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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"

#251

Post by dr_zoidberg »

This article reminded me of what Valerie Aurora[1] posted & discussed. She called for feminism values, and Lennart is calling for less hate. I get the feeling they are both talking of the same underlying problem.

On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angry comments about not updating my OS and a ban from the bug tracking system. Some time later, they added Windows XP SP2 as a requirement. I still use GIMP, but whenever I find a bug, I just wait patiently until the next version to see if they have fixed it.

[1] HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180

Edit: found the bug report, it was SP2, not SP1 as I first thought. Also fixed some typos.

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

#252

Post by freehunter »

snarfy wrote: post #23

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele Linus's approach is a cultural thing.

A lot of discriminatory or hateful actions can be written off as cultural. Racism is cultural in the Southern US. Doesn't mean it's acceptable.

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

#253

Post by nanoscopic »

Alupis wrote: post #183
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 r…

The specific bug was in the Varnish reverse proxy. It had to do with the non-functionality of the ESI ( Edge Side Includes ) "support". I really like Varnish and was making great use of it, and was happy to learn it supported ESI. I thought that if you change the contents of an ESI file, and then invalidate that file in Varnish, that Varnish would know the files that include it and invalidate them as well. Nope. Varnish seemingly has no recognition of ESI in regard to invalidation and simply includes the contents of the file, in effect treating them like regular SSI ( server side includes ).

I reported this behavior properly, and I was told that I don't know what I am talking about and there was no problem. The bug I filed was then closed without the issue being fixed or addressed in any way.

I can and will make a competing reverse proxy; because ESI is important IMO, and disregarding supporting it properly is silly.

I think Varnish is great; I'm happy it exists; I think it is silly to close a reported bug on the codebase without addressing it properly. The proper address to it is to simply say "No we don't really support ESI", just as I have said "No my parser is not really an 'XML' parser, because it doesn't really follow the spec."

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

#254

Post by antirez »

I must be very lucky... because after many many years of writing open source, being involved with at least three communities (IT security with hping, Tcl language with Tcl/Jim-Interpreter, Databases with Redis) I still have to receive serious attacks. Actually the only attacks I can remember are about my vision on how diversity should be handled (I was accused of sexism for saying that people are all alike), and a few company-driven attacks 99% generated from the SF area and for people working for competing companies, and with a big overlap of people accusing me of sexism (go figure...). Basically none of this was ever a great deal, and the remaining 99.999% of the OSS community was always awesome. Basically I'm just a single data point but as somebody involved for a long time in OSS, I can't confirm what I read.

Well, also consider this: I refuse most pull requests, and I'm not the kind of guy that is kind at every cost. I also am part of a minority, being very southern-european, from Sicily, often associated with the worst cliché of the Italian culture, Mafia, ... I also have a vision on software development which is very far from what is considered "good practice". One could expect me to receive more attacks than average.

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

#255

Post by kazinator »

kibwen wrote: post #78
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've never used a mailing list that didn't possess a centralized address like foo-discuss@example.com. And these all require explicit approval to submit messages to the list, in order to keep out spam.

No, they do not all require explicit approval to keep out spam. In GNU Mailman, this is a config option: you can allow non-subscribers to post or not.

All of the mailing lists that I operate on my own mailing list server allow non-subscribers to post. Due to my anti-spam configuration, this isn't a problem.

Traditional mailing lists, before the rise of spam, were usually this way.

And anyway, this is a separate issue. A list which does not re-mail postings from non-subscribers can nevertheless not do Reply-to: munging. So once you are on the list and participate in discussions, you're still sending messages to the list, as well as directly to those in the discussion.

Earlier this year I was involved in a mailing list discussion in which one of the parties was actually (unbeknownst to me for a while) a "persona non grata": someone banned from posting to the mailing list. His postings were not being seen by the subscribers, but only those in the debate. This list does use Reply-to:; he just (trivially) circumvented it.

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

#256

Post by muyuu »

disjointrevelry wrote: post #219
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 selec…

It has little to do with "white males" and more to do with Open Communities with no barrier of entry needing to be extremely dismissive when a standard is not met, to make up for said lack of barriers of entry.

The vast majority of OSS projects that don't start from a strong core fail miserably and it's because of this. People extrapolate their real life professional behaviour to a virtual, open scene where assumptions of competence and commitment fall flat massively.

If anything, OSS needs more people like Linus Torvalds and Theo de Raadt managing projects and not post modern clowns with "white male" guilt. It's not by chance that Linux is possibly the biggest success in OSS history with real community contribution, and most of the others have been carried out by their respective cores with very little external output.

American PC behaviour is a disaster for OSS and that's why a lot of OSS is "awful" where it matters, which is in quality, in competitiveness and in leading the industry. Companies like Google and Mozilla lord it over OSS projects that are basically "glass house" corporative projects with extremely little external contribution (other than forking code from Linux, Apache, BSD, etc).

If anything the OSS is not dismissive enough of shit and this is holding us back.

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

#257

Post by gambiting »

xroche wrote: post #88
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

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…

I work on a project which sells millions of units each year. You could also argue that idiots committing code to the code base should be stopped. Yet I am very certain that if my manager started calling anyone an idiot and telling them they should have been aborted, he would very likely end out of work very quickly. Yet somehow it's acceptable of Torvalds? How? Good quality work can be done without telling people they are pieces of shit.

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

#258

Post by inclemnet »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #226
inclemnet wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways. But none of those ways have anything to do with open source. You need to look no further than #gamergate to see that people act like assholes on the internet. > 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…

> But none of those ways have anything to do with open source

More bad arguments! He didn't say that open source is unique. Perhaps he's simply talking about the communities he's actually involved in.

> equating a concept with people

I don't think you do get it. Nothing about Lennart's terminology is particularly unusual - the 'open source community' in standard parlance is a fairly well defined set of people, organisations and forums that isn't particularly controversial to refer to.

I think you really are just using different words as everyone else to mean the same things.

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

#259

Post by aidenn0 »

Lennart specifically called out Gentoo; as a Gentoo user, I do want to speak up in defense of the Gentoo community.

I will concede the point that Lennart has, by far, probably received more vitriol per-capita from the Gentoo community than any others. I'm not going to defend any of the personal attacks launched on him.

However, Lennart writes very opinionated software, and the opinions it takes are more at clash with the Gentoo way than the Fedora way or the Ubuntu way. Furthermore it seems to me that Gentoo users are more conservative than any distro other than Slack.

What this adds up to is that a far larger fraction of the Gentoo community have issues with Lennart's software. There will be some fraction X of people who have issues with his software that will make inappropriate attacks on Lennart himself. Given that a much larger fraction of the Gentoo community has issues with his software than in other communities, the fact he gets a disproportionate amount of vitriol from Gentoo users doesn't necessarily mean that X is larger in Gentoo.

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

#260

Post by [deleted] »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #251

This article reminded me of what Valerie Aurora[1] posted & discussed. She called for feminism values, and Lennart is calling for less hate. I get the feeling they are both talking of the same underlying problem. On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angr…

[deleted]
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