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The things nobody wants to pay for

lwn.net

91–100 of 133 posts

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#91

I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation. Linus gets paid $1,5 million (from the Linux foundation). I think given the central position and importance of Linus compared to the head of the Mozilla foundation seems a bit off. A little while ago Linus announced that they had lost power at their home due to a large storm. I was p…

"I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation."

That's pretty insane. I used to view Mozilla as "good guys" but it seems they are more like a lot of other non profits that are run mainly for the benefit of their executives.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source software is doing just fine. The siren song of government intervention will not make it better. > People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a panel of peers and experts, then funded, and the impact of the software project can be reviewed. That's the dream. The reality is that the money will get allocated according to politics and corruption. The money will come…

If we recognize that the US government is corrupt, which I believe is a pretty universal sentiment among Americans, why aren't there any substantial anti-corruption movements?

The anti-corruption movements on the right get co-opted by fascists. The anti-corruption movements on the left get bombed by the police and sniped by the FBI.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#93
post #80

I must not be the first person to think that government sponsorship can play a positive role with funding and promoting critical software projects. Just as basic science research is funded by agencies such as the NSF, NIH, DARPA, DoD, and so on. Even the Arts have the NEA. Where is the National Institute of Critical Software? People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a pan…

My impression was, that there was consensus that the bay area was build on public funds and institutions. My intuition is that it is only later, ie. within the past 30-40 years, that the US has adopted this antipathy towards governmental organisations.

probably hit an inflection point in the 1990s when the internet backbone went private and libertarianism started to become so popular in tech circles.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#94

I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation. Linus gets paid $1,5 million (from the Linux foundation). I think given the central position and importance of Linus compared to the head of the Mozilla foundation seems a bit off. A little while ago Linus announced that they had lost power at their home due to a large storm. I was p…

"I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation." That's pretty insane. I used to view Mozilla as "good guys" but it seems they are more like a lot of other non profits that are run mainly for the benefit of their executives.

I believe a good size chunk of that 7 million comes from Google. Which is a pretty strong conflict of interest.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#95

AI can help with documentation. Simple tool can annotate all files and function using ChatGPP4 in few hours, then check it for correctness and completeness, then fix bugs, for few hundred dollars.

Technical documentation is only useful if it's factually accurate. Inaccurate or misleading documentation is generally worse than no documentation.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#96
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source software is doing just fine. The siren song of government intervention will not make it better. > People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a panel of peers and experts, then funded, and the impact of the software project can be reviewed. That's the dream. The reality is that the money will get allocated according to politics and corruption. The money will come…

If we recognize that the US government is corrupt, which I believe is a pretty universal sentiment among Americans, why aren't there any substantial anti-corruption movements?

There is, that's libertarianism. People don't think of it as an anti-corruption movement because their solution to corruption is to have less government rather than have more government employees fighting corruption, but it's the same end goal.

The problem here though isn't lack of money. Linux has lots of money. Adding more money from governments won't change anything. The article says there are hundreds of people paid to hack on the kernel. The problem is that the kernel development culture (sorry, it has to be said) is still a 90s hacker culture, and the people who get employed to work on it are hackers. Hackers like writing code, and dislike writing documentation or unit tests or fiddling with CI systems. The fact the kernel is written in C doesn't help (makes common testing techniques like dependency injection more painful).

The idea that it's companies to blame for lack of docs is rooted in this culture. The people who understand what the docs should say are the ones writing the code to begin with. How will these technical writers know what to write, exactly? Usually in a company they'll do that by interviewing the people with the knowledge, who are mandated to attend the interviews by their managers. In the open source context you can't do that so this boils down to "please hire reverse engineers at vast expense to work out things I already know but can't be bothered communicating" which is a terrible proposition. Who exactly are these unicorn reverse engineers who are skilled enough to work out kernel code but who want to spend all day writing docs? Where will you find them?

Likewise the lack of testing infrastructure. The idea that those terrible freeloading corporations just aren't helping is wrong - they have tried repeatedly and the kernel community has ignored them.

https://kselftest.wiki.kernel.org/

"Kselftest is run everyday on several Linux kernel trees on the 0-Day and Linaro Test Farm and other Linux kernel integration test rings."

https://foundation.kernelci.org/blog/

"The first KernelCI test development and coverage hackfest took place from 27th May to 4th June 2021. For a total of seven days, developers from the KernelCI team, Google, and Collabora worked to improve many different aspects of KernelCI testing capabilities."

If Linus and his subsystem maintainers decided to stop merging patches until they collectively had a good CI setup, money and staff would appear immediately. They have before, even when there was no commitment to do that. But in the early 90s people didn't really write unit tests or run CI systems, and so nor does the kernel today.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#97

I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation. Linus gets paid $1,5 million (from the Linux foundation). I think given the central position and importance of Linus compared to the head of the Mozilla foundation seems a bit off. A little while ago Linus announced that they had lost power at their home due to a large storm. I was p…

Linus doesn't bring in any revenue or manage the foundation. He's more like the CTO of Linux. Mozilla has over $500M revenue and almost a thousand employees.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#98
>> Have you ever wondered why KDE was deprecated in RHEL? It wasn't just because KDE Plasma 5 was so big that they couldn't make the jump for RHEL 8, it was also because people were not paying for RHEL for the desktop, so they had no budget for more people.

When you make code libraries or other "infrastructure" software it's important to be as stable as possible so your users don't have to constantly maintain compatibility. I suspect if it was easier to upgrade RH would have kept it KDE around. Same can be said for some of the Gnome updates too, and other software as well. "Maintenance" should be minimized particularly when people are working for free.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was, that there was consensus that the bay area was build on public funds and institutions. My intuition is that it is only later, ie. within the past 30-40 years, that the US has adopted this antipathy towards governmental organisations.

probably hit an inflection point in the 1990s when the internet backbone went private and libertarianism started to become so popular in tech circles.

Not an historian or American but Reaganism predates the 90’s

Don’t know when the Americans became anti-government but it’s been a while in the making. Hell, rabid anti-communism famously took root in the 50’s

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#100
This is why I'm sad to see the widespread use of MIT and BSD licenses, and others that allow the project to be pulled into closed-source services without anything returned. At the least use the GPL so that changes are upstreamed; ideally license it for free under something like the AGPL and then offer it under less restrictive terms in exchange for a fee
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