"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this" • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by hippich » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:01 PM UTC

Never had to participate in linux kernel development, so can't really comment on it (although I hear Linus can be rude).

But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.

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

#192

Post by ultramancool » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:02 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #189

pachydermic wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I don't think so - it may be large by usage and codebase, but it's not where most people have experiences with open source development.

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

#193

Post by vidarh » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:02 PM UTC

digital-rubber wrote: post #117

Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy. Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so…

I have big misgivings about Poettering, and this post has done nothing to improve my opinion of him. But a lot of the systemd criticism is poorly argued.

> Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux

Sys V init only works "fine" for you if your needs are simplistic. If you have not dealt with dozens of badly written init scripts that turns restarting a typical server process into a matter of trying "restart" followed by a "killall", possibly rm'ing pid files, and a "start", then you have not dealt with Sys V init much.

If you have not dealt with essential system processes dying and not getting restarted, and having to implement monitoring and restart logic to deal with problems that would not have occurred in the first place without a process monitor, you have not been exposed to a lot of Sys V init problems.

If you have not dealt with process managers outside of pid 1 being killed.

If you have not dealt with problems retaining log output from early boot.

And so on.

Systemd solves a lot of real problems that maintainers of bigger systems are likely to have run into. I will agree that it solves a lot of real problems in contentious ways, including things I don't agree with (I, for example, can not agree with the arguments for binary logs - I love the filtering functionality that journald brings, but they would all be possible while retaining a text based format for the main log files)

> If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man.

I agree with you about this, to a point. If you get some criticism, it's fair to assume that it may be their problem. If you become one of the most hated OSS developers in history, on the other hand, it should cause a lot of introspection.

To me it seems that there are a few separate problems:

- Poettering appears to have a very abrasive working style that wins him a lot of opponents. He may very well be a nice guy in person, but a lot of the time that appears not to come through online.

- There are some real assholes that go way to far in the way they criticise him, and he seems to use the illegitimate criticism as a way of ignoring the real issues and concerns people have with him. This is not that strange - if the outpourings of hatred towards you is not something you can easily reconcile with your own views about what you are like as a person, then it becomes easier to dismiss them all than to filter and accept some of them and dismiss others.

- Some of the technical decisions he makes are questionable and controversial, which is not uncommon, but rather than get resolved, due to the caustic environment created around him, very often it becomes impossible to deal with the actual technical issues and fronts harden.

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

#194

Post by wffurr » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:02 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #160

Poettering'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.

I liked your original pre-edit comment, since it portrayed your attitude even better:

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha

Was about to argue the merit of this post, then noticed the author. Almost got me, Poettering ;-) Just another social/political manipulation to get his way at the expense of others. I would feel bad for the guy if he wasn't such a whiny prick the rest of the time."

I especially like how you admit that if this letter was anonymous, you would actually consider the argument, but since it's a particular person you dislike, you're OK with people advocating violence and attempting to hire hitmen.

Stay classy.

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

#195

Post by psychometry » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:03 PM UTC

Desktop/non-mobile link: https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

It's apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile page. The "View Desktop" link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well done, Google.

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

#196

Post by pyre » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:03 PM UTC

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…

To summarize:

  The tech community has become weak because we have taken
  a look at ourselves and realized that many among us are
  brutish, brash, and generally all-around assholes. But
  since these people are highly skilled, we should feel that
  the fact that they are assholes should be swept under the
  rug and we should "just deal with it."

I get that these things exist and that we have to deal with them (change doesn't happen over night), but that doesn't make then "right" or "ok" or "acceptable." Is it wrong to want to change things? Does that make one weak because they don't like the current situation and want to change it rather than "growing a tough skin" and accepting the status quo?

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

#197

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:03 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by DonHopkins » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:03 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #68

mike_hearn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor. It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy to get into a downward spiral…

You cannot moderate mailing lists because they are not centralized. When you hit "reply all" in a mailing list, the replies go directly to everyone who is on the To: or Cc: list. The list robot is just one of those parties. And of course, private replies are possible that the list robot doesn't even see. Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that i…

That's not what a mailing list is. What you are describing is an email message with multiple recipients, not a mailing list. Mailing lists don't include the email addresses of all of the recipients in the distributed messages To or CC fields, and the From and Reply-to is the address of the mailing list, never a list of all users on the mailing list.

Mailing lists are centrally managed, and have a "reflector" or central distribution point (what you call a "robot") which maintains the email addresses of all the people on the mailing list. In order to add or remove yourself to the mailing list, you typically have to send a message to name-of-mailing-list-REQUEST, not to the whole mailing list of course. Now days there are usually web pages that people can use to subscribe and unsubscribe and view the archives, and which the administrator can use to moderate messages, but in the old days the moderator was a human and administered the list via email. To save bandwidth (in the days that it mattered, i.e. over the slow ARPANET and over international connections and expensive dial up modems) there would be redistribution lists for regions and organizations, which users or local administrators would have to manage themselves (or the central administrator would have to forward requests to the redistribution list administrator), so only one copy of the message had to be sent to each redistribution list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list

An electronic mailing list or email list is a special use of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to its members or customers, but typically refers to four things:

1) a list of email addresses,

2) the people ("subscribers") receiving mail at those addresses,

3) the publications (email messages) sent to those addresses, and

4) a reflector, which is a single email address that, when designated as the recipient of a message, will send a copy of that message to all of the subscribers.

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

#199

Post by belorn » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:03 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #169

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 ca…

When the message is a threat of violence or hitmen, it should be taken serious regardless of the targeted person gender.

It is very important to not trivialize harassment directed at men because they are male and not female. That is part of the very gender stereotype that it is the cause of the statistics your referenced, and reinforcing that behavior will only make things worse.

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

#200

Post by martiuk » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 3:04 PM UTC

I sometime think whether some people, especially people like Lennart did not experience bullying at school and would prefer the internet be policed to prevent any "attacks" made towards them.

Sometimes you just need to take it on the chin and carry on.

Maybe it's because I'm from the UK and you just expect the the world to shit on you whenever possible, I'm not really affected by outright attacks and offensiveness, but I probably wouldn't let anyone get to me, like Lennart shows.