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"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

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Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#41

Post by lmm »

chris_wot wrote: post #27
lmm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he's done to many people's systems, mine included, is pretty horrible. He doesn't deserve death threats. But users should be able to opt out of his software, and he's deliberately making that as hard as possible.

OK, that's a technical matter. That's not what he's upset about, the issue is bullying. I think, also, that you are pretty unreasonable yourself there - he's not making things deliberately as hard as possible. Nobody told the Debian guys to standardize on systemd.

It's not purely technical. Pottering absolutely has attempted to force adoption, if not directly with the distros then with the gnome integration. Systemd has succeeded where technically better alternatives failed by encouraging downstream software to hard-depend on systemd, rather than offering/conforming to a standardized interface, which is a dirty tactic, user-hostile and technically damaging. And the refusal to accept patches to add support to non-linux systems to systemd is technically indefensible and completely antithetical to the spirit of open source.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#42

Post by fidotron »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #33
fidotron wrote: post #30

He's just the new Drepper. Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole. Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git…

I'd be very interested if you could provide evidence of Lennart being an asshole. I've honestly never seen him be anything other than professional.

His entire m.o. is passive aggressive asshole, whereas Linus is balls out asshole, but has the relatively unique quality of being right more often than not.

I'd even argue this post is lennart using the genuinely disgusting antics of others as a way to deflect potential criticism of his work in future. This is why, like Drepper, many view him as a long term liability to the ecosystem as a whole.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#43

Post by forca »

fidotron wrote: post #30

He's just the new Drepper. Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole. Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git…

Linux has become simply the invisible platform upon which so much runs. This is true by virtue of not only Android, but other stuff. Take notice, though, that more and more businesses are shunning Linux in favour of BSD. PS4, most routers, switches, increasing numbers of embedded chips now run NetBSD and OpenBSD (esp. in wi-fi security space). Businesses are also increasingly wary of the GPL and using maximally free licenses like the BSD/ISC/MIT. I'm considering this myself.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#44

Post by silon3 »

fidotron wrote: post #30

He's just the new Drepper. Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole. Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git…

Systemd is great step ahead in theory. Seems even to be quite stable in practice. Binary logs by default are a disastrous decision however.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#45

Post by lmm »

danielweber wrote: post #36
lmm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he's done to many people's systems, mine included, is pretty horrible. He doesn't deserve death threats. But users should be able to opt out of his software, and he's deliberately making that as hard as possible.

As someone who thinks systemd, as well as the entire OSS practice of "we're bored, let's re-invent the wheel"[1], is taking everything in the wrong direction: you still don't handle this with abuse. You deal with it via forking. [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

If systemd was willing to conform to a standardized interface, published on freedesktop.org or similar, so that it was possible to swap out compatible implementations, I would agree with you. But instead the systemd folks deliberately make incompatible changes that they know will break non-systemd systems (e.g. Gentoo). At that point a fork does no good; it's "dos ain't done 'till lotus won't run" all over again.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#46

Post by tomp »

chris_wot wrote: post #9
freehunter wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real shame because it's really true and really needs to be addressed. We've had these conversations about gamers, about startups, about tech in general, but when it comes to Linux (and related open source projects) it's somehow impossible to talk about. The community just isn't friendly and isn't inclusive, and that bad behavior goes far enough as to shut down any talk of the bad behavior.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I read Linus write: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F✦CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" https://lkml.or…

On the other hand, I don't consider this bad. Sure, it's offensive, but he has quite a good reason to be upset - reading one byte at a time will be really slow. Could he say it in a better way? Obviously. Could you interpret his words in a less literal way? Obviously.

I don't know Linus, but he seems a good, selfless guy, with the best intentions at heart. If he's not politically correct, who the fuck cares? Sometimes I get the feeling that even murderers are more respected, as long as they talk nice.

In my opinion the insistence on political correctnes has much more chilling effect than some passionate, if insulting, words.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#47

Post by placeybordeaux »

fidotron wrote: post #30

He's just the new Drepper. Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole. Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git…

I disagree with Linux failing as a potential platform for end user deployment. We might even seen SteamOS take off.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#48

Post by eloisant »

freehunter wrote: post #12
chris_wot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what has happened to Lennart is pretty horrible.

I googled his name and as soon as I read what projects he works on I instantly knew his complaint was perfectly valid. Probably the most hated Linux projects ever devised, and for purely political reasons.

I wouldn't say his projects were hated for political reasons. They were hated because they were a central piece of software (sound for PA the init for systemd) and they were released unfinished.

It's certainly wrong to turn that to personal attacks against him, but I can understand why people disliked PulseAudio then Systemd - and even hated these projects because they caused breakage in numerous systems, hours to try to fix it, and ended up with justifications like "it's by design" or "you don't understand why but it's better this way".

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#49

Post by Xeoncross »

Odd, I've never had a problem from the open source projects I've developed or contributed too. In fact, I've made more friends from it than enemies.

I suppose the pressure of these projects is small compared to something important like a driver or operating system... but perhaps that says more about people than open source.

Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

#50

Post by rdtsc »

> By many he [Linus] is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one.

I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.

It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is his personality.

What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a "well on technical merits Linus was right but I'll attack his abrasiveness instead". I suspect this is related to the 'debug' flag and Linus chewing out one of the systemd developers. I think Linus was justified in chewing him out. Maybe shouldn't have used expletives, but still justified. And I understand it was a pattern of behavior of leaving bugs in their wake and so on.

> If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour.

Hard to say. Maybe so. Maybe if he wouldn't be as critical and as abrasive we would have had a different OS or different community. Maybe better. Maybe worse. hard to say.

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