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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"

#441

Post by ivraatiems »

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #281
ivraatiems wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear, as you seem to realize, is a crappy motivator. It only work in limited circumstances and for limited periods of time. It doesn't really change behavior permanently. That "society" does it doesn't make it any better (and when was the last time a judge cussed out a defendant for receiving a guilty verdict?) But I would argue that motivating through fear isn't even relevant to this situation. Is making death threa…

>Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something a valid way to motivate through fear? I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves. >Is cursing somebody out on…

>I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves.

In this statement I was referring to the issue being discussed in this particular thread, not to Linus. Sorry, should have been clearer.

> I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

But as I said - it doesn't change behavior, it only changes whether or not one publicly displays one's thoughts. And even then, it's a temporary effect at best.

> I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what would make programming special in that regard.

It's lousy because it doesn't inspire real change. People don't change their opinions because they got chewed out, even if it was rightfully so. They just learn to resent the people doing the chewing out and oppose them more subtly.

You use our education system as an example - but I don't know that I'd say the education parts of the system (as opposed to the discipline parts, whose effectiveness I would frankly dispute) aren't fear-based. They're generally built to be merit-based (whether they succeed is outside the scope of this discussion).

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

#442

Post by dummyfellow »

aidenn0 wrote: post #259

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…

>Lennart writes very opinionated software.

So does everybody, s/w are rarely written by committee, Linux is as designed by Linus, iOS/Android/WP/OSX/BSD/ are all made by choices of their creators. Why is his opinionated writing, getting in way of your opinionated installing/use of s/w you install on your machine.

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

#443

Post by nwmcsween »

mike_hearn wrote: post #406
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

You are forced when you cannot use the software you used before.

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

#444

Post by nwmcsween »

mike_hearn wrote: post #406
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

You are forced when you cannot use the software you used before.

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

#445

Post by mkal_tsr »

bhouston wrote: post #232
imanaccount247 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> I think the anonymity is the core problem

This explains the high level of rational discourse on news websites and Facebook :-)

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

#446

Post by acdha »

nwmcsween wrote: post #443
mike_hearn wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

You are forced when you cannot use the software you used before.

Forced – does that mean they raided your servers and deleted the old source code or just that you want someone else to do new development following your whims but aren't willing to do it yourself?

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

#447

Post by DonHopkins »

kazinator wrote: post #432
DonHopkins wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wel…

My point never was that an e-mail message is a mailing list. What is a mailing list? It is an "emergent phenomenon"(+). It is not just the mailing list manager; it is not just the handling of a single message. It's not the set of subscribers. It's the whole situation. -- + As in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

My favorite instance of emergent mailing list behavior was when a trouble maker named GUMBY created a "PLEASE-REMOVE-ME" mailing list, just for people who sent email to another entire mailing list asking to be removed from it, instead of sending their request to the administrator at mailing-list-name-REQUEST.

Whenever somebody would make that faux-pas, he'd add them to the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, and the emergent behavior was that those people would discuss amongst themselves the fact that they really wanted to be removed from the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, until they eventually learned that the way to get removed from a mailing list was to simply send email to PLEASE-REMOVE-ME-REQUEST, instead of the entire mailing list.

Worked like a charm!

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

#448

Post by SamReidHughes »

belorn wrote: post #199
minikites wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When the message is a threat of violence or hitmen, it should be taken serious regardless of the targeted person gender. It is very important to not trivialize harassment directed at men because they are male and not female. That is part of the very gender stereotype that it is the cause of the statistics your referenced, and reinforcing that behavior will only make things worse.

The "harassment" i.e. blog comments is not being trivialized. It's pre-trivial.

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

#449

Post by spc476 »

kazinator wrote: post #263
lallysingh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with changing Reply-To?

You mean, what is wrong with setting Reply-To. Reply-To is a special header that is normally not present. It has a valid use case (what it is designed for). It's used when someone composes a message on behalf of someone else (like a secretary on behalf of the boss). It says that another person is the real author; please reply directly to that person. When it's added by a mailing list robot, it wrecks the traditional…

The basis for modern email, RFC-822, has this to say about Reply-To:

    4.4.3.  REPLY-TO / RESENT-REPLY-TO

        This field provides a general  mechanism  for  indicating  any
        mailbox(es)  to which responses are to be sent.  Three typical
        uses for this feature can  be  distinguished.   In  the  first
        case,  the  author(s) may not have regular machine-based mail-
        boxes and therefore wish(es) to indicate an alternate  machine
        address.   In  the  second case, an author may wish additional
        persons to be made aware of, or responsible for,  replies.   *A
        somewhat  different  use  may be of some help to "text message
        teleconferencing" groups equipped with automatic  distribution
        services:   include the address of that service in the "Reply-
        To" field of all messages  submitted  to  the  teleconference;
        then  participants  can  "reply"  to conference submissions to
        guarantee the correct distribution of any submission of  their
        own.*
(emphasis added to the last sentence) So, Reply-To munging isn't out of the realm of possibility. Also, the BNF for Reply-To does allow multiple email addresses to be specified. RFC-2822 and RFC-5322 both say the same thing about Reply-To:

    3.6.2  Originator Fields

        ... When the "Reply-To:" field is present, it
        indicates the address(es) to which the author of the message suggests
        that replies be sent.
It could be argued that Reply-To munging is not allowed by this, but I could still see munging as adding an address to a mailing list email seems a reasonable thing to me.

Also, the "Sender" header is meant for the example you gave (composing and sending an email on behalf of someone else), not Reply-To.

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

#450

Post by notastartup » 

    The Linux community is dominated by western, white, 
    straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days.
Could it be that this is a purely cultural thing? If the fish rots from the head, then isn't something about the culture to be blame? Outside of race but purely from a group of straight males who are probably sexually repressed, beta male, grew up in a individualistic society free to express oneself naturally give rise to such Spartan environment?

Imagine if the linux community consisted mostly of Korean or Japanese males, both countries with strong Neo-confucian values of social hierarchy and mutual respect, avoiding harsh words. But maybe such culture are not apt at producing new ideas but retaining old ones.

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