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SDL Moves to GitHub

discourse.libsdl.org

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Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#181

Post by ocdtrekkie »

tra3 wrote: post #118
genmud wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago. Saying that MS is an enemy of open source is uninformed at best and idiotic at worse. Do me a favor, look at Facebook [1], Apple [2], Amazon [3], Netflix [4] and Google [5]. Now tell me which one has more Open Source repos than MS [6]. I'll give you a hint... none of them. Sure, volume of open source repos may not be the best metric,…

You're factually correct, but you've probably forgotten the "3 Es": "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [0]. Microsoft is a business and is therefore about maximizing profits. I'd rather not assume anything, especially not that they are somehow friendly to the OSS movement. Lets give it a few more years before we assume that OSS is something they are gonna do long term. Otherwise, it's like "free" google products; here tod…

EEE is from a meeting in 1996 by someone who left the company in 2000. It's really hard for anyone to claim it represents the company today or even a decade ago.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#182

Post by dleslie »

fartcannon wrote: post #180
dleslie wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of dead FOSS. Anything that relies on a library or build toolchain that's hard to find or configure comes to mind. Go spend some time trying to get RHIDE working, for instance. You're going to have to bring it back to life to do so. And yet, closed source seems to run just fine in emulation.

Luckily, I can bring it back to life. Good luck emulating! That emulator's probably based on FOSS. :)

It generally takes less effort to emulate ancient software than to bring ancient FOSS back to life. Sure, the emulator is FOSS, but that's fitting in the 80/20 rule just fine. There's plenty of broken, abandoned and dead FOSS emulators, too.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#183

Post by fartcannon »

dleslie wrote: post #182
fartcannon wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, I can bring it back to life. Good luck emulating! That emulator's probably based on FOSS. :)

It generally takes less effort to emulate ancient software than to bring ancient FOSS back to life. Sure, the emulator is FOSS, but that's fitting in the 80/20 rule just fine. There's plenty of broken, abandoned and dead FOSS emulators, too.

But if you wanted to, you could bring them back to life. That's the value.

With the emulator, first you need to write that emulator, and then you only get precisely that version of the software. After that, you're toast.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#184

Post by dleslie »

fartcannon wrote: post #183
dleslie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It generally takes less effort to emulate ancient software than to bring ancient FOSS back to life. Sure, the emulator is FOSS, but that's fitting in the 80/20 rule just fine. There's plenty of broken, abandoned and dead FOSS emulators, too.

But if you wanted to, you could bring them back to life. That's the value. With the emulator, first you need to write that emulator, and then you only get precisely that version of the software. After that, you're toast.

Sure, but I'd have a tough time finding proprietary software that I'd want to use that isn't adequately emulated. As for updating, well, I'm not going to be updating most FOSS, either.

Right now I can double-click an icon on my desktop that launches SimCity for Windows 3.1 inside of dosbox, and it works great. It didn't take much effort to get working, either.

I can't say the same for most dead FOSS that I've tried to resurrect. Usually I'll have to manage the outdated dependencies somehow, perhaps by writing a SHIM or somesuch; and probably significantly fiddle with the build system because Linux systems have changed significantly since the mid-90s.

It's a difference of hours versus days of effort. I've done both, but guess which I simply _haven't the time for_ now? I've got family and friends that need my attention moreso than a dead piece of FOSS no one but myself seems to care about.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#185

Post by josephg »

Jasper_ wrote: post #165
zokier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is als…

When you're a kid, tinkering is exciting. When you turn 30, you just want your software and tools to work. Janitoring your computer is not fun when it's in the way of your actual day job.

My worry is that this has bad long term implications.

Modern computing environments aren't very good, and most of the core abstractions haven't changed / improved since the 80s. Those core abstractions have so much stuff built on top of them now that they're very difficult to change. You used to be able to make a usable operating system in a month or two if you knew what you were doing. Now a simple web browser takes 20m+ lines of code to make. Its out of the hands of anyone with less than $1bn or so to spend - and at that scale the only real contributors are big tech companies. Except for some small features like io_uring and device drivers, linux is developed as if its already feature complete.

So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[1]? Will we ever have operating systems and software that can properly take advantage of NVMe and Optane memory[2]? Will we ever have desktop computers which sandbox software by default like my phone does, so I don't have to trust every program, npm library and rust crate on my computer with my data? Will there ever be a desktop class UI library which works across all my devices, or are we doomed to waste 90% of our computer hardware keeping electron + javascript fast-ish?

I'm worried these ships have sailed, and our grandchildren are destined to inherit a computing experience of electron, + more CSS.

In the 90s people would iterate on this stuff by just hacking linux and submitting patches. Now thats really hard because of how tall we've made our mountains of code. By the time you've climbed one mountain, you're halfway through your career. I mean, how many kernel hackers out there are also good at making user interfaces? How many people with frontend experience are even capable of hacking on linux? Its impossible to improve the interfaces between our systems without a holistic understanding. And thats becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

[1] Eg fsync(), and in my opinion the filesystem abstraction as a whole.

[2] Eg https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/bittman

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#186

Post by klyrs »

tristor wrote: post #142
zokier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is als…

> Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. I would argue this is only the case because we've created an intentional social and skill gap in the industry between server administration and operations work and software development. My experiences, especially more recently, have been shocking in how little the average software developer knows about /very basic/ server administration. I don't have a fu…

> My experiences, especially more recently, have been shocking in how little the average software developer knows about /very basic/ server administration.

I used to know quite a bit of that stuff, had a series of jobs doing it. I gradually moved from C89 to modern c++ over the course of about 25 years. Easy stuff, when you use it daily. But when it's not my job to do server admin, that stuff evolves too fast to stay on top of. For me it's not a high horse, rather, a wagon that I fell off a long time ago

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#187

Post by Firehawke »

wahern wrote: post #164
mlindner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is one of the reason's Stallman's ideas are fundamentally flawed as if there's a better product available even if it's only free as in beer, people will use it over the worse one, from the end user's perspective.

In the worldview of Stallman, your argument is analogous to saying that advocating for democracy is flawed because if an authoritarian regime or slave society provides a better product, people will choose it over worse democratic ones. To Stallman, your counter-argument is a non-sequitur. His goal is maximizing user freedom. UX may be one dimension of user freedom, but at best it's secondary to certain prerequisite f…

It's really simple. If you want me to use your software, it needs to not be like brushing my teeth with a Dremel. I have things to get done, and while the Open Source movement doesn't owe anyone anything, I'm going to pick the product that isn't going to halt my work to try to figure out what broke again.

With as many open and closed options that exist out there, competition is a thing and Open Source as a whole needs to compete on more than just being "the freedom option"

Stallman's valid points are entirely lost in the ocean-full of software like GNU Image Manipulation Tool that incite frustration from users.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#188

Post by apple4ever »

nuritzi wrote: post #72
PurpleFoxy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder why they did not pick GitLab since it is significantly better for FOSS ideals and has the same niceness of GitHub

Thanks, @PurpleFoxy! I tend to agree with @Fileeditview about the network effect and how GitHub has done a great job of helping OSS projects with visibility. Like john_cogs, I'm also a GitLab team member, and am part of the Community Relations team. I run the GitLab for Open Source program. I joined about a year ago and am really impressed by how fast GitLab moves forward. We have a lot of awesome stuff coming up to…

Best two things GitLab needs to do:

1. Fix their bugs instead of new features (ex: rebase fails 9/10 time for us) 2. Fix their pricing (ex: $99 per user is way to expensive and that is the only plan that allows free users)

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#189

Post by pjmlp »

zokier wrote: post #57
rockooooo wrote: post #2

"So in moving it to GitHub, we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day. And I grew up during the heydey of the Free Software Foundation, so I know this is a trap, but I’m tired and don’t have the energy to be a server admin for something that’s held together with scotch tape and prayers when I’m really supposed to be writing OpenGL code." This…

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is als…

Being a bit older this is no different than seeing the 70's hippies generation that helped fighting the dictatorship, working in capitalist right wing companies.

Eventually other things in life are more relevant and all that idealism fades away.

Even Linux will eventually be replaced by something else, when all the kernel engineers that helped its adoption are gone.

It won't be tomorrow, but it will come.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#190

Post by tristor »

dleslie wrote: post #175
tristor wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. I would argue this is only the case because we've created an intentional social and skill gap in the industry between server administration and operations work and software development. My experiences, especially more recently, have been shocking in how little the average software developer knows about /very basic/ server administration. I don't have a fu…

Most folks don't _need_ much more than a LAMP-equivalent running on a virtual host somewhere. Why bother installing k3s and whatever deployment-tool-du_jour it is these days, when dropping some files on a host is good enough?

Sure, and I'm not advocating to build a Rube Goldberg device, unless it's purely for learning purposes. But why go to great lengths (and expense) to avoid having to SSH into a server for your personal projects when you could run them on a Raspberry Pi or a $5/mo droplet?

The issue isn't that people need more than a LAMP stack, it's that for some reason software developers in the 2020s are scared to or think it's beneath them to install a LAMP stack of their own.

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