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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"

#231

Post by logn »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #47
fidotron wrote: post #30

He's just the new Drepper. Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole. Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git…

I disagree with Linux failing as a potential platform for end user deployment. We might even seen SteamOS take off.

Me too. The platform for end-user deployment is largely the browser. That's not Linux but the servers behind them are. And with 80% of smartphones on Android, along with a slew of other embedded devices, Linux truly does stand in a strong position. Further, most 'big data' is driven by Linux.

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

#232

Post by bhouston »

imanaccount247 wrote: post #173
bhouston wrote: post #107

I'll probably get burned for saying this but I think this is related to GamerGate/SocialJusticeWarriors. I think that other controversy is being portrayed as anti-feminist (and there is a lot of undertones of that) but I think that it is more indicative of a general problem -- it is basically unrestrained incivility against those whom one has disagreements, or who has done perceived wrongs. For some reason it has bec…

>It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with. Except the anonymity involved means people on the other side send abuse to themselves and their side in order to shift discussion off of the topic and onto how their opponents are evil abu…

I think the anonymity is the core problem-- anonymous crowds are easy to undermine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur) and they are always the least self-controlled. But the larger, amorphous and distributed the anonymous group, the more easy it is to undermine them via real Agent provocateurs and also people who are in it just for the kicks of causing havoc.

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

#233

Post by vidarh »

haberman wrote: post #175
vidarh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

> While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that being exasperated is justification to be arbitrarily caustic? There are plent…

I'm saying that sufficient exasperation makes it understandable whether or not it is justified. Linus is human. Humans are not flawless.

> There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.

And a lot of people who "do not talk this way" are a lot worse by dealing with these kind of issues through backstabbing or veiled insults.

While some are saint-like and never say or do a bad thing to contributors, I don't buy that the lack of abrasive language in any way is a reliable indicator of civility.

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

#234

Post by krober »

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…

He's not saying open source is categorically awful, but that there are awful things about it. Pointing out these deficiencies is a way to foster communication to fix shortcomings that may exist in the community. You're right, FOSS has allowed a great many things to happen, but that doesn't mean FOSS and its methods are perfect. Continually revisiting and refining processes should be at the forefront of FOSS.

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

#235

Post by imanaccount247 »

This trend towards using victim status from trolls as a shield to ignore real criticism is really unfortunate. Linus's criticism of redhat and redhat employees is perfectly reasonable and valid. Trying to distract attention from it and pretend he is just some evil bully nobody should listen to is incredibly childish and counter productive.

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

#236

Post by npsimons »

stephen_g wrote: post #177
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."

Do you seriously not see the difference between Lennart saying something like "if you don't like it, you're wrong and should use another distro" [that doesn't use Systemd] and Linus saying things like "you should have been retroactively aborted" and "you're so stupid I can't believe you didn't die as a child'? Or the difference between him telling someone not to use his software and people setting up crowd funding to…

Death threats are never justified.

But I was paraphrasing Poettering's responses to perfectly valid criticism. He did basically say "fuck off", just sugar coated it, which doesn't make it any better. It's just really incongruous to hear someone who is so polarizing (on purpose!) claim that other people should not be so polarizing. And funny how he never seemed to notice these assholes until his friend, Kay Sievers, got called out on LKML for refusing to fix a bug he introduced. It fits though; Poettering is so short sighted that he can't even see the value in portability, nor does he think anything besides desktop Linux matters (when Linux runs, oh, everywhere).

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

#237

Post by vidarh »

Diederich wrote: post #222
vidarh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible. There are also people involved on both sides, and people get angry and frustrated. > Being polite about doing that would benefit the same set of people, and may others at the same time. And a lot of people believe that sugar-coating it would reduce the benefit by signalling that Kays behaviour wasn't so bad after all.

In my opinion, there is a huge distance between politely pointing out the faults and problems with something and sugar-coating. And maybe this approaches the crux of the problem. It seems that there is a false dichotomy at work here. Being polite (or, indeed, just not being verbally abusive) takes less time and energy, and is overwhelmingly more effective, than being overly abrasive. I don't believe 'Sugar-coating' h…

When we're dealing with someone who repeatedly have ignored advice, instructions and admonitions and continues to cause major breakage, then yes, it would be sugar-coating to write something similar to what you suggested.

The point is that the person in question was being rude and disrespectful by continuing to ignore the instructions he'd been given in the past, and repeatedly caused a lot of very real, very heartfelt anger from a lot of people over the time he wasted for them.

Pretending not to be angry over that is very much sugar-coating to me.

Now, there are nicer ways of being direct and expressing anger, but pretending there was no anger and no valid reasons to be angry would be flat out dishonest. And I really don't think the recipient in this case had any reason to expect any civility from Linus at this point, even if others might choose less direct language.

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

#238

Post by npsimons »

shabda wrote: post #182
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. "

Ah, I see I've found yet another person who only reads the inflammatory email by Torvalds, but doesn't bother to read the preceding thread where the person Torvalds is addressing refused to admit his mistake, and further, insisted that other people work around it.

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

#239

Post by UK-AL »

naner wrote: post #73

For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other. In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where…

It because programming can very x vs y way of doing things. Where as most other professions theres a gray area in the middle that can be reached.

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

#240

Post by tomp »

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…

> Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results.

Thanks for saying this. I completely agree. I'm from Europe though, maybe it's worse in the US.

Also, I love the second post you cited (Equal Weights). It's completely clear to me that there is absolutely no sexism/racism involved, and also how stupid people would think that it's racist/sexist.

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