This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859
"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
151–160 of 487 posts
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#152> 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…
Every single time someone brings up Linus' "abrasiveness", they never fail to leave out the thread preceding it, where the target of Linus' ire inevitably was being obtuse or childish. How long would it take you to stop being polite if someone refused to respond to anything but invective? And in kernel land, there are some simple rules that must be kept to very strictly, else you can forget about things like reliability.
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#153He calls Linus out for being a toxic element in the open source (or at least Linux) ecosystem. This is quite probably true.
Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be the way he is because it's how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis, I can't claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task of remaining easy to work with either.
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#154Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#155Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the OpenBSD community is not that: there are m…
I'm talking devs and sysadmins. I agree with you that NetBSD is the friendliest of the bunch. Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He simply has no tolerance for p…
I've never used BSD before, but from reading FreeBSD's BSD vs Linux [0], I can't see a major difference aside of the license, and the number of distributions available. Can you please explain what made you go on off using BSD/Linux?
[0]: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#157> 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…
> 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. This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - neither does having strong opinions and good reasons for them. The argument you have made comes in another form, and…
I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make. When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the quality of your contributors up.
One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions.
I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any different seems kinda weird.
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#158Open source is not awful. It's perhaps the most important thing to happen to computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to code is easier than ever. Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying…
Your response is completely off the mark because in many ways "open source" is as much a community as it is a philosophy. Programming is as much a social activity as it is a technical one. You can release open source works, but if you don't use any social platform to distribute it, who's going to find and use it?
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#159Open source is not awful. It's perhaps the most important thing to happen to computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to code is easier than ever. Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying…
> Open source is not awful.
He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways. You're doing nothing more than fighting a strawman.
> Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good
This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.
> I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.
Another classic false argument that comes up all the time - do you think your good experiences cancel out his bad ones, or the other bad ones discussed elsewhere in this thread?
> It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions
More weird phrasing that seems a bit of a strawman. Who said that the open source community 'replaces' one's interactions? Can a community not have bad characteristics simply because it's not the only community you're involved in? This really makes no sense.
> but rather as a sharing philosophy
Again, this is an argument from nothing more than being pedantic. It's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual. Even if you're adamant that open source as a term must only refer to the philosophy and none of the practical details, you've done nothing to affect the original argument, because it's still about the communities that exist around it in practice.
Overall, I think your post is a bit of a mess of bad arguments and classic fallacies.
Re: "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"
#160Poettering's M.O. is basically to force people to adopt changes that piss off a lot of people, and then whine when he doesn't get his way or he gets push back by standards boards who aren't interested in his personal agenda. Keep flouncing, Lennart. I'm sure this is the best way to get people to be nice to you or adopt your changes.