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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"

#131
post #100

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…

I failed to understand this line of criticism. Open Source is a software development model. It's not a model of society and does not guarantee to consists of only well-mannered people. There are ugly, difficult people everywhere, not just in Open Source projects.

Open source is a software development model. It is also a community. If you bill yourself as a "movement", you're building a community around yourself, like the open source movement.

"Gamer" is a hobby, but it can also refer to a community that is much, much different from the broad spectrum of people who just play video games.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He named the GitHub repo which has his name in big bold letters: https://github.com/nanoscopic

Better might be to provide links to the cases where he feels hard done by. Re: the app framework naming, there's some partial conversation involving Brian Foy at https://www.mail-archive.com/modules@perl.org/msg34595.html . It doesn't seem to merit nanoscopic's comments, so I wonder if there's more to the story or if nanoscopic is being unfair. I tried to find archives of the Grant McLean XML stuff, but cursory Googl…

I didn't provide a ton of details because I think it is important to be constructive and just make the point that people should be more caring and positive. I don't want or need to try to bash these people. All I am saying is that they were somewhat mean to me. It is my personal perspective. I'm not sure what anyone will get out of reading this stuff in detail.

If you are so interested, I requested repeatedly to Brian and the list to approve the module after the name "Ginger" was agreed upon, but nobody with authority was willing to move it to the registered list. The leaders of CPAN basically stopped approving stuff. Registered modules were dropped entirely shortly after that.

I tried to talk reasonably to Brian, but he seemed oversensitive, likely due to being overwhelmed with his tasks. I am more sad that registered modules were dropped than anything.

It is likely that Grant McLean's comments attacking my module are no longer around; due to the changes to CPAN and the related bug tracking. He publicly stated that my XML parser has no right to call it an XML parser, in reaction to me including benchmarks showing how slow his parser is even when backed with LibXML.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

> they were released unfinished

Isn't that how open source is /supposed/ to work? TBH, as a Debian user, I'm quite happy with the "Lennart releases theoretically brilliant but practically buggy apps, Ubuntu / Arch users suffer for a few months, Debian integrates the system once it's stable" workflow :)

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

#134
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…

> 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.

Apparently, it also manifests itself in taking things too seriously, not being able to understand the nuanced meaning behind insulting words, and reducing a person's personality to a few mean things he's said.

Nice sexist remark, btw.

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

#135

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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8n-I53Ib8 (Pulp Fiction, Wolf's speech)

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

#136
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So isn't your beef really with the distro's which aren't fulfilling your needs? Maybe you should start your own branch with Systemd specifically excluded. That is how many currently popular distro's because popular (mostly relating to different windowing systems, etc but still). You could also move to Gentoo Linux which doesn't (and has no plans) to utilise Systemd as the default. Last point; systemd is so "crap" tha…

[deleted]

Well it's a good thing you switched to Unix then, because Linux is not Unix.

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

#137
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand this perspective. One can be a very effective guardian of quality without being an asshole about it. For example, this is what Linus wrote: "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…

Had this been Kay's first mistake of this magnitude, it would indeed have been reasonable to expect Linus to have been more civilised. Anyone who has followed this more closely would know that this was nowhere near the first time Linus had issues with his code. Yet he did not appear to be interested in listening no matter what Linus told him.

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

#138
So I'm a blogger with posts that occasionally go semi-viral [1], and I've been subject to unpleasant comments on a few occasions. Here are a couple of posts which have gotten me quite a bit of hate:

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html

In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics (economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred.

However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as this, I'm going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on with your life. I don't favor much in the way of systematic solutions. Assorted "codes of conduct" being proposed are blunt instruments and are easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of "incorrect" opinions.

Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it's communication. In many fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about facts. It's quite easy to ignore "you're wrong because X,Y,Z and a big jerk" - just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly.

Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): "Tu debil. Necesita para construir tu corpu." ("You're weak. You need to build your body.") In the recent past, the tech world's culture was a lot like that of a mexican boxing club. The correct response is "si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico." ("Yes, my SQL is weak, I'll practice.")

Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to regrow the thick skin it once had.

[1] A post about functional programming is limited in it's eventual virality.

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

#139
post #88

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…

I disagree. He can produce the same excellent product without his childish name-calling. His ability to read and accept commits does not depend on his menacing replies to bad commits.

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

#140
post #81
post #53

For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I've come to study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it's more important than degrees and schools. For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it wa…

> Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. Last I saw, reading the compiler wasn't recommended (by someone) since the code is apparently old and not idiomatic.

Historically, that's been kind of true, but it depends on the part, really, and is getting better all the time.
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