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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

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Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#151

Post by eridius »

jacquesm wrote: post #150
eridius wrote: post #130

> If you don't do something because of a personal dislike, and expect others to cater to your culture and personal preferences, then the problem is you. Are you serious? If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off, and you don't like that, the problem is with you ? How can you possibly defend that statement?

> If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off Consider that he might be right and not a complete asshole. Also, consider that you are not the person he insults but someone else. You're making up this strawman very craftily but it is still a strawman: people are coarse in their conversation all the time, it's not a big deal until the recipient declares it to be a big deal. And then they - not you, unless…

Speaking as someone who has been insulted personally and publicly by Linus, on a topic that Linus was completely wrong about, he's a real asshole. And it's extremely well documented that he's an asshole. I don't need to "consider that he might […] not be a complete asshole", because that's already a given.

> You're making up this strawman very craftily

I'm not making a straw man at all, and I resent your attempt to frame my argument in this way. Since this is how you choose to argue, I'm not going to engage with you any more.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#152

Post by Mz »

eridius wrote: post #123
jacquesm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a pretty shitty attitude to take. Why? The Linux kernel is mission critical, that means that tons of business and individual depend on it for all kinds of stuff that if it went down would be a major event with the losses likely hard to put a figure on. Developing for such an environment tends to be a fairly harsh affair, Linus was not bred for this, he more or less accidentally found himself the leader of a…

Correlation is not causation. Just because Linus managed to become BDFL of a hugely successful project doesn't mean Linus's communication style in any way caused this. And it doesn't mean that he should get a free pass on treating people badly. A lot of people subscribe to the idea that if you don't have a thick skin you shouldn't be in tech. That's a terrible attitude to take, there's absolutely no reason why that s…

and it discriminates against a lot of people (including women).

My assumption is you aren't a woman, but I thought I would stop in and ask if you are. If you aren't, what is the basis for your idea that his communication style would discriminate against women?

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#154

Post by jacquesm »

eridius wrote: post #151
jacquesm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off Consider that he might be right and not a complete asshole. Also, consider that you are not the person he insults but someone else. You're making up this strawman very craftily but it is still a strawman: people are coarse in their conversation all the time, it's not a big deal until the recipient declares it to be a big deal. And then they - not you, unless…

Speaking as someone who has been insulted personally and publicly by Linus, on a topic that Linus was completely wrong about, he's a real asshole. And it's extremely well documented that he's an asshole. I don't need to "consider that he might […] not be a complete asshole", because that's already a given. > You're making up this strawman very craftily I'm not making a straw man at all, and I resent your attempt to f…

Well, you could have put that gem out front instead of pulling a rabbit out of your hat. Otherwise to me you're just another anonymous person arguing on a forum rather than someone with a specific and relevant gripe.

If there is a specific case where you disagreed with Linus and he insulted you then I understand why you want to take this up in this way but I notice that Linus is not a participant in the discussion here so you're going to get the general case, not the specific one.

You've made up your mind about a person based on an online interaction that clearly left you seething and I'm perfectly ok with that. For all I know it was the defining point of your career and you've chosen to go into crusade mode, there is a good reason why I don't contribute to open source, I don't feel like getting heat from both maintainers and users. At the same time if I would go and do that I'd wear my flameproof jacket to work just in case. In short: lighten up, likely everybody but you has forgotten this interaction and it is a huge deal to you and hardly anybody else noticed. You should have seen some of the stuff that came my way on a public website, heck, even on HN I've been threatened with bodily harm.

Question: Did you contact him about this off-line, and did you try to work it out somehow? If not I'd suggest you do that, maybe you can get this behind you.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#155

Post by sethj »

jacquesm wrote: post #11

I'm fine with that. Github is 'too large to fail' already, adding the Linux kernel to the pile and forcing the kernel team into Github's workflow are two big negatives. It would be great for Github but bad for everybody else.

Launchpad has quite a bit of git support now.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#156

Post by dlp211 »

gnaritas wrote: post #144
thethirdone wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current workflow works fine, and I hardly think any potential kernel hackers are choosing not to work on the kernel because it is email-driven. I'm not so sure. If the kernel development was on Github, I may have looked into contributing, but as it stands, its not worth the trouble to try to contribute (as I don't have anything specific to help with). And, I suspect there are more capable developers who are clo…

Kernel development shouldn't have a low bar, it should have a very very high one. Anyone that finds email a high bar for communication doesn't belong in Kernel development.

This is gate keeping at its finest. Email is a clunky tool to do development with compared with what is available. A persons willingness to use email (and all the quirks for submitting a patch) for patching the kernel has nothing to do with the quality of code that they write.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#157

Post by ericfrederich »

Someone desperately needs to come up with an open source replacement for GitHub that is completely decentralized. Sure GitLab exists and the repo is decentralized since it's Git, but issues, merge requests, comments, etc aren't Git based (though they could be)

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#158

Post by X86BSD »

ericfrederich wrote: post #157

Someone desperately needs to come up with an open source replacement for GitHub that is completely decentralized. Sure GitLab exists and the repo is decentralized since it's Git, but issues, merge requests, comments, etc aren't Git based (though they could be)

I wish more people used Fossil. I find it much better than Git and if it had more developers you may get a much better replacement.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#159

Post by dajt »

mi100hael wrote: post #131
dublinben wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be a complete non-starter for one of the largest, and most important free software projects to be hosted on a centralized, proprietary service like Github. I can't even consider it as a serious suggestion.

I always think this sums it up well: > Current state makes it very hard to mange/search/fork/open-issues etc > especially for newcomers, > please move the project to github so we can have nice disussions > forks/prs etc goodness. No. Never. Github is proprietary communications tool which requires users to accept a terms of service and login. That gives power and influence to a single entity (and a for-profit organiza…

Linus seems to have a different take on OSS than most OSS warriors. I don't think he sees proprietary software as 'evil' or OSS as morally superior. I get the impression he just thinks OSS will be better in quality. Depending on the contributors, which is why he doesn't want or need endless numbers of average devs contributing to his baby.

I think his point about Tridgell's actions with BK reverse engineering were right, and El Reg was playing the OSS warrior card. It looks to me like Tridgell was trying to create a way to steal BK metadata - BK specifically required you to have a license to get that data.

OSS warriors annoy me as much as SJWs do, and seem just as narrow minded.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#160

Post by snakeanus »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #100
snakeanus wrote: post #55

I can't really see the obsession that everyone has with centralised and closed services like github. We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. Mailing lists and NNTP make decentralisation quite easy while being open standards and without having the need to have any account in any centralised service, why drop all these features away?

> We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. It seems this topic comes up quite frequently on HN. Unfortunately, while it sounds great in theory, no one ever has a practical way of doing this. The main problem here is the user experience. When using GitHub I can find an open source project, copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request. A little bit…

Sure, the UX might get slightly worse (early on at least) for some users but we are talking about programming related services. I do not think that having to use a well defined and popular standard protocol with the client of their choice in order to create a pull request or an issue would make contributing to a project difficult for a computer scientist.

Instead, I would argue that not having the ability to just send a mail/post to a mailing list/newsgroup by using my favourite SMTP/NNTP client without creating any form of account in a property service and without clicking buttons in a slow js-ridden web interface in order to create an issue or post a pull request is a bad UX.

> copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request

All of these (except clicking a button for a pull request) are possible just with git, they are not really github nor centralised-only features.

> Until that happens the idea of decentralizing things is just going to remain a pipedream.

I find sending an email and using NNTP with the client of my choice a lot easier than using a forum and a lot easier than using the github issue/pull request interface. Thus I would argue that this happened many years ago.

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