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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spreading awareness about a position" isn't a very accurate way to describe what happened. This is the guy who said he wanted to use social media to create a "hall of shame" for kernel developers. Of course Linus told him to knock it off, that's ridiculously unprofessional behavior.

Wow, what an uncharitable read. Are you aware of what that term means? He said it was not about literally shaming people, but showing what contributing to the kernel is like, and even clarified it wouldn't be for public consumption. It's a colloquialism for a resource where peers can learn from each other's mistakes. My high school Spanish class had a hall of shame. It's a magnitude more professional than the extreme…

As if he didn't read the comment about not wanting the cross-language code to spread like cancer in the most uncharitable way possible.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#112
Reading this I cannot help thinking about what Linus Torvalds said more than 20 years ago[1] in an interview.

When asked if he feared competition for Linux his answer was that few liked writing device drivers and as long as no one "young and hungry" came along that could write device drivers and liked it he'd be safe.

There you have him, Hector Martin, young[2] and hungry and loves writing drivers. No surprise he clashes with the old guard.

[1] I don't remember the date but it was still on analog TV, so definitely more than 20 years.

[2] At least a different generation from Linus and could easily be his son. Young enough for generational conflict at any rate.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#113

I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.

It's not really unprecedented. Reminds me of Paragon Software trying to merge their code for an NTFS driver and getting told-off because the driver code was so awful: https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/06/github_merges_useless... If you want your code merged in the kernel, you have to think about things from Linus' perspective. You cannot in any circumstances try to shame someone into adopting an enormous and unsust…

The linked article doesn't say the submitted driver code was awful. In fact, it says Paragon submitted the driver after Linus suggested they submit it.

What the article quotes Linus complaining about is a process issue. Paragon apparently used GitHub's GUI to merge some of their branches rather than the git CLI. Linus would prefer they use the CLI to merge branches because the GitHub GUI reportedly omits important metadata from merge commits, such as the developer email, and encourages uninformative commit messages.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#114

Well written. I think the accusations of drama-hunting are unfounded. What else are you supposed to do in the face of persistent "non-technical nonsense"? Linus doesn't seem to care. Definitely a shame. I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac. It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them.

> I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac Trust me, we would know by now if it was. It's not.

Things don't happen instantly. You could have doubted it was in Microsoft's interest to support Linux within Windows for years... until they released WSL.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is every successful product, small, medium, large. I've never ever worked on a big corporate or small personal project and not experienced this. The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority". You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment…

Yep. I've been working on Ardour for 25 years now, and it took me 7-10 years to develop the right kind of skin for dealing with "user feedback". For me, the right kind of skin was basically to shed such stuff like water off a duck's back. Whether someone is saying "I've been using Logic for 10 years and this is so much easier and intuitive" or "You should be ashamed for asking anyone to pay for this steaming pile of…

Thank you for Ardour btw, great piece of software although I still use Ableton from time to time, Ardour is taking over more and more parts for me :)

I've read your comments here (and elsewhere) for a long time, and I'm sure you'd have some great ideas or at least opinions about this, which is pretty relevant to what you just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#116

Well written. I think the accusations of drama-hunting are unfounded. What else are you supposed to do in the face of persistent "non-technical nonsense"? Linus doesn't seem to care. Definitely a shame. I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac. It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them.

That's not really Apple's game anymore. They don't really care about selling Macs, what they want to sell you is their ecosystem. So that way you'll get a Mac and an iWatch and an iPhone and whatever else they push out once they get their hooks and lock you in.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#117
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what an uncharitable read. Are you aware of what that term means? He said it was not about literally shaming people, but showing what contributing to the kernel is like, and even clarified it wouldn't be for public consumption. It's a colloquialism for a resource where peers can learn from each other's mistakes. My high school Spanish class had a hall of shame. It's a magnitude more professional than the extreme…

> He said it was not about literally shaming people The original message I read ( https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98... ) they quite explicitly said (verbatim): "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas."

Yes I'm aware of that quote, which doesn't make sense to link with the original quote because his intentions with the "Hall of shame" are different from this quote.

This message brings up a lot of valid complaints about talented developers being stonewalled and you're honing in on one word that is not being used the way you think. Again, there are dozens of emails from Linus that are vastly more unprofessional than this.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's deeply ironic that he's complaining about kernel maintainers supposedly forming secret cliques. However... this is the same man who made a sock puppet V-Tuber account, and acts in every way like they are two people; even though they've accidentally on-stream shared the system username, shared they have exactly the same kernel version, same KDE configuration, same login, same time zone, even (if I recall correctl…

How does having an alter-ego make it deeply ironic that he complains about secret cliques? I don’t get it. I’ve been supporting Hector since week 1 of the Asahi project and I think it’s a shame he’s thrown in the towel but I can understand why. I don’t know enough about kernel development to have an opinion about about the Kernel policy of “no aliases” for contributions. I certainly don’t care that some people think…

[flagged]

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is pretty normal; in paid products I even find it's less aggressive than in free things. But I have a hard and frozen shell around my vital organs to just politely and friendly point to the place in queue and where to donate to speed it up. For $10k I will build your cpu temp proc, if that's not an option then it's in pos #17463 of my task list.

Yes. I was developing some open source stuff before venturing to for-profit closed Source Software, and I was surprised that the paying customers were on average much nicer than those who got their stuff for free! Great idea about the priority queue.

When you pay for something, you’ve already demonstrated that you value whatever it is (a product, a service, etc). Free stuff tends to attract people who don’t value the thing.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#120
post #103

I don't think it's the first time, nor the last, we'll see maintainers and otherwise really great people being turned off from FOSS because of the massive weight that entitled outsiders and toxic "collaborators" seem to add. So on that, is there any guides for FOSS maintainers out there about how to deal with the emotional toll of FOSS, with a focus on self-care, how to say "No", generally just how to deal with the p…

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