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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"

#181

Post by belorn »

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

To get some insight behind linus behavior, I can strongly recommend his Q/A for latest debconf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo). It was quite interesting in how much he seems to like to exaggerate things, like the retroactively aborted comment, or how he can make two following sentences with "it is a horrible license" and "it is a great license" regarding the same license.

Linus do not seems to be a person one should quote, as context seem to be critical important for anything he says.

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

#182

Post by shabda »

npsimons wrote: post #124

This coming from the man who, when people point out flaws in his design of systemd, says basically "too bad, I'm doing it anyway, and if you don't like it, you can take a hike."

That sound like an entirely reasonable thing to say. If you don't like it, you can choose to boycott his system.

It would become unreasonable if he opened his emails with "YOU are full of bullshit. "

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

#183

Post by Alupis »

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…

You make a lot of good points, but I take issue with:

> me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge

Sometimes this is a perspective thing. It's not always a bug just because some user reports it as a bug in their opinion. Don't know the story behind that anecdote, but perhaps you didn't understand the codebase like you thought you did, or what the expected behavior should of been?

In any regard, if the project maintainer does not consider it a bug and won't accept a PR, then that is their prerogative. You are [usually] free to fork the codebase and fix it yourself if you had a PR that wasn't accepted. With closed source, that isn't even a remote possibility.

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

#184

Post by matt_heimer »

I've had some arguments with people but in large part it is pleasant to work with most people in the open source world. I was just at JavaOne and "everybody meets at conferences for beers" really does happen. For smaller projects most developers are extremely happy when someone takes any interest in their project.

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

#185

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jtbigwoo wrote: post #180
xroche wrote: 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…

>> You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills, just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time and more importantly (2) do damage…

He's just one guy. Not an apologist; the guy is straight out not a great communicator and not really expected to be. But somebody has to be gatekeeper. Whoever that is, should do it to the best of their ability. This is likely the best he has to offer.

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

#186

Post by lazyant »

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…

thanks for contributing your code

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

#187

Post by DanBC »

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

> I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN.

It is intensely but shallowly interesting. Previous attempts to discuss it devolve into bad tempered argument.

No one learns anything from these discussions. No one has their mind changed.

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

#188

Post by talmand »

vidarh wrote: post #89
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…

> (p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?) Linus is fully capable of writing "fuck", as evidenced by e.g. [1]. If he stars it out, assume it is a stylistic choice for that particular message. > then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML. If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well. Note the context (though I can…

For such a smart guy, Linus was being extremely dumb in this. Ok, I admit that's my opinion.

Most people are not going to see the context of that statement. I'm sure he had his issues with the developer and the relevant code, but that doesn't excuse such a public display. All he did in that matter is make himself look bad and, to a degree, made his project look bad. As it's been stated elsewhere, such actions most likely just drives people away.

Open source software, especially the big projects, are a public facing entity. Just like any large corporation. A public lashing with this type of language should not be considered healthy for the project nor the open source movement. It only causes negativity within and towards the project with the additional issue, as you show yourself, of not always actually solving the problem.

Each to their own I suppose.

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

#189

Post by JoeAltmaier »

pachydermic wrote: post #179
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…

>I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. Same here. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, though. I mean, I'm pretty much a nobody. I haven't contributed to the kernel or created a perl module or created systemd so of course I haven't had any issues. I'm sure Poettering isn't making this stuff up. People are so pissed at him for systemd and it makes no sense. And he's right to call out Linus fo…

Unfortunately Linux IS the largest piece of Open Source on the planet, dwarfing the other stuff. So its fair to diss OS when Linux has issues.

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

#190

Post by [deleted] »

lallysingh wrote: post #108
nilved wrote: post #82

I read this article and was very confused about how somebody could create an open source project that lead to actual death threads. Then I googled Lennart Poettering and it all made sense. PulseAudio and systemd make for a particularly wretched resume: Poettering is probably responsible for more frustration to Linux users than anybody else right now. Not that I'm not going to condone online harassment or blame the vi…

Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them. Yet the software seems quite popular. Sometimes someone has to step up to do the dirty work and write software that can only give mediocre results. I think he's getting flack as the scapegoat for the general consumerization of Linux (ala ubuntu, gnome, etc). Really, if people don't like these systems, or if they were…

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