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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"

#11
post #3

> in particular ones where losing face is a major issue This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Losing face is a fact of life. When I'm wrong, I want to know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible, tell me what can I do to be right the next time. It must als…

Even LKML is a generally pleasant place. Linus' well-crafted insults gets a lot of attention because technical discussions are not interesting to people not involved in kernel development.

LKML gets thousands of emails every day. The bulk of the discussion is actually very civil.

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

#12
post #4

[deleted]

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.

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

#14

Yeah, this was discussed about an hour ago, and it hit the flame filter pretty fast. I'd suggest that it won't last very long on the front page. Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859

There's always Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ifo6h/lennart_on_th...

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

#15
post #4

[deleted]

Because what has happened to Lennart is pretty horrible.

I agree. It's disgusting. Luckily he's a brilliant engineer and was able to withstand the flames long enough for people to recognise how good his software is.

Pulseaudio and systemd are two of the best things to happen to Linux in years.

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

#16
It's easy to see that in some quarters this is certainly true. People are allowed —even encouraged— to smack people down if they're being ridiculous... But this isn't the rule.

http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct

As an Ubuntu member, I'm expected to behave. In our derivative communities, we try to ensure that people adhere to these principles too. Ask Ubuntu (part of Stack Exchange, not Canonical), for example, also requires people to adhere to the Ubuntu CoC. Ubuntu Forums and IRC have similar behaviour guidelines.

Does that mean it's always civil? Of course not... But it does mean that nobody's surprised when people are tossed out for being needlessly rude and the non-technical flame wars of the late 90s just don't happen.

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

#17
I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several reasons for this. One I have notice in person working on both sides is that the BSD crews tend to be more professional overall. They love UNIX and the goal has always been to create the best UNIX-like OS around. The BSD license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few Linux devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal closed-source opponents for the sake of being vocal. The world cannot be all closed source or all open source. There is room for everyone. Most of the issues with people I have had over the three decades I've been in IT have been with Linux-based devs and users. Without exception all BSD guys and girls have been the pinnacle of professionalism. I think this speaks volumes and is quite telling. This is not observation from one workplace -- this is over many, many years in different work spaces, different cultures, states, whatnot.

All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.

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

#18
This post would be interesting if there wasn't the “all others do it except us” accusation. Systemd zealots are exactly the same with any other open source community's zealots and systemd's diva devs are exactly the same with any other open source diva devs.

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

#19

Yeah, this was discussed about an hour ago, and it hit the flame filter pretty fast. I'd suggest that it won't last very long on the front page. Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859

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.

This is why I'm glad that Debian now has a code of conduct.

https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct

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

#20
post #3

> in particular ones where losing face is a major issue This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Losing face is a fact of life. When I'm wrong, I want to know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible, tell me what can I do to be right the next time. It must als…

How common is it that people are provably wrong, in the logical sense? Most disagreements aren't of the form "here is a black swan that disproves your statement that all swans are white". In OSS the controversies tend to be disputes about which use cases are important and which subjective requirements of software (usability, licensing, interoperation) are met.
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