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

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

#111

Post by forca » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

pekk wrote: post #94

forca wrote: post #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 r…

I really don't appreciate the ageism in this comment. It's unbelievable that in this industry you don't meet 20-something asshats so that you have to single out people in their 30s and 40s.

Please... leave your PC stance at the door. Really. Grown men are never offended at stuff like this...

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

#112

Post by jdub » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

pekk wrote: post #84

chris_wot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to excuse this, but this involved a person with a Finnish name who specifically CC'd Linus complaining about a perceived regression when doing things a wrong way. Note that there is even a phrase about a Finnish phenomenon, "management by perkele," referring to a militaristic managing style which steamrolls dissent with a lot of profanity. Therefore, I doubt that a random person on LKML that wasn't CC'ing Linus t…

There's no double standard here. It's a conversation specifically about jerkish behaviour in the open source world, and merely having this discussion does not ignore jerkish behaviour in other companies, communities, etc.

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

#113

Post by chubot » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #55

bad_user wrote: post #51

This doesn't pertain to " Open Source " in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definit…

I think if you're involved in a closed-source company and you act like an ass too many times you'll get fired.

Not really, the same rule basically applies. If you have clout, people will tolerate your abuse (e.g. Steve Ballmer). If you don't you might get fired.

I think it's actually better in open source because the way to earn clout is through solid contributions. That is not really true at most companies -- you have clout through your title/position on the ladder, which may or may not be earned.

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

#114

Post by vidarh » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #58

sergiosgc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus is great enough, and known enough, to be allowed some idiosyncrasies. If you follow LKML long enough you realize these hard language comments do not carry one tenth the negative message a primary read would convey. Note that this happens because you can read it with knowledge of the writer's personality. If it were an anonymous author, your impression would be perfectly correct. No, I know that the standard rep…

"Oh you can advocate murder for people you don't like as long as your technical chops are in order" --you

How you managed to read that into the message above is totally beyond me.

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

#115

Post by lallysingh » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

naner wrote: post #73

For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other. In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where…

Do you ever wonder if the act of programming causes movement on the scale? Especially if done for a long time, especially if started when young?

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

#116

Post by nanoscopic » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

sii wrote: post #66

nanoscopic wrote: post #32

I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don't agree with. I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing…

> Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face. Really? My contributions to the open source world are certainly modest, but I get thank you emails perhaps once a month for applications I've released. People are quite pleasant.

Yes, for many years I intentionally did not release more open source due to only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you.

Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more.

The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the distributed discs ). Several people benchmarked it and said it was amazingly fast. I'm pretty sure it is used by a fair amount of people, but since it is mainly distributed through CPAN I have no idea who really uses it or how many.

I think this is the case for what I wrote because it is a component. People in general I think appreciate tools much more than components, especially if the component is one of many somewhat inter-compatible other options. There is little love for "another thing added to the pile" even if it is different in fundamental ways.

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

#117

Post by digital-rubber » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.

Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.

And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.

Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).

If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?

Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.

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

#118

Post by quadrangle » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #50

> 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 ri…

Linus is clearly not malevolent, not ill-intentioned, but he's closed-minded somewhat. He hasn't seen what the effect might be if he was a little more inhibited about cursing people out.

I think of this as the nice vs angry coach sorta thing. There are sports coaches who are nice people and ones who are assholes and both groups include legendary successful coaches. Clearly, this is not a make-or-break issue, but also it's clear that being an asshole doesn't help, even though assholes often claim it does. Like successful asshole coaches, Linus clearly wants the best for the community, he just has this asshole way of thinking about how to achieve it, and he's wrong enough that he's clearly out of balance. And if something could convince him to just temper things or apologize a little, it would be a helpful step. He still deserves honor and respect overall regardless, but it would be better if we didn't have to qualify that.

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

#119

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

netrus wrote: post #34

nanoscopic wrote: post #32

I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don't agree with. I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing…

Don't you think adding your real-name would be a nice move when you choose to give names of people you disagree with?

[deleted]

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

#120

Post by mike_hearn » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

xroche wrote: post #88

chris_wot wrote: post #2

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

You need to understand one thing: you are wrong. Linus Torvalds is not a bully. He's in charge of one of the biggest and most successful project out there. And this project is open-source, and anyone can contribute to it. Anyone. Even your cat. Imagine the Windows codebase being opened to anyone, with anyone being able to suggest fixes and send patches, or ask questions, or make suggestions. You do not want any idiot…

You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operate with reasonable team dynamics? There is no correlation between "runs an important project" and "must be an asshole" even though certainly everyone has off days from time to time (I've been known to flame people when reaching the end of my tether but usually regretted it later).

I think this notion - which Linus pushes - that the alternative to yelling at people and generally being short tempered is always "political correctness" ... well it's quite harmful. Yes, it CAN get that way, if people interpret criticism of their work as personal criticism and try to shut it down by complaining about it. I've seen that happen before. Some people don't know how to handle someone implying, even if politely, that their work sucks and can't handle it. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way and well functioning teams manage to avoid it.