) reaction to an issue is to START SHOUTING AND NAME CALLING in an attempt to shut down discussion. If the issue blows up he comes back and gives a reasonable, considered response. It's a pattern that's not helpful.
For some reason it has become really easy to escalate things quickly from what are disagreements or perceived wrongs to really intense hatred and online forms of retaliation that is so extreme that it overshadows the original disagreements/wrongs.
It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.
This type of crazy retaliation is really harmful to those that are targeted, but it also serves to detract from legitimate arguments. It is just weird.
But this is the internet and I suspect it isn't really that easy to curb going full "4chan" on subjects because it can be "fun" for those involved because there are few personal consequences -- as per that sociology concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation.
It is difficult to motivate a group of individuals to "hate on" an individual, technology, or movement without a personal stake. As 4chan would say: "Not your personal army".
The escalation process to this point is not quick. Instead, it is often cryptic, hidden, or complex to understand. When you see it laid bare, it can make a twisted sort of sense if you were there to see it build up; if you saw the initial back and forth vitriol between two parties.
Once a tipping point is reached, the building tensions spills over into an adjacent community which then bandwagons. This is the point where parties start complaining about forum invasions, threats, and it spirals out of control. This is where it becomes visible outside the community.
When you see the fighting from the outside, it is all noise and no signal. By this time all of the discussion that could be had between parties was already had. The time for legitimate arguments had been passed, and now it is only an emotional clash of personalities and communities.
What you don't see are all the disagreements and intra-community conflict that never make it to that level and are resolved quietly. These greatly outnumber the knock-down, drag out fights, or at least they never escalate to media attention.
I think what we're seeing now is not a fundamental shift in the state of online discourse, but rather the changing role social networks and "media outlets" that report on online controversy acting as a delayed amplifier which only fans flames and provides a place to appeal after all context is lost. Social media also enables bandwagoning and cuts across interests but tweets and hashtag oneliners cannot capture the nuance of the lead up to the current conflict.
It's seems as if now it is okay to label an entire activity as a singular group that should be attacked, based on negative behaviour of individuals.
That it is now okay and acceptable to release pent up hatred upon a group, an eye for an eye, abuse for abuse. It becomes justified when the group says "hey, that's not fair" and fights back. A war then is started which further defines and entrenches both sides.
The only logical and ethical stand point is to be a neutral pacifist and have nothing to do with warmongering of any kind.
This is closer to dehumanization, where the aggressor simply fails to be self-aware that there is a human that they are abusing, due to the impersonal nature of the communication channels being used.
Except the anonymity involved means people on the other side send abuse to themselves and their side in order to shift discussion off of the topic and onto how their opponents are evil abusive monsters. And then of course people who just love stirring up shit send abuse to both sides purely because they enjoy it.
I don't like being confused this way. :(
Well, also consider this: I refuse most pull requests, and I'm not the kind of guy that is kind at every cost. I also am part of a minority, being very southern-european, from Sicily, often associated with the worst cliché of the Italian culture, Mafia, ... I also have a vision on software development which is very far from what is considered "good practice". One could expect me to receive more attacks than average.
I will concede the point that Lennart has, by far, probably received more vitriol per-capita from the Gentoo community than any others. I'm not going to defend any of the personal attacks launched on him.
However, Lennart writes very opinionated software, and the opinions it takes are more at clash with the Gentoo way than the Fedora way or the Ubuntu way. Furthermore it seems to me that Gentoo users are more conservative than any distro other than Slack.
What this adds up to is that a far larger fraction of the Gentoo community have issues with Lennart's software. There will be some fraction X of people who have issues with his software that will make inappropriate attacks on Lennart himself. Given that a much larger fraction of the Gentoo community has issues with his software than in other communities, the fact he gets a disproportionate amount of vitriol from Gentoo users doesn't necessarily mean that X is larger in Gentoo.
Personal attacks are not OK, but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself. For what it is worth, his systemd is a bug.
Releasing free software and what you accuse him of are entirely different things. Frankly I'd like to understand how you even equate someone releasing software which you aren't even forced to use, to essentially ramming his opinions of how YOUR machine should run down your throat.
The anti-systemd people really aren't coming across at all well in this thread. At lot of what you guys are accusing him of literally makes no sense on the most basic level. This being a prime example.
Don't like systemd? Don't install systemd. Don't like that a distro is bundling systemd? Don't use the distro that is bundling systemd.
The creator of systemd cannot be held responsible for you voluntarily installing the software, leaving it on your system, and then becoming upset about how it works. If you installed systemd and hate it, remove it. It aint' rocket science.
For what it is worth, his systemd is a bug.
What way would you like to customize your system that you cannot using systemd? I'm genuinely curious if you've ever tried using it.
Now, there are many valid reasons why systemd may not be to your taste. No one is forcing you to use it. There are projects in which development is moving to depend on systemd, because it provides a lot of functionality that other systems don't, and the people writing that code don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. Lots of software has dependencies, some of which you may not like, but you shouldn't blame Person A for making a system that you don't want to use, that Person B who writes software you do want to use depends on; and really, blaming Person B isn't particularly helpful either, as they are just trying to get the job done efficiently and don't have the time to maintain many different backends for many different incompatible session management systems.
Glad to see someone finally mention that in this thread.
With all due respect for him but he is eating his own food. See this posts and you understand:
1 - https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post... 2- https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post... 3 - https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post... 4 - https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
So does everybody, s/w are rarely written by committee, Linux is as designed by Linus, iOS/Android/WP/OSX/BSD/ are all made by choices of their creators. Why is his opinionated writing, getting in way of your opinionated installing/use of s/w you install on your machine.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html
In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics (economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred.
However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as this, I'm going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on with your life. I don't favor much in the way of systematic solutions. Assorted "codes of conduct" being proposed are blunt instruments and are easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of "incorrect" opinions.
Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it's communication. In many fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about facts. It's quite easy to ignore "you're wrong because X,Y,Z and a big jerk" - just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly.
Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): "Tu debil. Necesita para construir tu corpu." ("You're weak. You need to build your body.") In the recent past, the tech world's culture was a lot like that of a mexican boxing club. The correct response is "si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico." ("Yes, my SQL is weak, I'll practice.")
Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to regrow the thick skin it once had.
[1] A post about functional programming is limited in it's eventual virality.
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar...
"Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."
http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/
The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”
Would the aforementioned unpleasant behavior be more acceptable to you if it were directed via a random number generator (i.e. a random set of people are singled out to receive 100 messages/day) rather than a predictable decision process?
It is very important to not trivialize harassment directed at men because they are male and not female. That is part of the very gender stereotype that it is the cause of the statistics your referenced, and reinforcing that behavior will only make things worse.
The tech community has become weak because we have taken
a look at ourselves and realized that many among us are
brutish, brash, and generally all-around assholes. But
since these people are highly skilled, we should feel that
the fact that they are assholes should be swept under the
rug and we should "just deal with it."
I also don't believe it's wrong to want anything.
I merely believe that all the potential changes I've seen suggested (beyond perhaps "everyone magically becomes nice") are probably more harmful than the current situation.
No. It's not wrong to not want to change them either. I like Linus. He delivers. Many people talk nice, but it's all bullshit.
Before setting out to change things, I advise figuring out what the desired end-state looks like. And what means of getting there are acceptable.
Thanks for saying this. I completely agree. I'm from Europe though, maybe it's worse in the US.
Also, I love the second post you cited (Equal Weights). It's completely clear to me that there is absolutely no sexism/racism involved, and also how stupid people would think that it's racist/sexist.
This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Losing face is a fact of life. When I'm wrong, I want to know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible, tell me what can I do to be right the next time.
It must also be kind. You do not point someone is wrong to humiliate the person and you should take care not to (I try and I fail more often than I'd like to) fall into the trap of judging a person for his or her first efforts.
Having said that, I am almost sure all the exaggerated discourse on the Linux kernel mailing list is not really part of the message, but should be understood as more like a sport, a game, where the one with the most elaborately crafted insult wins. When Linus says you should be retroactively aborted he most likely wants to say you are very wrong and your idea is really bad and that, maybe, you should be more thorough the next time you submit a patch. Their time is a finite resource.
Is this the most efficient way to run the community? Probably not. We just don't know what is the most efficient way to do it and it can just be that Linus found a local maximum.
Saying "you're wrong" isn't the issue here. Saying "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is the issue. I don't think people in cultures where losing face is a big issue much care if they're told they're wrong. They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the world.
What you say in defense of the mailing list insults is the same thing that has been said about casual racism or casual misogyny in other groups normally dominated by white men. It scares away other groups and cultures, and it's not acceptable anywhere.
This. Absolutely. The issue is the personal attacks. I've considered delving more deeply into the linux world, but why would I want to willingly go into a place where my constitution is insulted by those who know little-to-nothing of my constitution, let alone my character.
To the individual who commented on the fact that "time is a limited resource" ... so are intelligent people. That you would sacrifice a person (sacrifice them from your project, or committing to your work) by insulting them shows me to avoid your organization.
> They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the world.
Nobody is wrong enough to warrant that. I see the "elaborate insult" thing can get out of hand, but, still, it should not be taken at face value. I believe the proper way to deal with this is to either engage in an escalation of extremely elaborate insults (provided you accompany that with technical argument defending your "bad" idea) signalling the insult is not the topic being discussed (but it's "adorning" the arguments) or stating, privately, that the insult crosses a line and asking the person to please not to that again. It usually works.
Disclaimer: I am a caucasian straight married male in his mid-40's. I probably belong to the demographic least susceptible to bullying and some of the situations described here are probably very alien to me. I appreciate constructive feedback, however. I do not know how the moderators would react to an insult war, however, so I advise against it, even if you think it proves your point.
LKML gets thousands of emails every day. The bulk of the discussion is actually very civil.
Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...
Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good. Well, a little more than that, but that's the basic gist.
I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. The few times I've found a bug I sent a bug report, the maintainer was super friendly (maybe because I wasn't a whiny douche-bag complaining about something that I got for free), and fixed it in an absurdly short amount of time (less than a day). Even if it wasn't fixed for a month I'd have been more than happy.
Anyhow, the open source community is much like the world at large. Many very nice, friendly people, and a few assholes. Same thing if you step outside. It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions, but rather as a sharing philosophy in the same way free markets are an economic philosophy.
He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways. You're doing nothing more than fighting a strawman.
> Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good
This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.
> I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.
Another classic false argument that comes up all the time - do you think your good experiences cancel out his bad ones, or the other bad ones discussed elsewhere in this thread?
> It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions
More weird phrasing that seems a bit of a strawman. Who said that the open source community 'replaces' one's interactions? Can a community not have bad characteristics simply because it's not the only community you're involved in? This really makes no sense.
> but rather as a sharing philosophy
Again, this is an argument from nothing more than being pedantic. It's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual. Even if you're adamant that open source as a term must only refer to the philosophy and none of the practical details, you've done nothing to affect the original argument, because it's still about the communities that exist around it in practice.
Overall, I think your post is a bit of a mess of bad arguments and classic fallacies.
But none of those ways have anything to do with open source. You need to look no further than #gamergate to see that people act like assholes on the internet.
> This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.
I know that, but equating a concept with people is like equating the corner block outside with the drug dealer that sells there. "Street corners are awful!"
> t's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual.
So instead of saying those communities suck, he says open source can be awful in some ways...
Communities can suck in any industry/hobby/interest/etc...
Both arguments have qualitative merit, but also large quantitative holes.
There are many open source communities (and there are many altogether; good and bad) that don't have any of this sort of behaviour. It would seem that the Linux kernel / systems arena would have more than its fair share.
"Some elements of the open source community are awful to contributors"
"Open source is an awful place to be if you don't have a thick skin"
"The behavior I have observed as a prolific contributor to open source is awful"
All of these statements, I believe, accurately summarize his experience. All of these statements can be summarized "Open source is awful in many ways" for purposes of titling an article.
He's not trying to say that the concept of open source is awful. You don't have to jump in and defend that cause.
In either case, I think the author made it fairly clear that he was referring to the community and not the concept.
Same here. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, though. I mean, I'm pretty much a nobody. I haven't contributed to the kernel or created a perl module or created systemd so of course I haven't had any issues.
I'm sure Poettering isn't making this stuff up. People are so pissed at him for systemd and it makes no sense. And he's right to call out Linus for saying those things. Whether you think the people deserve this kind of abuse or not it's just toxic for the community at large and there isn't any reason to say stuff like that (I'm talking death threats or the most hurtful insults you can think of). If someone drops the ball don't take their work and ask them to leave - if they don't, you should be able to ignore them.
>Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...
What he's actually talking about is a pattern of bad behavior. Of course there are going to be random assholes on the internet - that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about all of the abuse he gets from the actual community on a regular basis. Systemic abuse and vitriol.
I love open source. I owe my career to Linux and my passion about it. But that doesn't mean we can't make it better. And this internet bullying stuff is a real problem - it's very well documented. Ignoring the problem is the worst thing you can do short of contributing to it.
If we're going to have a real community then we have to make sure people feel safe and welcome.
Open source is as much a community as the park outside I run in. Other people show up there, some say hi, I meet my friends there sometimes, but the park is not a community.
Maybe he should say people who interact online can be awful.
Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole.
Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git is the more important contribution, because as it stands Linux as a potential platform for end user deployment, except as part of Android or Chrome OS, is basically dead now.
I'd even argue this post is lennart using the genuinely disgusting antics of others as a way to deflect potential criticism of his work in future. This is why, like Drepper, many view him as a long term liability to the ecosystem as a whole.
He's also been an annoyance in Steve Langasek (Upstart developer)'s Google+ feed, and his post regarding the inseparability of systemd-logind as a main argument for why Debian should adopt systemd, at the time of the heated debates, is another. Among plenty of other examples.
His hijacking of Wolfgang Draxinger's CCC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPKDeo9Oow
Announcing udev becoming systemd-only while referring to potential detractors as "systemd-haters": http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May...
That said, Lennart does not deserve the death threats and the extremer vitriol, but the jabs and sardonic humor are par for the course, given he is a divisive figure, and has made a lot of people mad for good reason.
He's not as abrasive and destructive as Drepper is, certainly, but some people actually find indirect and passive-aggressive attitudes to be even more offensive.
Developers in the Linux space the developers get nervous when vendors want to take it and graft DRM/black box components on the side and not document them or allow others to do the same. You can do this under GPL with a hardware-assisted solution, but not in pure software. If you treat your firmware as part of a black box where the keys to the kingdom are baked into the firmware, then you're probably better off with something that isn't copyleft.
All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.
Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He simply has no tolerance for people with no merit and nothing to add. Anyone would be the same.
I've met a couple of snarky FreeBSD admins, but they were also Linux and Windows admins at the same time. These two guys were full of themselves regardless of platform.
BSD (in general) tends to be more polished than Linux and suffers fewer bugs out of the box. Again, this is what I've noticed. I've yet, in almost 20 years of using FreeBSD off and on, ever had an issue with it that was a deal breaker. I cannot say this of the various Linux distros.
"The GPL license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few BSD devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal copy-left opponents for the sake of being vocal."
Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be the way he is because it's how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis, I can't claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task of remaining easy to work with either.
For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it was mostly a closed source world.
Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. I can't fathom how painful it must be for current Swift developers to develop in a young (so far) closed project where you can't see nothing and bang your head against every walls to find your way.
Last I saw, reading the compiler wasn't recommended (by someone) since the code is apparently old and not idiomatic.
A comment like "How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" is only tolerated if you're Linus Torvalds or somebody like him that has contributed a lot and that is tolerated in spite of his character. And yes, the world is full of jerks that want to copy Linus Torvalds, or Theo de Raadt, or Richard Stallman, or Steve Jobs, or David Heinemeier Hansson, or whatever else ruthless leader with strong opinions that happened in this industry, but without the track record to back up their strong thoughts. Open Source is only special because the discussions are often public for anybody to see.
I do find Linus' behavior regrettable, as he's a very public person in this industry, his opinions do have legs and he is a role model for others. And I'm personally against PC talk, for example I think usage of the word "fuck" is totally legitimate because it implies passion, it implies that you care, but I think critiques should never be ad-hominem and people breaking this rule should get social punishment, including Linus.
Fortunately or unfortunately, in an open source setting, if you act like an asshat you can still contribute and discuss and continue to be an asshat. And then other people ignore you. So you convince people that they're the asshat. And people believe you because you're still there.
I'm not sure it's really a flaw. It's just the way it is. I feel as if it's simply one of the tradeoffs that you make with an open source project. People can hang around and be annoying and abusive and there isn't all that much you can do to totally get rid of them if they're determined. On the other hand, you can get brilliant programmers who come out of nowhere and have no qualifications that would never get past the interview stage in a large company.
What I've tended to see in companies, though, is that instead of venting like this and getting it over with, there is backstabbing, intrigue, and much worse insults veiled in language that provide deniability.
Personally, I'd prefer being on the receiving end of Linus' approach to most of the "nicer" hostility I've seen in corporate settings.
And in open-source I actively avoid projects that are run by jerks, because my thinking is that an open-source project has less chance of surviving and flourishing when being led by jerks, plus the community's support will probably be frustrating. So that's part of the cost analysis I'm usually doing, with the exception being big projects that are very well established.
The notable difference is that due to the nature of the enterprise, Linus pours shit in public. In a company, it might perhaps happen in a smaller gathering, like a board meeting.
I think it's actually better in open source because the way to earn clout is through solid contributions. That is not really true at most companies -- you have clout through your title/position on the ladder, which may or may not be earned.
http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct
As an Ubuntu member, I'm expected to behave. In our derivative communities, we try to ensure that people adhere to these principles too. Ask Ubuntu (part of Stack Exchange, not Canonical), for example, also requires people to adhere to the Ubuntu CoC. Ubuntu Forums and IRC have similar behaviour guidelines.
Does that mean it's always civil? Of course not... But it does mean that nobody's surprised when people are tossed out for being needlessly rude and the non-technical flame wars of the late 90s just don't happen.
s/Open Source community/human race/
I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.
It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is his personality.
What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a "well on technical merits Linus was right but I'll attack his abrasiveness instead". I suspect this is related to the 'debug' flag and Linus chewing out one of the systemd developers. I think Linus was justified in chewing him out. Maybe shouldn't have used expletives, but still justified. And I understand it was a pattern of behavior of leaving bugs in their wake and so on.
> If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour.
Hard to say. Maybe so. Maybe if he wouldn't be as critical and as abrasive we would have had a different OS or different community. Maybe better. Maybe worse. hard to say.
This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - neither does having strong opinions and good reasons for them.
The argument you have made comes in another form, and I hope when I phrase it this way you'll see why I disagree strongly: "Do you know who I am?!"
One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions.
I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any different seems kinda weird.
You can't just say this. I mean, where do you put the limit? Imagine if we let all kinds of aggressive and violent behavior slip on the account of "eccentric personality". I enjoy reading Linus's rants as much as the next guy, but it makes you wonder how the other person feels. And "grow a thick skin" isn't good advice, because if something doesn't bother you doesn't mean it can't bother someone else. For example, I've long ago grown out of taking stuff on the Internet personally. But I remember how it was, and I would often be very close to just giving up on doing whatever I was being hated for. (In fact, I can bet that happened at least once.)
There is some norm of decency you have to follow when talking to someone you don't know. It's how you show that you can accept others' opinion and argumentation, and sometimes accept you weren't right. I have a hard time imagining Linus Torvalds admitting that he was wrong about something he ranted about. (If you know of any examples, I'd love to see them.) And that's not a good thing. Either he's never made a mistake, or he doesn't want to admit it. I'm willing to bet Linus has god complex issues, and instead of recognizing it as something that needs to be toned down, he just embraced it and amplified it. Some people will still say that it's cool, sure, but I, for one, would like to see him be a tad more humble. Even when you've achieved as much as he did, you can very much be wrong about stuff. That's, in fact, by definition of the human being :)
Does Linus ever swear in Finnish? Because from what I've been told people in some Nordic countries will happily say fuck and fucking all day, but would be reluctant to use local language versions.
This appears to be a false dilemma. I don't think the success of the kernel and Linux depends on Linus' foul mouth. And I think the point was that he, as a role model may influence and inspire others to adopt the same behavior.
I think of this as the nice vs angry coach sorta thing. There are sports coaches who are nice people and ones who are assholes and both groups include legendary successful coaches. Clearly, this is not a make-or-break issue, but also it's clear that being an asshole doesn't help, even though assholes often claim it does. Like successful asshole coaches, Linus clearly wants the best for the community, he just has this asshole way of thinking about how to achieve it, and he's wrong enough that he's clearly out of balance. And if something could convince him to just temper things or apologize a little, it would be a helpful step. He still deserves honor and respect overall regardless, but it would be better if we didn't have to qualify that.
But not all is gloomy. As a positive example, the Clojure community has always impressed me with its maturity. People are incredibly nice and helpful, discussions are constructive. Bad tone is immediately struck down. And it is true that a lot depends on the leader — Rich Hickey sets the example here and people follow.
However this does not address the inter-project nastiness that the OP refers to.
But switching to Mac OS doesn't fix this, if we wanted to talk about that then there is a whole set of separate issues there.
I'd like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I'm not that idealistic.
I don't think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects (particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren't up for criticism or discussion, but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty territory.
But here's my question:
With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally drop the "it's all volunteers so this shit is acceptable" mantra.
It's not all volunteers. It's people volunteering their time and collectively sharing the source/combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved.
So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?
Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. Time for the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human beings.
>> Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo.
I wonder if this isn't part of the problem. Many of the massive open-source blow-ups have been between people who are being paid to do it. It's not like a guy from Red Hat, for example, can just pick a different project to contribute to. His jobs depends on working in these abusive environments. The only way to stop contributing would be to get a different job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w
Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And "everybody" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated than that.
The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale of Mojang.
The hate grew to massive portions mainly because of his response to that initial hate. You can't insult everyone and expect them to thank you for it.
I watched it a few months ago, and may re-watch it tonight when I have more time to make a clear argument about specific ideas presented there. But probably won't for the same reason I never bothered posting a criticism of that video online when it was new. The twitter crowd that likes Fish and games press cliques that are friendly with him wouldn't respond well to the agitation.
Sometimes you just need to take it on the chin and carry on.
Maybe it's because I'm from the UK and you just expect the the world to shit on you whenever possible, I'm not really affected by outright attacks and offensiveness, but I probably wouldn't let anyone get to me, like Lennart shows.
I'm also reasonably sure that Lennart Poettering's experience does not generalize. He is rather unique within the Linux community.
Sentiment analysis probably has some utility if bad commits are clustered around a particular contributor. Would it be more product to represent sentiment as a graph? What would it look like?
Maybe one reaps what one sows.
Linus's approach is a cultural thing.
In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where technical merit is king, however, things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially very large groups.
I think Lennart's experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional.
I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction and awkwardness is always intense and tiring/difficult to deal with. I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.
This doesn't only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type social environment as well, but in a different way.
I love what I do, but there's a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :)
EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.
Apparently, it also manifests itself in taking things too seriously, not being able to understand the nuanced meaning behind insulting words, and reducing a person's personality to a few mean things he's said.
Nice sexist remark, btw.
That's really insulting to people that actually have autism. Don't do that.
(And you mean autism scale, asperger's was eliminated as a separate diagnosis.)
[1]: https://ischool.uw.edu/academics/informatics/curriculum
Unfortunately I was brought up with a terminal as my foster parent, takeaway pizza as my mother's milk and snarky technical email lists as my social milieu. So I haven't quite had that experience. :-/
I suppose the pressure of these projects is small compared to something important like a driver or operating system... but perhaps that says more about people than open source.
In fact, just a few weeks ago I had a wonderful experience contributing a patch to cairo. You meet a new person and you are working together with the goal of the best quality code. I was not doing much open source development for some time and it was amazing how great it felt again.
I appreciate the work that is being done in open source community, the language part I don't really care much as long as it's to make a point. If you don't like that community, why don't you just fork the kernel and call it whatever you like. Nobody prevents you from doing that then you become the jail keeper and show what you can do to the world.
I won't argue that Linus' attitude has no influence in general, but the categorical differences between this and Linus' hyperbole make it a red herring for the conversation.
My jaw dropped. Feelings about systemd aside (I actually quite like it), this is uncalled for, and outrageously bad.
Grow up! Hiring a hitman? Are you for real?
Anytime someone makes a large project that gets traction, people are going to disagree; that does not make it acceptable to launch personal attacks, and call for violence against the developer.
As a community, we need to call out the people doing this and show it's not acceptable; irregardless of any politics that may be involved.
This is a very, very limited way of approaching the complex dynamics of people working together. It shows up in many ways. Most open source communities are not good places for people who can contribute design, documentation and god forbid, people management skills.
A pervasive illusion amongst software engineers is that we can do without "soft" skills, and nowhere does this manifests itself more in places where no boss or company forcefully adds those soft skills into the mix.
Some open source communities are lucky enough to have people that have both the technical chops to get respect based on technically focused meritocratic values and have other "management" skills. Most don't. So once conflict arises (as it inevitably will, because they are human beings) and simple meritocracy no longer suffices (because both sides are smart and contribute), the community either breaks up or devolves into a permanent Lord of the Flies atmosphere.
It has nothing to do with Open Source in general. It's the lack of value placed on soft skills in tech driven meritocracies.
(You can see the same thing in tech start-ups founded by technies, but there it usually gets quickly corrected after the first PR disaster.)
It seems that some Linux users are unhappy with systemd.
While I do not agree with any user being disrespectful to the author by targeting him personally, the fact that users are seriously upset about systemd as a program gives me hope for the future of the popular Linux distributions.
When the author says "Open Source is awful" maybe he is revealing his true colors. Perhaps he is better suited to closed source development which is insulated from public review by users and other developers at-large. But that is for him to decide.
There was a post on HN a little while back by the developer of a popular glibc alernative for Linux who told us he has been using a flat, linear /etc/rc file for over a decade and his boot times are substantially shorter than with systemd. But more importantly, his approach is simple by comparison. How many users will be able to debug systemd by examining the internals?
It is this type of "hands-on" user that gives me hope for the future of the distributions that are experimenting with systemd. I hope these users will speak up if they have not done so already.
I mean, I wouldn't join /r/kkk and expect everyone to "chill out on the use of the N word guys". Maybe, just maybe, I'm not as important to that community as I believe myself to be?
Urgh, I can't believe I'm typing this, but the phrase "be the change you want to see" applies for community membership. Be the beacon of conduct you want the community to share. Inspire the community to aim for those ideals through example.
Or write a snarky blog post about it because you're finding it difficult to get mind share on an obviously flawed project.
Communities require membership contribution to change. You want to change the culture, you have to get involved. IF the communities culture is too poisonous for you, then maybe that's not the community for you.
But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If
Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite,
not because of this behaviour.
So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a complete asshole to his contributors.
He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I've seen him on video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart - but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and effective form of management.
To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.
Git is good, but it's not new.
[0] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5...
On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angry comments about not updating my OS and a ban from the bug tracking system. Some time later, they added Windows XP SP2 as a requirement. I still use GIMP, but whenever I find a bug, I just wait patiently until the next version to see if they have fixed it.
[1] HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180
Edit: found the bug report, it was SP2, not SP1 as I first thought. Also fixed some typos.
As with any group of people, the assholes are the loudest, and if you're writing software for a huge group of people a bunch of them are going to be really loud assholes.
It would become unreasonable if he opened his emails with "YOU are full of bullshit. "
Or the difference between him telling someone not to use his software and people setting up crowd funding to hire a hitman?
It's the same reason college athletes get away with breaking so many rules.
And both situations are very hard to solve due to the competing and conflicting interests involved.
On a personal level, we should all try our best to stop people (ourselves included) from being programmer bullies. And I've seen many people work very hard to do so!
But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.
Eventually we will install a system that will protect ourselves from one another. I hope it's a good one.
On a more specific note, PulseAudio sucks and I could care less what Lennart thinks.
It's apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile page. The "View Desktop" link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well done, Google.
Remember, this is the same group of people that gets passionately whipped up about text editors. Can you imagine them not having strong opinions about forum interfaces? Defaulting to good old email and letting everyone use their interface of choice is probably the only practical way to get everyone to participate.
The title is a bad on because it lacks this distinction.
If you want to see how the Open Source fish rots from the head down, you have to look no further than Eric Raymond's own blog: "In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129
Or in his own words: "And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome." http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet...
"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
"Ego is for little people" "[bla bla bla...] I’ve blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I don’t even have a BS, yet there’s been an entire academic cottage industry devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. [...bla bla bla]" (...and on and on ad nausium -- he really needs to work on his BS!) http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404
The hacker culture can do just fine without ESR's "reinventions", thank you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953
"I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine."
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha
Was about to argue the merit of this post, then noticed the author. Almost got me, Poettering ;-) Just another social/political manipulation to get his way at the expense of others. I would feel bad for the guy if he wasn't such a whiny prick the rest of the time."
I especially like how you admit that if this letter was anonymous, you would actually consider the argument, but since it's a particular person you dislike, you're OK with people advocating violence and attempting to hire hitmen.
Stay classy.
The Linux community is dominated by western, white,
straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days.
Imagine if the linux community consisted mostly of Korean or Japanese males, both countries with strong Neo-confucian values of social hierarchy and mutual respect, avoiding harsh words. But maybe such culture are not apt at producing new ideas but retaining old ones.
Sometimes someone has to step up to do the dirty work and write software that can only give mediocre results. I think he's getting flack as the scapegoat for the general consumerization of Linux (ala ubuntu, gnome, etc).
Really, if people don't like these systems, or if they weren't worth the trouble, why not do something about it? They sound like itches that could be scratched. That was the spirit of a previous, less popular open source movement. Now it's full of useless bitching assholes who will spend 10x the time complaining over time actually fixing.
Note: I'm not saying that you personally are in that category. But this guy should be able to respond with "fix it, fork it, or fuck off."
One could always pay $1000/hour and get his software from someone with correct attitude, sex, race and age. If you pay $0 do not complain!
Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.
And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.
Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).
If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?
Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.
The community invites you to produce something superior. PulseAudio and systemd may have their own problems, but they're in place for a reason. I don't think they were selected due to some irrational hero worship for Poettering; they were selected because they were the most concise way to solve a real problem.
As much as one may dislike Pulse, it provides a unified, modern audio system that just works. I don't know if you remember the bad old days when it was a fight to get applications to play audio correctly, but that has gone away with the introduction of Pulse. For all of its potential problems and inefficiencies, it provides the basics in a reasonably accessible and universal manner.
>And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD.
It is optional. Open-source means you can run your own distro completely free of Poeterring's touch. You may have to deal with the legacy left by his projects, but that's nothing special; he had to deal with the legacy of ALSA et al and wrote compatibility layers that were major factors in the successful proliferation of PulseAudio.
>The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought.
I'm sure the nerds that are entrusted with the security and sanity of millions of systems across the world would disagree about whether "proper thought" was involved.
I don't really see a point in addressing the rest of your reply. Disagreement is fine, but please be civil. Poeterring and others in the community are obviously capable and they deserve acknowledgement and respect, which is a different thing than deference or worship. If you disagree, please disagree, but do so with civility. This shouldn't have to be complicated.
Why don't you roll your own distro and keep init in that?
I'm honestly not trying to troll. Isn't the point of open source that each individual can do what they want with the code? Why is it someone else's responsibility to maintain code options that you want, but they don't?
Are you claiming that personal attacks are justified if you don't like a person's software?
> Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux
Sys V init only works "fine" for you if your needs are simplistic. If you have not dealt with dozens of badly written init scripts that turns restarting a typical server process into a matter of trying "restart" followed by a "killall", possibly rm'ing pid files, and a "start", then you have not dealt with Sys V init much.
If you have not dealt with essential system processes dying and not getting restarted, and having to implement monitoring and restart logic to deal with problems that would not have occurred in the first place without a process monitor, you have not been exposed to a lot of Sys V init problems.
If you have not dealt with process managers outside of pid 1 being killed.
If you have not dealt with problems retaining log output from early boot.
And so on.
Systemd solves a lot of real problems that maintainers of bigger systems are likely to have run into. I will agree that it solves a lot of real problems in contentious ways, including things I don't agree with (I, for example, can not agree with the arguments for binary logs - I love the filtering functionality that journald brings, but they would all be possible while retaining a text based format for the main log files)
> If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man.
I agree with you about this, to a point. If you get some criticism, it's fair to assume that it may be their problem. If you become one of the most hated OSS developers in history, on the other hand, it should cause a lot of introspection.
To me it seems that there are a few separate problems:
- Poettering appears to have a very abrasive working style that wins him a lot of opponents. He may very well be a nice guy in person, but a lot of the time that appears not to come through online.
- There are some real assholes that go way to far in the way they criticise him, and he seems to use the illegitimate criticism as a way of ignoring the real issues and concerns people have with him. This is not that strange - if the outpourings of hatred towards you is not something you can easily reconcile with your own views about what you are like as a person, then it becomes easier to dismiss them all than to filter and accept some of them and dismiss others.
- Some of the technical decisions he makes are questionable and controversial, which is not uncommon, but rather than get resolved, due to the caustic environment created around him, very often it becomes impossible to deal with the actual technical issues and fronts harden.
He does, it is called fedora. The problem is that red hat has so much influence that people will follow their lead. In this case, they pretty much have to as some software simply won't work if they don't follow.