Bruce Byfield addresses the all-too-often-seen ugliness in open source software circles, and the tendency of open source enthusiasts, to start flame wars based on their personal preference.
He explains that most people working in open source development and free software have very strong feelings of satisfaction in their contributions to the community. But often these feelings have an ugly side.
The issue was brought to a head in an article about the decline of Apache OpenOffice, and the ascendance of LibreOffice. His email indicated that many writers wanted to see Apache humiliated due to differences in their approach even though the products were basically the same code-base.
What disturbs me is when the strong feelings devolve into insularity that excludes other free software projects.
Why, for example, would I possibly want to see OpenOffice humiliated? I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and -- with some misgivings -- the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation.
[More after the Break]
This reminded him of the Desktop Environment wars, KDE vs Gnome, while several smaller players like XFCE, LXDE, and Enlightenment and a host of others, chug along largely unscathed. We see the same sort of camps forming around File Systems, Init Systems, as well as many user-space programs. We see user communities vilified, and companies trashed, usually for something tangential to the actual free or open source software involved. People become insular.
Sometimes, this kind of insularity may reflect which projects a person works on. However, at least as often, it is voiced by average users with no direct connection to any of the projects involved. It appears an expression of the human need to belong, although an unusually misguided one. ... In fact, I suspect that this insularity is responsible for much of the opposition to diversity efforts. After all, when your sense of who you are depends on externals and what you define yourself as not being, any change becomes uncomfortable -- and, often, an outright threat to your sense of self.
Personally, I'd have to say that what annoys me most about free and open source software are the forced marches imposed on the users, for frivolous reasons. To combat the insularity I see in myself, I try to install a different Distro, or a different OS every 6 months or so. I guess it's time to add a new Desktop Environment to those experiments. virtual machines are a godsend for this.
Bruce goes on to say
In theory, maybe some way exists to encourage the enthusiasm that free software inspires while discouraging the ugliness of insularity.
Soylentils: Do you ever force yourself to step outside your comfort zone with your choices of free software? If so, how, and how often?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @05:22PM
Sometimes you end up with someone in the group who is 'good' but for some reason takes it upon themselves to be a total dick. Then the group has the problem of how do they get rid of this disaster of an emotional wreck without killing the project.
I dont mean the 'hey fix your crap' kind of dick.
But a belittling sort of dick for tiny mistakes. 'how dare you use xyz instead of abc you should never fucking code again and should kill yourself for even thinking of doing it the wrong way'.
I see it over and over in many projects. People look up to linus and think hey he is a dick and steve jobs was a dick so therefor I can be a dick.
There is a difference. They motivated people. There is a fine line between being a bully and saying 'hey do better, I dont want half ass'. They are willing to toss out 3 years of work and try other things. Could they do it 'nicer', probably. But their is a difference between belittling and 'do better'.
Instead of making this fun (which it totally can be). They make it somewhere you would rather they go away and never speak to you again. So you do not bother to contribute or find somewhere else to go.
They mistake their superior knowledge in one field to be that they are good in others. In this case a sense that the decisions they made are the best ones evar!1! and everyone else is stupid neanderthals who couldnt rub two rocks together.
It is a form of what the grumpyprogrammer was talking about in his last post. http://www.thegrumpyprogrammer.com/2015/04/rfids-encryption-and-stop-rules-oh-my.html [thegrumpyprogrammer.com] Bad decisions come from bad assumptions even though what is being made may be cool. Everything around it might be total crap.
What is worse that some people are sorta in charge and the attitude become infectious. As it is easier to 'throw mud', 'cant be done' or 'the right way', etc. Than to deal with real issues (like poor performance or hard to understand code). So people start making wild assumptions. I remember back to the mid 90s and people saying emulation was impossible. Yet today we have things like cycle accurate NES, Amiga, and PC emulators. But in the early days of emulation it was pretty much everyone repeating what the same 'chosen few' had said 'it cant be done because its not perfect'. As the perceived group in charge were actually bullies who got a little power and abused the hell out of it. This has not changed. Sites like this even help feed the egos of people who do this. We even have at least 4 that I know of (I will not name names as we are well aware of who they are). They come in and make a proclamation on something. They eventually take on the air of 'in charge' because they post so much.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:47PM
I remember back to the mid 90s and people saying emulation was impossible.
...Which is amusing. IBM used software emulation to provide backwards compatibility between newer computers and older software back in the 1960s. I'd think it would've been covered by the idea of Turing equivalence, anyhow. Or did you just mean that a lot of people thought emulation would be impractical?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Katastic on Sunday May 03 2015, @11:23PM
>But a belittling sort of dick for tiny mistakes. 'how dare you use xyz instead of abc you should never fucking code again and should kill yourself for even thinking of doing it the wrong way'.
Are you my boss?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday May 03 2015, @05:27PM
This isn't some fabricated divide with camps waving flags and cheering for their hometown solely for the sake of an entertaining competition event. There are major conflict of interests stemming from corporate contributors pushing for their company's interests over other (often also corporate) contributors' interests which leads to issues covering everything from language choice, licensing and tool-chain choices to design (specifically modularity, feature-sets and standards).
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @10:25AM
Well said.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @05:29PM
systemd.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @02:33PM
your mom
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SubiculumHammer on Sunday May 03 2015, @05:44PM
This is not about open source, it is about human nature. Don't tell me that turf wars and such do not happen in the private workplace.
(Score: 5, Informative) by joekiser on Sunday May 03 2015, @06:12PM
This is not about open source, it is about human nature. Don't tell me that turf wars and such do not happen in the private workplace.
Not only in software, but in most other industries as well. For example, I was recently searching for my first digital camera purchase in a decade, and having no idea where to even start, I read reviews (and comments) of dozens of cameras on Photography blogs. Good god, the elitism among pro/amateur photographers makes the systemd debate look civil. From reading those comments, unless you spend a minumum of $2000 for a camera lens and an equal amount for the camera, you might as well shove it up your ass.
Part of it is confirmation bias ... someone who just spent a lot of time or $$$ on a product, needs to make themself feel better by tearing down anything different. I remember ten years ago, I built a straight six truck motor with more torque and horsepower than larger V8's. I remember the idiot that I hired to weld the exhaust laughing at me the entire time, saying I was an idiot who had wasted my $$$. Maybe a V8 swap and build would have been cheaper, but it's not what I started out with, and he didn't have to tear down my decision.
Even recently, I would catch flack from colleagues because I carried around a BlackBerry Passport, and I still catch flack from peers because I haven't played with the Win10 demo (yet).
As for the original question, "Soylentils: Do you ever force yourself to step outside your comfort zone with your choices of free software? If so, how, and how often?"
Yes, I was a longtime BSD user who spent time learning Windows 8/2k12 and later systemd (or RedHat 7 to be more precise), because I can't imagine going into a job interview and explaining that I'm not familiar with those systems because I don't agree politically with their creators. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. Imagine trying to hire a car mechanic, only to find out that he can't work on any motor made in the past 30 years because he refused to learn electronic fuel injection.
Debt is the currency of slaves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:00PM
and I still catch flack from peers because I haven't played with the Win10 demo (yet).
Where do you work, Microsoft? What kind of morons would bash someone for not wasting their time on some stupid Windows demo? In the automotive world (to borrow from your truck engine anecdote), that's like making fun of someone for not buying a Pontiac Aztek.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:55PM
What kind of morons would bash someone for not wasting their time on some stupid Windows demo? In the automotive world (to borrow from your truck engine anecdote), that's like making fun of someone for not buying a Pontiac Aztek.
Best. Car. Analogy. Ever. All hail Grishnakh!!
(Score: 2) by joekiser on Sunday May 03 2015, @08:00PM
Unfortunately, there are packs of Windows die-hards at every sysadmin job I've had. When I say "packs," I mean groupthink mentality Microsoft know-it-alls looking for people to bash, like the unsuspecting customer who made the mistake of bringing their MacBook to work.
The last time one of these die-hards jumped on me for not installing Win10 preview baremetal on my newly-built desktop, I responded that I didn't want to put a keylogger on my machine. Lots of "what?" from the clan ensued, followed by the shill pulling out his Windows phone to look it up for himself.
The next day, he informed me that it's not really a keylogger, it's for analytics to help Cortana's development (I call anything that records your keystrokes and sends them off to a remote server a *keylogger*, Swype included). And besides, he went ahead and installed Windows 7 back on his Win10 machine because he suddenly got bored with it that night, so it isn't an issue anymore.
Debt is the currency of slaves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @10:55PM
I was visiting my previous boss, in a Windows beige box shop, a couple of weeks ago. He knows I prefer Linux to Windows, so after a few minutes he said that nobody should be using Linux any more because the NSA has infiltrated their codebase with all sorts of nasty code. This, of course, would never happen with Microsoft products, in his mind.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday May 04 2015, @01:17AM
so after a few minutes he said that nobody should be using Linux any more because the NSA has infiltrated their codebase with all sorts of nasty code. This, of course, would never happen with Microsoft products, in his mind.
Wow, that's some seriously delusional thinking. Yeah, this open-source code which anyone can inspect at will (not that they actually do, but they can, and sometimes do) is infiltrated by NSA code, but Microsoft code which is closed-source and secret is completely trustworthy and there's no way Microsoft would comply with a National Security letter telling them to insert NSA code into their codebase! Sure...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @05:59PM
Is the keylogger for the technical preview (which I guess is aggressive but may have uses) or planned for the actual Windows 10 release?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:07PM
Road bike Reviews are the worst.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @03:17AM
I still catch flack from peers because I haven't played with the Win10 demo
because I can't imagine going into a job interview and explaining that I'm not familiar with those systems
Dawaaaht? For any sort of sysadmin win10 *will* become part of your life. To not even look at it is silly. You are letting your preconceived notions of 'good/bad' get in the way. Its just windows. Its not going to bite (though some of the design decisions will make you think for your sanity).
Pop it on a VM. Its not good, its not bad. It is rather 'meh' from my POV. But I do know this, it is what everyone will be using *very* quickly. MS is going to give the sucker away they are changing the way they release software (they are going to rolling release). Tons of people are going to snag it. They will be looking to me for advice. To shrug my shoulders and show that I am not familiar with it would hurt me just as much as what you claim with not knowing different bits of linux. MS is betting the farm on their cloud stuff. You should at least be semi familiar with it. It will come up. It even sounds like you work in an MS shop. There is one mark of death in tech it is to be the perceived laggard. Sure you may be very good at your job. But to ignore the reality of peoples perception of you will not help you in the future. In my shop no one bothers with it because they are too busy still fng around with visual studio 2008/10 and sql2008. I bring up the idea of 'upgrading tools' and they bury their heads and do not even want to discuss the matter.
It would be more like being a car mechanic and not bother to find out how bushings and li-ion batteries work because its not what you do. But you *will* be...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Sunday May 03 2015, @06:08PM
But often these feelings have an ugly side.
I think one thing that contributes to this is that free software communities are held together by electronic communications. When you're typing an email or forum post its very easy to forget that you are ultimately communicating with flesh and blood people, there's no body language to communicate how serious or angry you really are and there's the temptation to reply immediately, without time to reflect and cool off. Its very easy to send off an email or post that, on reflection, comes over as a lot more aggressive or critical than intended - I suspect most people have sent and received a few of those in their time. Add to that the grain of truth in the stereotype of programmers tending towards Sheldon Cooper Syndrome, and you have a recipe for flamewars.
Then you have the tension that software developers want to work with the newest, trendy technologies. Maintaining old-tech systems to keep the paying customers happy is boring in any business, so when the customers aren't paying its completely understandable that developers don't have much patience.
YouTube had the right idea when they actually implemented the XKCD proposal [xkcd.com] - I'd propose an enhancement whereby (a) the message was read back by Nicholas Briggs [wikipedia.org] doing his best Dalek, and (b) for good measure, any references to gender, race, religion, age, political affiliation or text editor of choice was inverted.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @06:27PM
Debian rejects game due to authors opinion on women.
A properly licensed opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.
The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the authors past anti-feminist remarks:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=770314 [debian.org]
The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)
Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to free software projects?
(Score: 4, Informative) by http on Sunday May 03 2015, @09:03PM
No, but a long history of being a regressive asshole with no intent of reforming makes it easy (and rational) for others to decide that working with you ain't gonna be worth the hassle. Anti-feminist remarks only touches the surface of the, um, full exent of the alleged coder's conduct. Plus, the code itself is DailyWTF worthy.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @01:05AM
Please tell us of this conduct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @01:39AM
Show us this code you dislike?
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Monday May 04 2015, @04:34PM
Show us this code you dislike?
Not that I care one way or the other, but they did provide a link to the packaging request, which included a link to the source download. [codeplex.com]
Just from a quick look, I find it interesting that they chose Perl as the engine for this, but since it's a text-based project I guess that's reasonable. There seems to be a lot of string literals used pervasively (ASCII art? didn't look too close), and a TON of places where the code gets really repetitive and could have been refactored to be shorter. Pervasive use of if...elsif...elsif...else instead of switch/case is a good example.
I find it hard to get really worked up about any of that, though; perhaps I'm just not a good enough coder to recognize the WTF involved? This is Perl, after all, so it's expected to be write-only. Anyone care to take another look and report back on the code quality issue?
*note: I'm wiling to admit that perhaps I've missed the point and that the GP should have been the one providing code snippets since they're the one suggesting it's got problems. If so, ignore me and carry on.
***PRE-SEND EDIT***
OK, found one for myself. The author apparently wants the money displayed in a 10-character wide field, with the number right-justified in this field. They've figured out how to use sprintf to display numbers larger than 10^11-1, but use "print" and hardcoded spaces in a cascade of if...elseif... statements for everything smaller. Check it out:
sub rllvrtotal {
sep;
if ($money > 9999999999) {
print colored(sprintf("%.4e", $money),"$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 1000000000) {
print colored("$money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 100000000) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 10000000) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 1000000) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 100000) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 10000) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 1000) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 100) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 10) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} elsif ($money >= 1) {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
} else {
print colored(" $money","$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
}
sep;
}
All of that could be functionally replaced by the following, and lose no clarity:
sub rllvrtotal {
sep;
# output 10 characters wide, right justified, switch to exponential notation if needed
print colored(sprintf("%10g", $money),"$rllvrcolor13 on_$rllvrcolor14");
sep;
}
The WTF for me is that they went to the trouble of looking up sprintf for the exponential output, but didn't notice that the formatting they want is a built-in feature of the same function. Seriously, perldoc is your friend. [perl.org]
Also, apparently, zero and all negative numbers are treated the same; I don't see any error checking going on to make sure the number is a positive integer.
I guess I cared enough after all =P
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Monday May 04 2015, @05:30PM
Self-replying with shame, bear with me. Example #2 of WTF from this code:
The title screen is user-adjustable, and two of the options are "viewdecss" and "nowomensrights". As an easter egg goes the viewdecss screen is harmless, but I'm going to take a wild guess that the subroutine nowomensrights is the one that would start a flame war with the Debian packaging crew. Grepping through the code I can't tell that there's any indication to the user that it's there; the developer threw it in for personal reasons, I guess.
How bad is it that I react to the anti-feminist gesture with a "meh" and get worked up over the fact that detection code for it uses eq instead of a regex with "~="? I'd like to think that my "meh" comes from a trained response not to knee-jerk just because someone's intentionally trying to offend me. Also, who uses Perl but doesn't grok how to do a case-insensitive text search?
elsif (($titlescreen eq 'feminism') or ($titlescreen eq 'women')
or ($titlescreen eq 'women\'s rights') or ($titlescreen eq '19th ammendment')
or ($titlescreen eq 'women\'s vote')
or ($titlescreen eq 'FEMINISM') or ($titlescreen eq 'WOMEN')
or ($titlescreen eq 'WOMEN\'S RIGHTS') or ($titlescreen eq '19TH AMMENDMENT')
or ($titlescreen eq 'WOMEN\'S VOTE')) {
newlines();
nowomensrights();
}
The programmer could have saved himself a bunch of work by adding "$titlescreen =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;" to the input scrubbing; currently all he's got is a "chomp($titlescreen);". Don't get me started on blindly accepting unfiltered user input. [perl.org]
I guess the real question for me is to what extent do the Debian maintainers feel that the content of code in their repository is a reflection on them? I know that they split repositories on "Free"/"Non-Free" lines, so developer and user freedom are important to them. Have they also declared the entire codebase, included contributed code, as a "Hate-Free" zone? Are they really afraid that people will blame the distribution for an 3rd-party package's misogyny?
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:33PM
As Debian is a volunteer run project, did anyone actually volunteer to package this? I can't blame Debian for not packaging it if no one wants to become the maintainer for that package.
For all we know "greg" could actually be the author of that game using a pseudonym, as all Google turned up for that email address was the bug reports asking for that game to be packaged.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday May 03 2015, @06:33PM
You pay for your free software with emotional buy-in, with a relationship.
Then "your" project cheats on you with another license, or a 3some with some creepy MBA.
People hate cheaters.
Its really that simple...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by zugedneb on Sunday May 03 2015, @06:49PM
This reminds me of a quote by a senator from "The Gladiator"...
"I am for the people, but not of the people."
The problem that many leftist wing, that is, not-hardcore-for-profit but more also-for-common-good, organisations seem to have, is the incapability of dealing with sociopaths.
I attribute this phenomena to the fact, that these left wing type of people are more "people persons", they have difficulty in passing any sort of judgement over other entities... Instead, they fence with their personalities, and try to "social engineer" the situation.
Also, these people persons have very little grasp of the concepts "gear", "ally", "process"...
Leftist people are not very good at self-organisation...
A personal anecdote is this: If you join the local green party or social democrats, you think that your knowledge matters, and there will be people standing up for you.
Now, if you are educated, and have expertise in more technical stuff, you might have flaws on the "patience" and "diplomacy" side...
So what happens in reality, is that, mostly middle aged people, and mostly middle aged woman will be uncomfortable with having to deal with "dry" professionals, and they will not see you as an ally or an asset. They will not try to learn from you. Instead, you will get drawn into a war, with the aim of causing you and your allies extreme emotional discomfort, so that people abandon you, and eventually you leave to.
These people will never take the fact that they are dealing with the ruling of a nation seriously, they will only consider that they don't like you...
The above is not as true for any right wing organisation: if you seem knowledgeable, and can make more money or power for them, they will listen to you lectures, even if you are a homeless bum... They can identify, and understand how to make use of an asset...
The biggest flaws of many of the fee software crowd, is that they are not only for the people, but also of the people...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Sunday May 03 2015, @09:29PM
It seems, one of the worst things you can do, is to get fascinated with you natural enemy, when it comes types within human nature.
My natural enemy seems to be the type of human who really believes and wants to believe.
When this type of human gets denigrated, or something it values gets denigrated, it fights with claws and teeths...
Wise people would say to me "just let it be", friends would tell me "stop shitposting", but I just can't.
I can't, because it is worse.
The definition of an "idiot" is one who really believes. Like, u ask this muppet: Do you really fucking believe that yourself? And the muppet just looks at you in disbelief and says "Yes, of course it is so..."
The definition of "civilian" is "idiot who can't see who is ally and who is enemy"...
Man... I am a natural enemy of all civilians...
What shit can happen...
It's fascinating, but it's shit...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @10:57PM
...and you believe this, yourself? (Yes, I just called you an idiot.)
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Sunday May 03 2015, @11:33PM
If I would attempt to give you a serious answer to this questions, it would have the following outline:
1: are there types of minds tailored for different tasks - a bit like types of ants in colony?
2: is there a need for different mind types in the evolution of men?
3: is it possible for evolution to create slightly deviating brains so they approximate these different types, broadly speaking, in tendencies?
4: if these different types of minds exist, do they have differences in handling objects in life?
sub-questions on 4:
- what is the difference in halting time for thinking about different objects for the different minds?
- what is the magnitude of the vision, when different types try to imagine the same object?
To troll with some examples:
- My mother-type friend Sabine can't stop talking about children, but my military-type friend Boris does not give a fuck... I can see on his face that he tries to envision what Sabine, but his imagination just can't cope with it, so he gets bored. He can other things though...
- My social-scientist type friend Jimbo cant talk for hours, and indeed write a dissertation about how the muslim really feels, where I have problem envisioning them as one object at all... In many conversations I am tagged troll...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @01:14AM
It seems, one of the worst things you can do, is to get fascinated with you natural enemy
A dead guy with a funny name said it much better a long time ago: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
(Score: 2) by tadas on Monday May 04 2015, @01:09AM
I just modded you as "interesting", and I think you're on to something, even though I'm not sure that the spectrum you're using (left-wing vs right-wing politics) matches the real world phenomenon I think you've caught. I certainly don't think you were attempting "flamebait", which is what your comment was rated at when I read it - you didn't use any of the disdainful buzzwords ("SJW" and similar) that real flamers use against left-wing folks, and your comment treated the effect as a bad consequence of a good instinct. It might have been more accurate to talk about a spectrum ranging from purely profit-oriented enterprises or projects to purely charitable/public service ones, but I appreciated your comment and hope you keep commenting. BTW, I consider myself fairly left wing ( as the late Senator Paul Wellstone once said,"I belong to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party").
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Monday May 04 2015, @04:09PM
The problem that many leftist wing....
A problem I see frequently is people trying to turn a technical discussion into political BS.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:30PM
etbe.coker.com.au/2015/04/26/anti-systemd-people/
Anti-Systemd People
For the Technical People
This post isn\u2019t really about technology, I\u2019ll cover the technology briefly skip to the next section if you aren\u2019t interested in Linux programming or system administration.
I\u2019ve been using the Systemd init system for a long time, I first tested it in 2010 [1]. I use Systemd on most of my systems that run Debian/Wheezy (which means most of the Linux systems I run which aren\u2019t embedded systems). Currently the only systems where I\u2019m not running Systemd are some systems on which I don\u2019t have console access, while Systemd works reasonably well it wasn\u2019t a standard init system for Debian/Wheezy so I don\u2019t run it everywhere. That said I haven\u2019t had any problems with Systemd in Wheezy, so I might have been too paranoid.
I recently wrote a blog post about systemd, just some basic information on how to use it and why it\u2019s not a big deal [2]. I\u2019ve been playing with Systemd for almost 5 years and using it in production for almost 2 years and it\u2019s performed well. The most serious bug I\u2019ve found in systemd is Bug #774153 which causes a Wheezy->Jessie upgrade to hang until you run \u201csystemctl daemon-reexec\u201d [3].
I know that some people have had problems with systemd, but any piece of significant software will cause problems for some people, there are bugs in all software that is complex enough to be useful. However the fact that it has worked so well for me on so many systems suggests that it\u2019s not going to cause huge problems, it should be covered in the routine testing that is needed for a significant deployment of any new version of a distribution.
I\u2019ve been using Debian for a long time. The transitions from libc4 to libc5 and then libc6 were complex but didn\u2019t break much. The use of devfs in Debian caused some issues and then the removal of devfs caused other issues. The introduction of udev probably caused problems for some people too. Doing major updates to Debian systems isn\u2019t something that is new or which will necessarily cause significant problems, I don\u2019t think that the change to systemd by default compares to changing from a.out binaries to ELF binaries (which required replacing all shared objects and executables).
The Social Issue of the Default Init
Recently the Debian technical committee determined that Systemd was the best choice for the default init system in Debian/Jessie (the next release of Debian which will come out soon). Decisions about which programs should be in the default install are made periodically and it\u2019s usually not a big deal. Even when the choice is between options that directly involve the user (such as the KDE and GNOME desktop environments) it\u2019s not really a big deal because you can just install a non-default option.
One of the strengths of Debian has always been the fact that any Debian Developer (DD) can just add any new package to the archive if they maintain it to a suitable technical standard and if copyright and all other relevant laws are respected. Any DD who doesn\u2019t like any of the current init systems can just package a new one and upload it. Obviously the default option will get more testing, so the non-default options will need more testing by the maintainer. This is particularly difficult for programs that have significant interaction with other parts of the system, I\u2019ve had difficulties with this over the course of 14 years of SE Linux development but I\u2019ve also found that it\u2019s not an impossible problem to solve.
It\u2019s generally accepted that making demands of other people\u2019s volunteer work is a bad thing, which to some extent is a reasonable position. There is a problem when this is taken to extremes, Debian has over 1000 developers who have to work together so sometimes it\u2019s a question of who gets to do the extra work to make the parts of the distribution fit together. The issue of who gets to do the work is often based on what parts are the defaults or most commonly used options. For my work on SE Linux I often have to do a lot of extra work because it\u2019s not part of the default install and I have to make my requests for changes to other packages be as small and simple as possible.
So part of the decision to make Systemd be the default init is essentially a decision to impose slightly more development effort on the people who maintain SysVInit if they are to provide the same level of support \u2013 of course given the lack of overall development on SysVInit the level of support provided may decrease. It also means slightly less development effort for the people who maintain Systemd as developers of daemon packages MUST make them work with it. Another part of this issue is the fact that DDs who maintain daemon packages need to maintain init.d scripts (for SysVInit) and systemd scripts, presumably most DDs will have a preference for one init system and do less testing for the other one. Therefore the choice of systemd as the default means that slightly less developer effort will go into init.d scripts. On average this will slightly increase the amount of sysadmin effort that will be required to run systems with SysVInit as the scripts will on average be less well tested. This isn\u2019t going to be a problem in the short term as the current scripts are working reasonably well, but over the course of years bugs may creep in and a proposed solution to this is to have SysVInit scripts generated from systemd config files.
We did have a long debate within Debian about the issue of default init systems and many Debian Developers disagree about this. But there is a big difference between volunteers debating about their work and external people who don\u2019t contribute but believe that they are entitled to tell us what to do. Especially when the non-contributors abuse the people who do the work.
The Crowd Reaction
In a world filled with reasonable people who aren\u2019t assholes there wouldn\u2019t be any more reaction to this than there has been to decisions such as which desktop environment should be the default (which has caused some debate but nothing serious). The issue of which desktop environment (or which version of a desktop environment) to support has a significant affect on users that can\u2019t be avoided, I could understand people being a little upset about that. But the init system isn\u2019t something that most users will notice \u2013 apart from the boot time.
For some reason the men in the Linux community who hate women the most seem to have taken a dislike to systemd. I understand that being \u201cconservative\u201d might mean not wanting changes to software as well as not wanting changes to inequality in society but even so this surprised me. My last blog post about systemd has probably set a personal record for the amount of misogynistic and homophobic abuse I received in the comments. More gender and sexuality related abuse than I usually receive when posting about the issues of gender and sexuality in the context of the FOSS community! For the record this doesn\u2019t bother me, when I get such abuse I\u2019m just going to write more about the topic in question.
While the issue of which init system to use by default in Debian was being discussed we had a lot of hostility from unimportant people who for some reason thought that they might get their way by being abusive and threatening people. As expected that didn\u2019t give the result they desired, but it did result in a small trend towards people who are less concerned about the reactions of users taking on development work related to init systems.
The next thing that they did was to announce a \u201cfork\u201d of Debian. Forking software means maintaining a separate version due to a serious disagreement about how it should be maintained. Doing that requires a significant amount of work in compiling all the source code and testing the results. The sensible option would be to just maintain a separate repository of modified packages as has been done many times before. One of the most well known repositories was the Debian Multimedia repository, it was controversial due to flouting legal issues (the developer produced code that was legal where they lived) and due to confusion among users. But it demonstrated that you can make a repository containing many modified packages. In my work on SE Linux I\u2019ve always had a repository of packages containing changes that haven\u2019t been accepted into Debian, which included changes to SysVInit in about 2001.
The latest news on the fork-Debian front seems to be the call for donations [4]. Apparently most of the money that was spent went to accounting fees and buying a laptop for a developer. The amount of money involved is fairly small, Forbes has an article about how awful people can use \u201ccontroversy\u201d to get crowd-funding windfalls [5].
MikeeUSA is an evil person who hates systemd [6]. This isn\u2019t any sort of evidence that systemd is great (I\u2019m sure that evil people make reasonable choices about software on occasion). But it is a significant factor in support for non-systemd variants of Debian (and other Linux distributions). Decent people don\u2019t want to be associated with people like MikeeUSA, the fact that the anti-systemd people seem happy to associate with him isn\u2019t going to help their cause.
Conclusion
Forking Debian is not the correct technical solution to any problem you might have with a few packages. Filing bug reports and possibly forking those packages in an external repository is the right thing to do.
Sending homophobic and sexist abuse is going to make you as popular as the GamerGate and GodHatesAmerica.com people. It\u2019s not going to convince anyone to change their mind about technical decisions.
Abusing volunteers who might consider donating some of their time to projects that you like is generally a bad idea. If you abuse them enough you might get them to volunteer less of their time, but the most likely result is that they just don\u2019t volunteer on anything associated with you.
Abusing people who write technical blog posts isn\u2019t going to convince them that they made an error. Abuse is evidence of the absence of technical errors.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @07:33PM
Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
Recently an opensource game release story was removed due to the game developer's open sexism(0) and harrasment(1) of women in tech.
A story posted by the editor of the popular Phoronix linux news site about a release of an Open Source videogame was later manually removed(2). The reason cited was the game developer's unacceptable views on social issues such as gender equality (3).
The release story was titled "Xonotic-Forked ChaosEsqueAnthology Sees New Release - Phoronix" and can be accessed via the google cache(4).
With the recent inclusion of a code of conduct(5) for those wishing to contribute to the Linux Kernel some questions now need to be asked and answered about the inclusion of code from people who are known to engage in or promote socially unacceptable attitudes or harrasments of those whom the free-software movement would prefer to attract in their place:
* Are the social or political views of an author of free software relevant to that software's inherent quality?
* Should the beliefs of an opensource developer weigh when when evaluating whether a piece of opensource software is worthy of any publicity or public notice?
* Should men with unpopular or "forbidden" views be excised from the opensource movement and "not allowed" to contribute, in a manner similar to that which is done in employment?
* Has the free/opensource software movement changed in these respects since its founding? If so is this a positive change?
* Should there be gatekeepers to opensource that decide who may and who may not contribute. Should abusive developers be "blackballed" to maintain proper social order and controls?
and
* What are the consequences of not doing this
Citations:
(0) Past related incident: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310 [ibiblio.org]
(1) http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Debian_and_LinuxChix_harassment_by_MikeeUSA [wikia.com]
(2) Removed story URL: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ChaosEsqueAnthology-Rel-51 [phoronix.com]
(3) http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?115776-Xonotic-Forked-ChaosEsqueAnthology-Sees-New-Release/page2 [phoronix.com]
"Fortunately, the article has been removed now."
"Thanks everybody for speaking up."
(4) https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JeCIgSFrBlgJ:http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page%3Dnews_item%26px%3DChaosEsqueAnthology-Rel-51%2Bchaosesque&gbv=1&tbs=qdr:w&hl=en&&ct=clnk [googleusercontent.com]
(5) Linux "Code of Conflict"
http://whatwillweuse.com/fodder/terrorware/ [whatwillweuse.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Sunday May 03 2015, @08:56PM
The only reason I chose to use LibreOffice at the time it forked, was that OpenOffice is under control of Oracle.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday May 04 2015, @09:33PM
Open Office performance seemed to tank a while after Oracle took over. I stuck with it for a while, but then someone said something about LibreOffice. Haven't looked back since.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @09:20PM
> step outside your comfort zone with your choices of free software? If so, how, and how often?
Every time I use free software I'm steeping out of my comfort zone. Piracy would be so much easier, but I still try.
Few projects come close to proprietary equivalent. I have found OpenOffice/LibreOffice to be adequate for my needs but your mileage may vary. Other projects fall far short, varying from inconvenient to infuriating. But it isn't a winner takes all proposition.
There are many gems that "do one thing well" or do one thing quite well, or slightly better than another program and I'm willing to tolerate a toolbox full of slightly different hammers, even though sometimes I would be far better off using a proprietary screwdriver.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @01:00AM
>There are many gems that "do one thing well" or do one thing quite well, or slightly better than another program and I'm willing to tolerate a toolbox full of slightly different hammers, even though sometimes I would be far better off using a proprietary screwdriver.
The libraries on which they depend have all been rewritten to require systemd by people not originally part of the project.
(gtk was created by the gimp, not gnome)
And the old versions "DDDEEEPRREEECIAAATEEEEDDD!!!111"
(Score: 2) by threedigits on Monday May 04 2015, @07:07AM
They join a random party and engage in hate of the opposing one. There's no logic or rational process involved. Be it Microsoft, or Ubuntu or Systemd, if they do good or bad doesn't matter much, just if they are on your side.
It's not different that sports games (for non-players, that is).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday May 04 2015, @08:04AM
I wrote about this in my blog, I'll repost it here with the hope that someone finds it interesting.
What are holy wars? Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, you are probably acquainted with the concept: Coke vs Pepsi, Xbox vs Playstation, Emacs vs vi, Windows vs Mac, Linux vs BSD, MIT vs GPL. These are wars waged with few facts and many personal invectives, in an attempt to assert moral or technical superiority. Anyone with a lot of experience with holy wars learn to steer clear, for nothing good ever comes out of it. Or does it?
I believe that, even if holy wars may be harmful and ultimately futile, that there’s a real reason for fighting (and hopefully, winning) holy wars, similar to the reason why real religious wars are fought: community size.
Imagine the following scenario: there are two competing open source programs, A and B. For realism, feel free to fill in the spots with Emacs or Vim, in whichever order you like. A “wins” the holy war, gaining most, if not all, of the community in the domain of users of A and B. A gains many well-written up-to-date guides and tutorials, while B only has a few, out-of-date guides. A’s set of features grows far beyond B and remains just as stable, with many talented developers contributing code while the watchful masses of users reports any bugs. Other programs only support A because so many people use A and very few people use B. Any advantage that B may have is quickly appropriated by A, by its many users; no such speed of adoption exists for B, whose users would be lucky to get an extremely useful feature from A a year later. A has gained immensely, while B has lost immensely. As a user of A, I benefit from every other user of A. Holy wars matter because community size matters.
However, this piece of writing is not meant to encourage readers to begin hurling ad hominem attacks in the nearest forum or mailing list. While it is true that holy wars matter, to the extent of achieving a large community size, there are usually better ways than those in which holy wars are traditionally waged, that is, with personal attacks. One catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, as the saying goes. Here, marketing (of the morally sound variety) is the optimal weapon. Encouraging users to switch to A, presenting hard facts, and helping such new users during the difficult transition period, while neither forcing nor attacking, and allowing for a clear escape route at any time (for software, this amounts to using open data formats and support for exporting and importing data) will lure in many to your cause.
Happy hunting.
(Link here for reference, but I'm actually not looking for a lot of clicks. My wimpy server would kick the bucket.)
http://felesatra.moe/blog/2015/03/11/why-holy-wars-matter/ [felesatra.moe]
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