"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"

#401

Post by kazinator » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

anthony_d wrote: post #391

kazinator wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is a particular mailing list configuration (one often seen today); not what mailing lists are . Traditional mailing lists (such as ones created by a vanilla install of GNU Mailman) do not work they way you describe. They work like this: 1. You send a message to a mailing list address. This address belongs to a software agent which sends the message to everyone. Your From: header is clearly pres…

What you describe certainly used to be common, but it's not anymore. You didn't say why the old style is better. I find it frustrating for a mailing list because invariably a long thread is going to have missing messages. In the context of a mailing list the default behavior should be to reply to the list and setting the Reply-To takes care of that nicely. Btw, the "because I've been doing it for n years" argument ge…

Reply-To does not take care of anything nicely. There is no "default" behavior about how to reply; you have to think about whether to reply privately or publicly based on the topic and your intended content. (If anything, the default should probably be privately, unless the response really is of interest to the whole multitude of subscribers. All too often, mailing list discussions devolve to the point that it's not the case.)

Reply-To: stomps over the option of replying privately. It can still be done, with manual steps. Worse, someone might not be paying attention, and just use Reply out of habit, thinking it's a private reply, when in fact it is being broadcast to the list. It's very sneaky!

The old style is better because it is more convenient and non-broken. It keeps conversations intact by letting people have a debate with the mailing list without subscribing to it, and doesn't rudely re-program your Reply button into doing Reply All.

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

#402

Post by brockers » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 7:50 PM UTC

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…

>> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them.

This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were "not invented here."

That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That he may be a good developer, but what he does has less to do with engineering merit and more to do with politics.

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

#403

Post by kazinator » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 7:51 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #393

kazinator wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is a particular mailing list configuration (one often seen today); not what mailing lists are . Traditional mailing lists (such as ones created by a vanilla install of GNU Mailman) do not work they way you describe. They work like this: 1. You send a message to a mailing list address. This address belongs to a software agent which sends the message to everyone. Your From: header is clearly pres…

>What you're describing is a particular mailing list configuration (one often seen today); not what mailing lists are. So are you! Your original point hinges entirely on having many non-centralized posts and counting them as part of the list.

I only described the technical back-drop for mailing lists. The behaviors of setting Reply-To: headers, and of rejecting posts from non-subscribers, are still implemented as hacks against the old mechanism. These configuration features have not changed how mailing lists work.

My original original point is that moderating mailing lists is not possible. I have not seen an effective counterargument. Reply-to munging and subscribe-to-post do not add up to effective moderation, and are easily circumvented.

I have seen it happen: someone banned from posting to a mailing list harassing discussion participants anyway. Perhaps he subscribed with a phony e-mail address to collect the list traffic, and then just composed replies as himself to everyone in the debate, but excluding the list robot (which would reject the copy).

"Modern" mailing lists still pass through the Cc: material which makes this possible, even though they set Reply-To, and disallow posts from non-members.

I don't care how you set up your mailing list; you're not going to easily be able to moderate out persistent trolls. You can't use IP block banning easily, because trolls don't contact your server directly; they can go through any number of e-mail service providers. If a troll keeps coming back over and over again, using different gmail addresses, are you going to ban everything from gmail?

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

#404

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 7:53 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…

[deleted]

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

#405

Post by antirez » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 7:56 PM UTC

solipsism wrote: post #376

antirez wrote: post #254

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 fe…

Could you hint or point us toward some of the ways your vision on software development is far from what is considered good practice? I like to absorb counter-normal opinions.

Just a few examples: reinvent the wheel (Redis uses its own event loop, strings library, and in general has very little external deps). Always backporting new features when they have little interactions with the rest on the code base, to patch-level releases of the stable version. Using data structures or algorithms which are not common. For example Redis implements LRU by random sampling. Taking extreme tradeoffs: Redis is also a store but the dataset is in RAM, Redis Cluster does not try to achieve theoretical optimum of CP or AP in order to win latency, lack of metadata, simplicity, and so forth.

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

#406

Post by mike_hearn » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 7:57 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #325

Someone1234 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself Releasing free software and what you accuse him of are entirely different things. Frankly I'd like to understand how you even equate someone releasing software which you aren't even forced to use, to essentially ramming his opinions of how YOUR machine should run down your throat. The anti-systemd people really aren't coming across at all wel…

Unfortunately, things aren't as simple as you'd like them to be. The systemd developers have made many political decisions that ended up putting systemd in a position that makes it difficult to avoid. The prime move often cited is the engulfment of udev inside the systemd codebase and entangling it with systemd's shared files (formerly belonging to libsystemd-shared, not it's just a big libsystemd blob), and later re…

But again, nobody is forcing you to use systemd. You are upset because you want to upgrade some part of your OS but not have systemd, even though the developers of the part you want to upgrade decided to use it. But you could just .... not upgrade. You could use Debian Stable, or fork the programs that are using systemd to take it out.

It's been years since I used desktop Linux, but frankly so far my impression of systemd is that it sounds like someone in the Linux community is finally doing some damned architecture work for once instead of just trying to build a desktop on top of a pile of historical accidents. I remember when GNOME 2 was being developed (back then I was a user) and the massive, rampaging flamewars about how GNOME 2 was killing Linux, how it was fundamentally against the UNIX way etc. Back then it was Havoc Pennington who got shitted on by the "community" for daring to suggest that maybe you don't really need seven kinds of clock widget installed by default. And now what I see is people forking GNOME because they love GNOME 2 so much and they don't want to switch to GNOME 3.

Back when I used to work on Linux related stuff, one of my projects was a cross-distro packaging framework. The idea was you could create binaries that'd install and be upgradeable on any reasonable distribution. We did a lot of work into binary compatibility and other tools so you could make binaries that soft-linked against libraries, etc. The amount of crap we got was unreal. A lot of people in high places in the community, especially from distributions, hated the idea that maybe people could just download apps from a website and it'd work. I think at some level they understood that distros competed largely on the size of their package repositories and if that approach to software distribution became mainstream they'd lose their "lock in". And some of them had internalised the idea that "Linux is great. Linux doesn't distribute software in the same way as other platforms. Therefore that's what makes Linux great."

When I look at MacOS X what I see is a very successful OS that has an architecture rather similar to what systemd sounds like (the OS X equivalent is called Launch Services). So maybe that's why distros are getting behind it.

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

#407

Post by lallysingh » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 8:00 PM UTC

brockers wrote: post #402

lallysingh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them. This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were "not invented here." That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That…

(I'm not asking combatitively, I'm genuinely curious)

Wouldn't RedHat be the one to blame here? And the complicity of other distro vendors who also included it? RedHat doesn't back KDE, but KDE does quite well.

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

#408

Post by Diederich » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 8:00 PM UTC

mcantor wrote: post #384

Diederich wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big believer in 'spectrum of gray areas'. This particular quote from Linus is particularly bad. What I want to firmly point out is the general community's level of acceptance of verbally abusive language. There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess. What I'd love to see is the community acknowledge that using and even encouraging such lan…

I agree with you. The problem I'm seeing in this thread relates to this point: > There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess. Right now, a lot of people simply do not make the distinction between verbal abuse and direct language. In other words, they are arguing that we should not bother discouraging verbal abuse because it "shouldn't" affect t…

Yeah, I don't really have anything more specific in mind. I think your analysis is spot on.

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

#409

Post by the_why_of_y » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 8:05 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #42

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be very interested if you could provide evidence of Lennart being an asshole. I've honestly never seen him be anything other than professional.

His entire m.o. is passive aggressive asshole, whereas Linus is balls out asshole, but has the relatively unique quality of being right more often than not. I'd even argue this post is lennart using the genuinely disgusting antics of others as a way to deflect potential criticism of his work in future. This is why, like Drepper, many view him as a long term liability to the ecosystem as a whole.

That's odd... I thought passive-aggressive is when you're deliberately failing to do something you're supposed to do and capable of doing, but what he's usually accused of is actually doing too many things - please clarify this apparent contradiction.

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

#410

Post by bronson » Mon, Oct 06, 2014, 8:07 PM UTC

mcantor wrote: post #384

Diederich wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big believer in 'spectrum of gray areas'. This particular quote from Linus is particularly bad. What I want to firmly point out is the general community's level of acceptance of verbally abusive language. There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess. What I'd love to see is the community acknowledge that using and even encouraging such lan…

I agree with you. The problem I'm seeing in this thread relates to this point: > There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess. Right now, a lot of people simply do not make the distinction between verbal abuse and direct language. In other words, they are arguing that we should not bother discouraging verbal abuse because it "shouldn't" affect t…

Universal expectation? It seems you two are railing against a straw man. Abusive behavior, even on the LKML, even by Linus, is rare. If you feel as strongly as you seem to, please subscribe, form a first-hand opinion, and maybe contribute to positive change. (I contributed around 2001-2003 and really enjoyed it; I don't subscribe now).

Too many misunderstandings have been caused by well-meaning people reading too much into cherry-picked HN comments.

Hm. Because these comments are WAY off topic and have now drowned out the article and any rational discussion, I won't comment any further. Diederich, I hope you'll show more restraint with the Reply button.