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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"

#421

Post by RivieraKid »

meapix wrote: post #357
zimbatm wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is is that each time offensive Linus quotes are used only a handful of them show up ? Over the thousands of emails that have been exchanged in the last fifteen years there surely must exist a bigger variety.

How could a person who has 24 hours a day be: 1. very nice. 2. receiver of whatever shit (including good shit) people send. 3. productive. 4. responsible to make a critical system work. 5. a filter of bad code. 6. ... Without offending anybody?

Any emotionally mature person shouldn't have a problem with what you've described.

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

#422

Post by grantmnz »

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…

I am disappointed to learn that you feel I have attacked you in the past. I apologise unreservedly for any offence I caused you. I always try to be civil and professional in my interactions and to be mindful of the difficulty of conveying the intended tone over an electronic medium.

If I have voiced some criticism of your code it is certainly not because I wished to belittle your efforts or to make any value judgements about your worth as a person.

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

#424

Post by peterwwillis »

wffurr wrote: post #194
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 especiall…

Yeah, I figured explaining my opinion was more valid than the verbal diahhrea I initially concocted. But since I never took a position on whether his treatment was fair, I think your attempt to paint me as an advocate of violence is a lot less classy. To be clear, it's not that I dislike him personally, it's that he's an open source troll and this is just more trolling. I'm sure he's a lovely person when he isn't shitting on Linux.

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

#425

Post by DonHopkins »

kazinator wrote: post #294
DonHopkins wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 centr…

> 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. Counterexample to your claim: browse the linux kernel mailing list archive at https://lkml.org/ On any message you can click [headers] to view the headers. You can see rich Cc: lines full of…

Sounds like a terrible idea. Is it a bug or a feature? Why would anyone want to do that? I'd be afraid that some mail readers would choke on the empty addresses, and I can't think of any reason you'd want them, or any purpose they'd serve. It doesn't ever include actual email addresses in the cc does it? Because those poor users would get at least two copies of every reply.

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

#426

Post by DonHopkins »

kazinator wrote: post #245
DonHopkins wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 centr…

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…

Yeah, I'm old too. I subscribed to INFO-COBOL@MC (which was not about COBOL, but used that name because joke mailing lists were forbidden on the ARPANET), DB-LOVERS@MC (maintained by the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow, specializing in dead baby jokes, not databases), ITS-LOVERS@MC aka UNIX-HATERS@MC, and I also ran a large international mailing list NeWS-makers@brillig.umd.edu, with lots of redistribution lists as well as usenet subscribers (routed via uunet) for many years during the 80's.

My point is that an email message that has a bunch of people's addressed in it, but no central server or list of email addresses, which you reply to by copying all the addresses in the To: and CC: fields, is not a mailing list, no matter how sophisticated your email reader is. It's just an email message, and you're doing all of the work in your email reader. (Hello, Emacs!) That's not a mailing list. It's just an email message with a list of recipients. There's nothing preventing any recipient from adding or removing any address from the list, and there's no central archive or administration or moderation.

Here's what mailing lists looked like in the 80's:

http://its.svensson.org/.MAIL.%3B.MCNEW

Who remembers Mark Crispin's oft-repeated catch phrase, "MM is not at fault!"

JWZ's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

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

#427

Post by dbaupp »

Dewie wrote: post #81
doe88 wrote: post #53

For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I've come to study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it's more important than degrees and schools. For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it wa…

> Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. Last I saw, reading the compiler wasn't recommended (by someone) since the code is apparently old and not idiomatic.

The standard library (for the most part) is reasonable; the compiler itself is not quite as nice, but it's improving.

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

#428

Post by kazinator »

DonHopkins wrote: post #425
kazinator wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Counterexample to your claim: browse the linux kernel mailing list archive at https://lkml.org/ On any message you can click [headers] to view the headers. You can see rich Cc: lines full of…

Sounds like a terrible idea. Is it a bug or a feature? Why would anyone want to do that? I'd be afraid that some mail readers would choke on the empty addresses, and I can't think of any reason you'd want them, or any purpose they'd serve. It doesn't ever include actual email addresses in the cc does it? Because those poor users would get at least two copies of every reply.

The empty addresses are just in the public mail archive that is exposed through the web. They were scrubbed away by the archiver software. The recipients of the original message got it with all that information intact.

Users do not get two copies because the mailing list software is smart enough to calculate a set difference between the expanded mailing list, and the set of addresses which are already in To: or Cc:

GNU Mailman makes this a configurable preference (per subscriber, I think!) The reason is that some people prefer to get the duplicates. A possible reason is that they want the official list copy, which is subject to some custom mail processing rules based on its list headers, or rewritten subject line.

By the way, some people also prefer to get only mailing list digests. For users who receive only digests, discussion participation is still possible because the discussion is based on the normal To/From/CC mechanism of e-mail.

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

#429

Post by DonHopkins »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #416
kazinator wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a 'modern' mailing list a troll will be able to spam people on the list, but they won't really be replied to. They won't be able to participate. The actual conversations will be moderated.

Does anybody remember the nettime mailing list, and the amazing ascii graphics code-poetry performance art trolling (and excellent personalized customer support) by Netochka Nezvanova aka NN aka antiorp aka integer aka =cw4t7abs aka m2zk!n3nkunzt aka punktprotokol aka 0f0003, the brilliant yet sociopathic developer of nato.0+55+3d for Max? Now THAT was some spectacular trolling (and spectacular software).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

http://jodi.org/

http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/ The name Netochka Nezvanova is a pseudonym borrowed from the main character of Fyodor Dostoevski’s first novel; it translates loosely as “nameless nobody.” Her fans, her critics, her customers and her victims alike refer to her as a “being” or an “entity.” The rumors and speculation about her range all over the map. Is she one person with multiple identities? A female New Zealander artist, a male Icelander musician or an Eastern European collective conspiracy? The mystery only propagates her legend.

Cramer, Florian. (2005) "Software dystopia: Netochka Nezvanova - Code as cult" in Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, Chapter 4, Automatisms and Their Constraints. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute. https://web.archive.org/web/20070215185215/http://pzwart.wdk...

    Empire = body.
    hensz nn - simply.SUPERIOR
    
    per chansz auss! ‘reazon‘ nn = regardz geert lovink + h!z !lk
    az ultra outdatd + p!t!fl pre.90.z ueztern kap!tal!zt buffoonz
    
    ent!tl!ng u korporat fasc!ztz = haz b!n 01 error ov zortz on m! part.
    [ma!z ! = z!mpl! ador faz!on]
    geert lovink + ekxtra 1 d!menz!onl kr!!!!ketz [e.g. dze ultra unevntfl \
    borrrrrrr!ng andreas broeckmann. alex galloway etc]
    = do not dze konzt!tuz!on pozez 2 komput dze teor!e much
    elsz akt!vat 01 lf+ !nundaz!e.
    
    jetzt ! = return 2 z!p!ng tea + !zolat!ng m! celllz 4rom ur funerl.
    
    vr!!endl!.nn
    
    ventuze.nn
    
       /_/  
                             /  
                \            \/       i should like to be a human plant  
               \/       _{  
                       _{/  
                                      i will shed leaves in the shade  
           \_\                        because i like stepping on bugs

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

#430

Post by the_why_of_y »

lmm wrote: post #45
danielweber wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who thinks systemd, as well as the entire OSS practice of "we're bored, let's re-invent the wheel"[1], is taking everything in the wrong direction: you still don't handle this with abuse. You deal with it via forking. [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

If systemd was willing to conform to a standardized interface, published on freedesktop.org or similar, so that it was possible to swap out compatible implementations, I would agree with you. But instead the systemd folks deliberately make incompatible changes that they know will break non-systemd systems (e.g. Gentoo). At that point a fork does no good; it's "dos ain't done 'till lotus won't run" all over again.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo...
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