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Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

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Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#531

Post by alexvoda »

martin8412 wrote: post #323
alexvoda wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I don't even believe Stallman is as ideologically pure as people like too believe he is. I think he is much more attached to his own ideas and realisations than he is to the overarching idea of software freedom. And to support that argument I bring three anecdotes. 1. He is much more attached to his own creation, the GPL, as a tool for driving software freedom and as a "hack" on top of copyright. As suc…

Re: microcode you're so right. The Librem 5 phone is expected to be certified as respecting your freedom by FSF, but the Pinephone is not. Both use proprietary firmware, but because the Librem 5 loads the firmware from a chip that can't be updated by the host CPU, then that's apparently okay. Pinephone simply loads it from /lib/firmware

The most idiotic example of their stance with regards to microcode is related to Spectre and Meltdown. They deliberately removed warnings:

"Another significant change in this release is that it was pointed out that there were error messages in Linux suggesting users to update x86 CPU microcode. Since such microcode is non-Free Software, such messages don't belong in GNU Linux-libre. We now have patterns to detect and clean up this sort of message. A number of them were introduced recently, relying on microcode changes to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown problems, but there might be others that go farther back. I haven't yet made my mind on whether to go back, check and possibly respin such earlier releases."

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002...

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#532

Post by alexvoda »

toyg wrote: post #391
arp242 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your repair is fundamentally meaningless if you cannot communicate it (2 and 3). I have spent significant amount of time working around bugs and limitations in proprietary software that could have been fixed easily otherwise, and simply being able to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be beneficial. This is so staggeringly blindly obvious that it pains me that this is even a point of contention. Of c…

> simply being able to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be beneficial. That's basically the old Unix model, in practice it was unsatisfactory to the point that... people just wrote their own Unix and made a point that fixes should be public - and we got GNU. Companies could give you the old Unix model tomorrow, if they so wished; but it's effectively lose-lose, because they don't gain anything meanin…

You are missing GPs point.

The default today is not the Unix model, it is the Windows model and increasingly the SaaS model. You have none of the 4 freedoms by default.

GP argued that by law by default you should have at least freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that it should not be legal to withhold freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that freedom 0 and 1 should by default actually be facilitated by providing source code. They are arguing for changing the status quo and that doing so gradually is more feasible than all at once.

(Source code is not actually necessary for freedom 1 but it makes it orders of magnitude easier.)

You are arguing that the law is fine because we can just make our own sandbox (GPL software) where we have all 4 freedoms and that is enough. You are arguing that the status quo is fine because you can ignore it while you are in the sandbox.

Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.

Your approach towards a world of free software might be to just grow the sandbox until everything else doesn't matter but the GNU GPL family continues to decline in popularity. For this approach you need popularity and for popularity you need effective advocacy and the FSF is not effective.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#533

Post by cookieperson »

pie_flavor wrote: post #522
cookieperson wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they have a different vision for it. And sometimes people prefer to work under different conditions. The ends don't justify the means. People jump from one insurance company to another insurance company for changes in leadership every day. If these people don't want to work under the current leadership I'd say they aren't doing the same thing. OSS is a free thing. They can do what they want.

They aren't working under the current leadership. None of them work on Rust and none of them plan to work on Crab. There is no point acting like five minutes fiddling with sed is the start of something big in the first place, but especially when the authors explicitly state that they aren't planning on starting anything.

If you check my posts on this subject I never said anything about this being big. I even said it'd probably fail.

I didn't know the authors had no intention of not doing anything with the repo. In which case it's just someone trolling. Which is also not a big deal.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#534

Post by michaelcampbell »

nindalf wrote: post #192

This fork promises "All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy!" Compelling, until you realise that all the commits are auto-merges of rust-lang/rust's main branch. Which means the same teams doing the same work, under a different name. Rust is experiencing growing pains because they're still figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone. They want to simultaneously keep th…

> figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone

Does anyone honestly think this is even possible?

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#535

Post by bluGill »

cies wrote: post #524
bluGill wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jenkins forked Hudson years ago. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD. Many linux distributions are forks of some other. I can't think of any language, but the idea that a fork can work has a long successful history. (And a large history of failure)

I know about many successful fork. But forking a language (like including the compiler and the lang spec), never seen that work out.

C forked Algo. (and many others) ADA forked Pascal (modula? - another fork of Pascal). C++ forked C and Simula. D forked C++.

Objective C forked C and gcc. (eventually folded back)

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#537

Post by alexvoda »

arp242 wrote: post #316
alexvoda wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I don't even believe Stallman is as ideologically pure as people like too believe he is. I think he is much more attached to his own ideas and realisations than he is to the overarching idea of software freedom. And to support that argument I bring three anecdotes. 1. He is much more attached to his own creation, the GPL, as a tool for driving software freedom and as a "hack" on top of copyright. As suc…

Yes, I agree; that's what I meant with "ego-centric". [1] is a good example: "It is OK to call it GNU when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it GNU/Linux so as to give Torvalds some credit" . Seriously? Calling some Linux distro "GNU" is "OK"? How gracious that he wants to give this little upstart student from Finland "some credit" as well. As for microcode: IMHO Stallman is just wrong about it. H…

What I find tragic is that the FSF has refused to be anything other than a platform for Stallman.

Stallman will be Stallman in all his weird and egocentric ways.

This is a case of the ship choosing to go down with the captain.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#538

Post by scns »

sillymath3 wrote: post #84
scns wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Let a 1000 flowers bloom. There is an essay about it. To lazy to google it. Maybe some fellow has it bookmarked.

There is a blog post by Peter Seibel: Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots. It has inspired other posts, for example (2) As a hobby Lisper I learned about Peter Seibel as the author of Practical Common Lisp. (1) https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ (2) https://medium.com/@danonrockstar/let-a-thousand-flowers-blo...

That's the one i meant. Thanks.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#539

Post by toyg »

alexvoda wrote: post #532
toyg wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simply being able to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be beneficial. That's basically the old Unix model, in practice it was unsatisfactory to the point that... people just wrote their own Unix and made a point that fixes should be public - and we got GNU. Companies could give you the old Unix model tomorrow, if they so wished; but it's effectively lose-lose, because they don't gain anything meanin…

You are missing GPs point. The default today is not the Unix model, it is the Windows model and increasingly the SaaS model. You have none of the 4 freedoms by default. GP argued that by law by default you should have at least freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that it should not be legal to withhold freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that freedom 0 and 1 should by default actually be facilitated by providing source code. They are a…

> They are arguing for changing the status quo and that doing so gradually is more feasible than all at once.

This has been argued over and over and over, and it has made no difference whatsoever. All the limited-rights licenses that have been tried from time to time (MPL et al) have simply fallen by the wayside: because, in reality, nobody is actually interested in this "right to repair" - it was around in the Unix days and it was discarded, because it did not effectively serve users nor businesses.

What have had an impact are effectively two licenses: the MIT/BSD ("do what you want") and GPL ("do what you want but your changes should be public"). By adopting and leveraging those two licenses, the world was slowly steered where we are now - which is a lot better than where we were in the '90s but also where we were in the '70s. We got here by being radical in a punk sense: creating a world of software developed in the open, and fuck what was there before. It's not by bowing to established interests that we ended up with Microsoft developing in the open, it's by bombing their commercial spaces with open software. The minute you stop doing that, they will happily retreat behind the firewall.

> Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.

The sandbox is the world at this point, closed software is retreating every day to smaller and smaller niches. You use browsers developed in the open, on websites built with opensource software. Even on mobile, the foundational frameworks are open - the most popular mobile OS is opensource. Obviously it's not a perfect state of things, but it's a world apart from the bad old '90s, and we did get here by keeping the Overton window firmly rooted at one end, thanks in large part to the FSF. It doesn't really matter how much software is GPL, what matters is that other licenses are defined in relation to the GPL.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#540

Post by ehvatum »

nindalf wrote: post #192

This fork promises "All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy!" Compelling, until you realise that all the commits are auto-merges of rust-lang/rust's main branch. Which means the same teams doing the same work, under a different name. Rust is experiencing growing pains because they're still figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone. They want to simultaneously keep th…

> The fact that they don't have bureaucracy is a direct consequence of them not doing any work right now.

Is “bureaucracy” a euphemism for Diversity, Equity And Inclusion busybodies, in this case?

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