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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"

#71

Post by mike_hearn »

tomp wrote: post #46
chris_wot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I read Linus write: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F✦CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" https://lkml.or…

On the other hand, I don't consider this bad. Sure, it's offensive, but he has quite a good reason to be upset - reading one byte at a time will be really slow. Could he say it in a better way? Obviously. Could you interpret his words in a less literal way? Obviously. I don't know Linus, but he seems a good, selfless guy, with the best intentions at heart. If he's not politically correct, who the fuck cares? Sometime…

It's really not political correctness to just keep technical discussions calm and non-personal. Meanwhile, consider the chilling effect that kind of attitude has. I know quite a few skilled engineers who would just walk out if their boss talked to them like that, regardless of the merits of the underlying discussion. It's just wildly unprofessional and when Linus does that kind of thing, it sets the tone for all the other Linux-wannabe's who think "great engineers flame people!! i should flame people too!!".

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

#72

Post by forgottenpass »

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

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.

It's not that we "can't" discuss it, you just have to be prepared for the discomfort of disagreement from both reasonable and unreasonable positions. Bad positions will be argued well, and good positions will be argued poorly.

The empathy to understand issues from stances you disagree with is necessary to make arguments that sway people to your position. The ability to be as critical of your own positions as those you disagree with is how you ditch silly ideas and improve the defense of your good ideas.

The reader has to put in more effort than looking at a salty conversation and coming out the other end saying "gee, that was frosty, therefore I don't have to think about the issue seriously and can conclude the position I had going in was right all along." It may not be ideal, but making the best of a bad situation is a practical approach often necessary to get anything useful done. Do you want to change minds or do you want to indulge in the comfort of showing everyone just how right you are?

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

#73

Post by naner »

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 technical merit is king, however, things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially very large groups.

I think Lennart's experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional.

I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction and awkwardness is always intense and tiring/difficult to deal with. I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.

This doesn't only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type social environment as well, but in a different way.

I love what I do, but there's a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :)

EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.

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

#74

Post by forca »

_delirium wrote: post #52
forca wrote: post #17

I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several r…

Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the OpenBSD community is not that: there are m…

I'm talking devs and sysadmins. I agree with you that NetBSD is the friendliest of the bunch.

Theo de Raadt is a great guy. He gets a bad rap when it's undeserved. What the OBSD guys is very serious stuff. He gets a lot of flak but running an OS and security software project as successfully as he does takes a strong personality. He has that, and in the real, he's a nice, friendly guy. He simply has no tolerance for people with no merit and nothing to add. Anyone would be the same.

I've met a couple of snarky FreeBSD admins, but they were also Linux and Windows admins at the same time. These two guys were full of themselves regardless of platform.

BSD (in general) tends to be more polished than Linux and suffers fewer bugs out of the box. Again, this is what I've noticed. I've yet, in almost 20 years of using FreeBSD off and on, ever had an issue with it that was a deal breaker. I cannot say this of the various Linux distros.

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

#75

Post by bad_user »

PaulHoule wrote: post #55
bad_user wrote: post #51

This doesn't pertain to " Open Source " in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definit…

I think if you're involved in a closed-source company and you act like an ass too many times you'll get fired.

It depends - usually the thinking is that this has an impact on the company's bottom line, therefore employees are forbidden to act like this in public. Internal dialogs are an entirely different matter on the other hand.

And in open-source I actively avoid projects that are run by jerks, because my thinking is that an open-source project has less chance of surviving and flourishing when being led by jerks, plus the community's support will probably be frustrating. So that's part of the cost analysis I'm usually doing, with the exception being big projects that are very well established.

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

#76

Post by RVuRnvbM2e »

forca wrote: post #31
RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's disgusting. Luckily he's a brilliant engineer and was able to withstand the flames long enough for people to recognise how good his software is. Pulseaudio and systemd are two of the best things to happen to Linux in years.

Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready. PA was not ready for primetime when it was initially released. Everyone knows this. It works fine now after many fixes and considerable time. systemd is the same. A lot o…

> Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO.

Have you considered that a flexible, high-quality OS audio subsystem might be difficult to bang out in one weekend?

> ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable.

Are you kidding? Every desktop install before pulseaudio was a crapshoot when it came to audio.

> I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready.

No-one forced anyone to switch to pulseaudio, and has any software ever been perfect in release 0.1? I personally upgraded straight from Debian squeeze (default ALSA) to wheezy (default Pulse) without a single issue, because pulseaudio wasn't integrated until it was stable.

> What I don't like is the hooks that systemd places into software it has no business touching, like Gnome.

It's not like systemd people sneaked their "hooks" into Gnome. Gnome switched to systemd interfaces (e.g. logind) because they fixed real bugs!

> Userland software should not be touched by this. Full stop.

It isn't! Developers are just switching because it is better.

Wow. This post is a good example of the baseless accusations Lennart has to put up with.

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

#77

Post by Someone1234 »

[deleted] wrote: post #65
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…

[deleted]

I'm confused, did he force you or anyone else to utilise his "crap?" If it is "crap" why are you using it? And what's more why are you UPSET that you're voluntarily using his contributions? What you just said literally makes zero sense to me...

Also he hasn't (according to him nor Wikipedia) contributed to the Linux kernel, yet you moved kernels to avoid his "crap." Makes zero sense. The Linux kernel isn't one of his projects.

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

#78

Post by kibwen »

kazinator wrote: post #68
mike_hearn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet in general has problems with this, but I suspect it's much worse in the open source world where unmoderated forums are standard. If you look at the moderation tools available in something like mailman, they're very poor. It's just not been a priority for technical discussion forums at all. And the social convention is to leave forums largely unmoderated anyway, so it's easy to get into a downward spiral…

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.

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

#79

Post by ivraatiems »

rdtsc wrote: post #50

> By many he [Linus] is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux. It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is his personality. What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a "well on technical merits Linus was ri…

> I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.

This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - neither does having strong opinions and good reasons for them.

The argument you have made comes in another form, and I hope when I phrase it this way you'll see why I disagree strongly: "Do you know who I am?!"

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

#80

Post by Someone1234 »

qwerta wrote: post #62
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 find it (mo/i)ronic that you reference people with full name "XYZ attacked me", only for verification of course, but you forgot to include your own name.

He named the GitHub repo which has his name in big bold letters: https://github.com/nanoscopic
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