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“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

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Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#501

Post by skishore »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #480
dcosson wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're saying is true in the case of someone just throwing up some code they wrote online without any plan of supporting or developing it further. But once you call it an open-source project, and you have docs and a roadmap and an issues page and stuff, you're making an implicit contract with people who use it that it will do a reasonable job of solving the problem it claims to solve. The user is choosin…

I think theres absolutely zero implicit contract that implies that open source software maintainers owe ANYone ANYthing at ANYtime. That's the reason it's open source because everyone can fix it, all an open source maintainer owes you is a P.R. review. Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them. If Ben and Jerrys left a bun…

> If Ben and Jerrys left a bunch of ice cream on the sidewalk and a bunch of people ate it and got sick then there would be zero liability on Ben and Jerrys.

Citation? That doesn't seem right, based on my anecdotal knowledge that restaurants take care to throw leftovers into a garbage bin rather than leave them out somewhere where someone could eat them and expose the business to liability.

I looked up this claim myself. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act into law to limit liability for those who donate food. [1] The majority of restaurants still discard leftover food due to concerns over liability, though. [2] Clearly, liability was a real issue at some point in the past. I don't know enough about the current law to know how easy it is to take advantage of the new protections; I can understand why people are still concerned.

In summary, liability issues vary by country and are not clear-cut. As an analogy for this open-source situation, they don't clarify matters.

[1] https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurants-that-dont-d...

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#502

Post by mgkimsal »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #480
dcosson wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're saying is true in the case of someone just throwing up some code they wrote online without any plan of supporting or developing it further. But once you call it an open-source project, and you have docs and a roadmap and an issues page and stuff, you're making an implicit contract with people who use it that it will do a reasonable job of solving the problem it claims to solve. The user is choosin…

I think theres absolutely zero implicit contract that implies that open source software maintainers owe ANYone ANYthing at ANYtime. That's the reason it's open source because everyone can fix it, all an open source maintainer owes you is a P.R. review. Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them. If Ben and Jerrys left a bun…

> because everyone can fix it

Nope, not everyone can. And not everyone using it can fix it. And certainly not everyone can fix something to the standards that maintainers might demand.

> Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them.

If I'm bothering to try to help them with their project, they owe as much 'politeness' and 'gratitude' back to me as is expected of them. It's a (minimum) 2 way street.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#503

Post by tomhoward »

antpls wrote: post #402
daxorid wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everytime we post an opinion against the consensus Downvoting was, long ago, supposed to be used to indicate trolling, incivility, not substantive, etc. Sometime recently, dang and sctb have ruled that downvoting for disagreement is now perfectly acceptable. In any event, I agree it's become a terrible method of hivemind enforcement. Have an upvote.

That is what I thought too. I read HN since so many years. Perfect example of a rating system turning into a bad censorship.

pg asserted that downvoting is fine to be used for disagreement in Feb 2008, when HN was less than a year old:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#504

Post by lisper »

fit2rule wrote: post #293
theandrewbailey wrote: post #85

Python was my first programming language, ~15 years ago. The bracket- and semicolon-free syntax is beautiful and approachable to this day. Python is my go-to for writing data format conversion scripts. I wrote a random sentence generator in Python 10 years ago that gave me and my friends hours of entertainment. Thanks, Guido, for the good times!

I can never get into Python and end up with as much passion as you. For me, its a very powerful and useful language - no doubt about it. But the aesthetics of a whitespace language just don't jive with my 30+ years of experience writing code. No matter how many times I try over the past few decades, I just can't get passionate about writing Python code. I know its power, and I totally grok its value to our industry -…

Python has open-braces in the form of colons. If you use emacs, you can use the PASS statement as a close-brace and everything will auto-indent properly. Python purists have conniptions when they see this programming style, but I've used it for nearly 20 years and it works for me.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#505

Post by ci5er »

kk__ wrote: post #445
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #427

I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot. The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught t…

You are paying for python. You pay for any software product you use by not using an alternative. OSS maintainers deserve respect but at a certain point they have turned their hobby in to their career, complete with clients and marketing. If you are willing to trust an open source project for your livelihood than the maintainer also has an obligation to respect that.

In a previous life I threw some tarballs w/ a buildable OpenGL clone and separately a buildable Renderman "clone" onto an FTP server and published the location.

Some people downloaded it, built it and used it. Even added to it, where they liked.

Most people were like you.

I never share code any more.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#506

Post by dharma1 »

pasabagi wrote: post #482
buserror wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nail it, I think. Being nice to contributors leads to bullying. Contributors assume, then feel entitled, and it gets harder and harder to say 'no' -- and it's probably very taxing. Linus shoots first, that keeps the bullying down -- of course everyone else thinks he is the bully, however he's just protecting himself. I've spent many years victim of bullying, and I know that the only way to beat a bully is to out-…

I think Linus's main point is that if he seems happy about something he's actually uncomfortable with, developers can sink a lot of work into something he ultimately doesn't like and doesn't want in the kernel. So the aggressive approach is to stave off that outcome, which is fair. I suspect he also enjoys it - which is also fair enough. A lot of people actively enjoy and seek conflict.

I think with Linus' "my way or the highway", at least some of it comes from early upbringing. His dad ran for president (unsuccessfully) in Finland recently - intelligent, likeable but very opionated guy.

Think apple did not fall too far from the tree :)

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#507

Post by cwyers »

nas wrote: post #147
chimeracoder wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. Heck, Python 2 is still officially supported until 2020. Python 3 adoption is increasing, but the instability and breakage that it introduced caused a lot of knock-on effects throughout the Python community that held it back and hindered its adoption and mindshare. It'll take a…

> The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. It's not. Python 3 has overtaken 2 and there is no stopping migration to it now. Python 3.7 is a lot better than 2.7. Just on memory use alone, 3.7 is massively better. Sure, there will be some hold outs on 2.7 for a long time. That's fine. Also, this is not the say that migration from 2 to 3 was handled well. It wasn't. Python 3.0 should have had backwa…

That's not the point of the person you're responding to. They didn't say that the transition didn't happen. They said it's not yet known if it was worth it. All you're saying is that it happened.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#508

Post by TooBrokeToBeg »

kelnos wrote: post #214
TooBrokeToBeg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still puzzled to why would a compiler allow assignment in an explicit conditional (outside of loop syntax). It's like a baked-in blindspot that most people just want to ignore for some reason. Some languages actually guard against this well enough (eg Kotlin) and say "don't". Even with guards in place, it's not all that complicated to work around in the edge cases where you might want to do it.

Because assignment is an expression. It has nothing specifically to do with the position being a conditional. Conditionals need an expression, and assignment fits the bill, so it works.

> Because assignment is an expression. It has nothing specifically to do with the position being a conditional.

No, but it has a lot to do with the way humans write code. This is the source of the bug, not the logic. eg Why bother having whitespace that the compiler can't use (typically)? Human readability.

The concession to not take into account human failing, is pathological.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#509

Post by dragandj »

dcosson wrote: post #475
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #427

I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot. The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught t…

I think what you're saying is true in the case of someone just throwing up some code they wrote online without any plan of supporting or developing it further. But once you call it an open-source project, and you have docs and a roadmap and an issues page and stuff, you're making an implicit contract with people who use it that it will do a reasonable job of solving the problem it claims to solve. The user is choosin…

That depends on the license. Most open source licenses state explicitly that you use the software at your own risk, and that the author promises you nothing and owes you nothing.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#510

Post by TooBrokeToBeg »

KSteffensen wrote: post #374
Dayshine wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linter? You mean compiler right? The compiler should be warning for things like this, not relying on 3rd party tools. So, yes, if you're using a custom compiler, you kinda are to blame for shooting yourself in the foot. Just use the official binaries!

It's not that easy for the compiler to provide these warnings when the language is interpreted rather than compiled

The compiler can do anything a linter can do. Multi-pass multithreaded compilers are not unheard of. eg While compiling to temporary storage, I do a linting in another thread. At the end, check for successes and move the artifacts into the output directory.
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