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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"

#211

Post by tankenmate »

inclemnet wrote: post #159
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…

> 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…

And Lennart's post is bit of a mess of over generalisation.

Both arguments have qualitative merit, but also large quantitative holes.

There are many open source communities (and there are many altogether; good and bad) that don't have any of this sort of behaviour. It would seem that the Linux kernel / systems arena would have more than its fair share.

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

#213

Post by cookiecaper »

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…

>They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.

The community invites you to produce something superior. PulseAudio and systemd may have their own problems, but they're in place for a reason. I don't think they were selected due to some irrational hero worship for Poettering; they were selected because they were the most concise way to solve a real problem.

As much as one may dislike Pulse, it provides a unified, modern audio system that just works. I don't know if you remember the bad old days when it was a fight to get applications to play audio correctly, but that has gone away with the introduction of Pulse. For all of its potential problems and inefficiencies, it provides the basics in a reasonably accessible and universal manner.

>And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD.

It is optional. Open-source means you can run your own distro completely free of Poeterring's touch. You may have to deal with the legacy left by his projects, but that's nothing special; he had to deal with the legacy of ALSA et al and wrote compatibility layers that were major factors in the successful proliferation of PulseAudio.

>The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought.

I'm sure the nerds that are entrusted with the security and sanity of millions of systems across the world would disagree about whether "proper thought" was involved.

I don't really see a point in addressing the rest of your reply. Disagreement is fine, but please be civil. Poeterring and others in the community are obviously capable and they deserve acknowledgement and respect, which is a different thing than deference or worship. If you disagree, please disagree, but do so with civility. This shouldn't have to be complicated.

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

#215

Post by pikachu_is_cool »

Fourteen year old kids were telling me that they were going to skullfuck my grandmother with a rake over Xbox Live, a decade ago, just because I killed them once or twice in Halo 2. Internet insults have always been ridiculously over the top, it's nothing new. Nobody is actually going to rape or kill her over this, you're a massive idiot if you think for even a split second that they would.

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

#216

Post by qwerta »

nanoscopic wrote: post #144
qwerta wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not cool. Proper way is to reference commits and bugs. Just imagine someone Google your name and first link is to this comment: XY attacked me....

Go ahead and Google my name. You'll find that it is mostly just attacks on my character related to an incident with UMD and the FBI. Unfortunately people don't reference facts; news ( and people in general ) just believe what they want. Once again, my point in referencing these people is to say that negative attitudes and attacks are widespread, and happens by many professional ( the people I mentioned ). I don't bla…

But I do not care that some guy refused to approve your name or whatever. I do care, that you are shaming people you do not like on public forum. It is pretty much same behavior as Linus and other a*holes in OS community.

Congrats on top comment BTW.

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

#217

Post by imanaccount247 »

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…

>Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool?

He does, it is called fedora. The problem is that red hat has so much influence that people will follow their lead. In this case, they pretty much have to as some software simply won't work if they don't follow.

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

#218

Post by makomk »

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…

With PulseAudio's development methods it'd be difficult to bang out a flexible, high-quality OS audio system in any finite amount of time. For example, they merged a patch in I think 4.0 that was literally incomplete - it changed the undocumented and uncommented internal interface between resamplers and the rest of PulseAudio without updating all of the resampling code to match, so if anything used the non-updated resamplers PulseAudio crashed. Their official volume control app used one of those resamplers; using it caused PulseAudio to crash randomly. This was eventually fixed in 5.0 by reverting the offending change, but of course it came with a bunch of new features of questionable quality. (Not sure if there were any regressions this time around; I gave up trying to track down PulseAudio crashes after that one.)

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

#219

Post by disjointrevelry »

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

Linus' behavior is one that is necessary in order to work with the dominant culture in OSS, particularly white males. The open forum insults to establish the pecking order, and to deter thin skinned people is one that is also abundant in other cultures where open forums are used for establishing the hierarchy. One such example are some East-Asian cultures, such as the Chinese.

The question is, is this method of selection conducive and is the use of obsessive aggression costing open forum projects like OSS through selective acceptance? There may have never been an alternative to the extremely abusive nature of white-male dominated cultures in the first place in regards to projects in open forums.

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

#220

Post by tomp »

pyre wrote: post #196
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 h…

> Is it wrong to want to change things?

No. It's not wrong to not want to change them either. I like Linus. He delivers. Many people talk nice, but it's all bullshit.

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