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Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

roy.marples.name

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Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#191

Post by [deleted] »

winfred wrote: post #111
duncan-donuts wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should any single person carry the weight of the person in desperate need? UBI + healthcare implies that there’s a social safety net that creates an entire network of people to carry this weight. I don’t have a clue if any implementations would successfully do this but to just throw people in desperate need to the wolves is inhumane.

I don't think people would prosper under such a system. Free health care, yes, free education, yes. Retirement for all, take care of the disabled, yes. But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. Just the way natural selection programmed us. "All basic needs are me…

[deleted]

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#192

Post by kortilla »

js2 wrote: post #141
sneak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think perhaps you mean "moral" rather than "ethical". It is entirely ethical to use free software, even to generate massive profits, without paying anyone anything. That's literally the whole point of software freedom: you're free.

Ethical and moral are synonyms. I don't understand the difference you're trying to draw. Definition of ethical 1 : of or relating to ethics // ethical theories 2 : involving or expressing moral approval or disapproval // ethical judgments 3 : conforming to accepted standards of conduct // ethical behavior Definition of moral (Entry 1 of 2) 1a : of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior : ETHICAL //…

https://www.dictionary.com/e/moral-vs-ethical/

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#193

Post by luckylion »

eulenteufel wrote: post #186
luckylion wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that, if you make it a job, you're no longer free to decide how you want to raise your children, what values to teach them etc, you're now just a caretaker that produces a labor source for their employer. I'm not sure that's such an attractive thought.

There are a lot of self employed that have freedom on how to do their work. We could see it as self-employed contribution to the future of society. Also raising new citizens with a diverse set of values & beliefs is exactly what I would want to see. It would be horrible if their was some kind of institution that would dictate the same kind of upbringing for every child. However, in the end parenting is really not a j…

Self employed people aren't disconnected from society though, they don't "work for themselves", they still need to offer something that others consider to have value. I don't think we want parenting to be judged in that regard, it does very much change the relationship between the individual and the state (and not in a good way imho).

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#194

Post by thecleaner »

Developers should just stop working for free. This guy is battling cancer while making an effort to do another release. Surely if society needs such kind of software it can pay for it. A functional society shouldn't need heroes to make progress.

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#195

Post by pjc50 »

kortilla wrote: post #171
pjc50 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call this "Postel decentralisation": everyone thinks there's some kind of system or institution making everything work, but in fact there's just a guy doing it all on his own.

In reality it works nothing like this though. People like to think that all of these companies and downstream projects depend on this maintainer, but realistically they would have no problem switching to a fork or doing it internally. Using his work as-is from upstream is just the path of least resistance. If nobody picks up dhcpd maintenance companies will have no problem carrying forks and more than likely the open…

Well, they do depend, in the sense of it's listed in their dependencies.

Yes, they could change. But that would be something that had to be chosen, it's not automatic. I'm reminded of openssl: while it wasn't even unmaintained, it was "undermaintained" to the extent of critical security holes, and both the effort to fork it and simplify and the effort to replace with modern from-scratch versions have been a bit fraught.

(Perhaps the real rule as to who the "maintainer" of something like this is "who has to panic when a security hole is reported")

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#196

Post by pjc50 »

caslon wrote: post #86
pjc50 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call this "Postel decentralisation": everyone thinks there's some kind of system or institution making everything work, but in fact there's just a guy doing it all on his own.

Interestingly, you seem to be the only person on the World Wide Web to ever have used that phrase (three times over three years?), but it's such a perfect description of such a common phenomenon that I'm pretty sure its propagation could save hours of time in typing for nerds on the Web.

Ironic, that. I'm happy to be the one person trying to coin this phrase.

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#197

Post by phh »

kortilla wrote: post #171
pjc50 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call this "Postel decentralisation": everyone thinks there's some kind of system or institution making everything work, but in fact there's just a guy doing it all on his own.

In reality it works nothing like this though. People like to think that all of these companies and downstream projects depend on this maintainer, but realistically they would have no problem switching to a fork or doing it internally. Using his work as-is from upstream is just the path of least resistance. If nobody picks up dhcpd maintenance companies will have no problem carrying forks and more than likely the open…

That's both true and wrong at the same time.

Sure all the big companies that relied on dhcpcd will rewrite it. But still the loss of one opensource project has a major impact on the economy. You mention the part of time saved by the company. Sure, but that goes longer than that.

For instance, in Android, since Android 6, they stopped using dhcpcd and decided to use their own DHCP client. 5 releases later, Android's DHCP client still don't support storing leases (or any feature that has less than 20% usage really). Sure that's just one packet, but the most user-deployed OS in the world has an additional RTT when connecting to WiFi, because of using internal DHCP client rather than a FLOSS-driven one.

Let's do back of the napkin computation: This adds like 0.5s when connecting. I'd say that personnally I'm connecting manually to WiFi (and thus wait for WiFi to connect) maybe once a week. K, worldwide I'd say once a month. There are 3B active Android devices. I'd say mean salary in those 3B is 1USD/h. If my computation is correct ( ((3*1000*1000*1000)*0.5*12)/3600 ), that makes a society cost of Android NOT using dhcpcd of 5M$ per year.

Now, let's go to the mirror successful part of dhcpcd, still at Google. Chromebooks are using dhcpcd as their DHCP client. Considering what happened on Android, I'll assume that if Chromebooks weren't using dhcpcd, they wouldn't use leases either. There are maybe 100M Chromebooks worldwide, but they are mostly centered in the US where salary is higher, but Chromebooks are mostly for students, so let's make it 5USD/h. But on a Chromebook you connect "manually" to WiFi every day (every time you open your laptop pretty much). That means that the existence of dhcpcd is a gain for society of 25M$ per year ( ( ((100*1000*1000)*0.5*365)/3600)*5 ).

So, yes, if nobody picks up dhcpcd maintenance, companies will have no problem carrying on. It doesn't mean that we, as a society wouldn't have lost a lot.

PS: I'm definitely not trying to put a price on Roy Marple's life. But if someone would try, it would be incredibly high.

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#198

Post by fastball »

_Microft wrote: post #87
fastball wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? A country having implemented a nationalized healthcare system does not mean the problem in question has been "solved", it just means that particular society has managed to agree where to draw the line. But this does not guarantee the population at large will continue agreeing indefinitely into the future.

Umm... yes? Of course this is subject to change. What else did you expect?

That is what I expect.

I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make.

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#199

Post by fastball »

michaelmrose wrote: post #168
fastball wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is "we don't live in a post-scarcity society, not even close". This is objectively true. There is nothing hypothetical about it.

We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items. Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost s…

> We are objectively wealthy enough that everyone could have a place to live, enough food to eat, free medical care even to the point of expensive cancer treatment, free education if so much of our resources weren't directed towards enriching so few without sacrificing essential items.

I'd love to see your math on this.

Re: Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer

#200

Post by Anthony-G »

LukeShu wrote: post #115
sterlind wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably Jon Postel, who co-authored many RFCs foundational to the internet such as TCP, IP and DNS. As a single person he was very involved in the internet's architecture.

Today, the "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" refers to an organization. But for many years it didn't refer to an organization, it was Jon Postel's title.

Upvoted – but don’t forget Joyce K. Reynolds. There’s a lovely anecdote of how the IANA operated in the early 90s in “The story of getting SSH port 22”: https://www.ssh.com/ssh/port
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