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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"

#161

Post by philh »

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…

Minor correction: the person who CC'd Linus was Alan Cox, directing Linus' attention to Jukka Ollila's message.

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

#162

Post by Zikes »

nathanb wrote: post #148
Mikeb85 wrote: post #63

Open 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…

Surely you can understand the intent of his message and of the phrase which you partially quote. "Some elements of the open source community are awful to contributors" "Open source is an awful place to be if you don't have a thick skin" "The behavior I have observed as a prolific contributor to open source is awful" All of these statements, I believe, accurately summarize his experience. All of these statements can b…

It might be more accurate to say "the state of the open source community is awful", but for some folks that are deeply involved in that community that might simply be synonymous with open source itself.

In either case, I think the author made it fairly clear that he was referring to the community and not the concept.

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

#163

Post by imanaccount247 »

freehunter wrote: post #131
vph wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of us did not bill ourselves as a movement though. Some money grubbing people did back in the .com bubble days. I did not make the OSI. I am not part of any movement. I write software I want, and give the source away freely for others to use if they find it useful. That's it.

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

#164

Post by freehunter »

vidarh wrote: post #114
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

>This is a Linus' flaw, of course, but one we can live with in the context of his hugely positive net contribution.

Said in response to a comment by Linus directly stating that someone should be retroactively aborted (murdered).

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by jusssi »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #76
forca wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready. PA was not ready for primetime when it was initially released. Everyone knows this. It works fine now after many fixes and considerable time. systemd is the same. A lot o…

> Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. Have you considered that a flexible, high-quality OS audio subsystem might be difficult to bang out in one weekend? > ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. Are you kidding? Every desktop install before pulseaudio was a crapshoot when it came to audio. > I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement…

Pulseaudio still needs to be restarted every time an USB headset is plugged in, to get it to work as both input AND output card.

EDIT: Other than that, it _does_ work quite well nowadays.

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

#167

Post by freehunter »

forgottenpass wrote: post #72
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

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. It's not that we "can't" discuss it, you just have to be prepared for the discomfort of disagreement from both reasonable and unreasonable positions. Bad positions will be argued well, and good positions will be argued poorly. The…

No, really, historically it's been impossible to discuss. People flag the article off the front page or downvote anything negative about Linux or open source the same way they do anything positive about Microsoft.

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

#168

Post by filmgirlcw »

I'm glad Lennart wrote this, though obviously I'm sorry he had to do it.

I'd like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I'm not that idealistic.

I don't think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects (particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren't up for criticism or discussion, but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty territory.

But here's my question:

With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally drop the "it's all volunteers so this shit is acceptable" mantra.

It's not all volunteers. It's people volunteering their time and collectively sharing the source/combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved.

So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?

Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. Time for the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human beings.

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

#169

Post by minikites »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #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 concre…

This is different for men and women.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar...

"Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."

http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/

The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”

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

#170

Post by kyberias »

kibwen wrote: post #67
tomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Sometime…

I don't think "political correctness" has anything to do with suggesting that someone is so braindead that they ought to have starved to death. Rather, you appear to be using it as a strawman to discredit the notion that we should treat people like decent human beings. As for his "passion", I don't think that resorting to public humiliation is any way to lead a project. Rather, it sounds like an item out of that "How…

> But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them.

No, you don't really know that! These outbursts may bother you and other people but it is also possible that they have been very, very beneficial to the community. Like it or not, they are a form of humor to many people and that may improve team cohesiveness.

I for one think that the reaction to this particular retroactive-abortion-outburst as "not treating people as human beings" is taking things absolutely way too seriously.

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