Bruce Byfield's Blog covers some drama taking over the NTPSec fork of the NTP (Network Time Protocol) software, which is running on just about every unix-like operating system.
Apparently the original forking team invited Eric Raymond and Susan Sons into their project. That didn't work out too well as Raymond and Sons (no actual offspring involved), proceeded to take over the whole effort and use it for their own grandiosity. Then they ejected the project leader.
Byfield uses the story to spin his distaste for Forks for the Wrong Reasons.
However, a few weeks ago, while preparing an article about the animosity between the Network Time Protocol and its off-shoot NTPsec, I came to the conclusion that there are forks that deserve support, and others that do not. The more I investigated, the harder a neutral presentation of NTPsec became. Increasingly, it seemed a fork made for most of the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways.
We've seen some rather large projects spin out of forks over the years, some good, some bad, some dead, and others surviving long past any rational reason. The list is long. The quality is varied.
What are some of the WORST forks Soylentils have seen that somehow still persist?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @03:29PM
What are some of the WORST forks Soylentils have seen that somehow still persist?
I'm not talking about all the altcoins.... I'm talking about Bitcoin (and Etherium) Classic/XT forks from their "core" implementations because the devs can't get their sh*t together. So much money and politics involved.... throw in a big bunch of uneducated fanboys that take one or the other party for whatever reason, perfect drama.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:43AM
What are some of the WORST forks Soylentils have seen that somehow still persist?
OpenSSL, forked from SSLeay when RSA bought it. How that bug-ridden piece of shit manages to survive is totally beyond me.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @03:39PM
In most cases OpenNTPD would suffice as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @11:58PM
In Soviet Russia, ntpd opens you!
http://openbsd.su/src/usr.sbin/ntpd/ [openbsd.su]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @04:19PM
In addition, Sons claims that some of the developers working on key projects like NTP are "are older than my father" -- presumably, in their fifties or sixties -- and so out of date that they should retire.
They're just older men, not womyn, so discriminate away!
WTF is Susan Sons anyway? It appears she was a webdev who is now riding the "girl hacker" wave. Just the right skill set an infrastructure project needs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @04:24PM
So she thinks NTP coding standards are outdated. Maybe she can rewrite it in PHP if she can spare time from her grandstanding.
(Score: 3, Touché) by dyingtolive on Friday February 24 2017, @05:05PM
I briefly envisioned a future where, to install NTP, one needed node, mongodb, bower, polymer, and a bunch of other bolt-on cruft. It was disturbing, but at least it was webscale!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:21PM
oh no, a bunch of ruby horseshit with 8 pages of install instructions is the right way to go.
(Score: 5, Touché) by zocalo on Friday February 24 2017, @04:43PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:11PM
Surprise! An ESR acolyte is studiously self-unaware. Who would have guessed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:38PM
First, I thought ESR has a son, but then there is this:
when her partner in this venture is, at 59, old enough to be her father... Maybe the she ought to start there.
Say it ain't so, Sam! The implications of this are just creepy. I mean, Everyone Loves Raymond, but this would be taking things a bit too far.
(BTW, is ESR still on welfare? Has the Patron account worked out for him? )
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @08:06PM
Yeah it looks like 'hey I could use some money to keep this project going and some help getting more people to mentor so the project can go on'. They show up and say 'code sucks, you suck, we are taking over'. Yeah I can see why he noped the hell away from them. He has spent years making that program. It is his baby. They wanted to basically steal it from him and then just put it on life support and marginalize him. I can see why he just dropped them out of the project. Then they act like cry babies.
background in abuse management
I have been watching a lot of videos on narcissists lately (yes I am kinda bored). One thing many warn about is covert narcissists. They gravitate to positions such as abuse management as they can get new supply by using existing vetted abuse victims. Not saying they are, but all of the signs are there that they are narcissists.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday February 24 2017, @04:58PM
There you have it [iu.edu].
Seems that the "background in abuse management" may be her relevant qualification in this particular context. Or maybe the "martial arts"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by dyingtolive on Friday February 24 2017, @05:08PM
On one hand, if ESR will work with her, I want to say she can't be all that bad, at least for very selective definitions of bad.
On the OTHER hand, I look at "She comes from a background in abuse management, web development, and web application pentesting" and I cringe the fuck out.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:08PM
Lol, triggered by a phrase you don't understand. It doesn't get more cliched than that.
"Abuse management" is about stuff like spam, ddos, etc.
https://abuse.io/ [abuse.io]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:14PM
That still has not much to do with infrastructure level stuff, you know, like NTP?
Maybe some of the DDOS stuff translates usefully. Given that she has no qualifications outside "teh webz", I'm not very hopeful.
Maybe you're the one freaking out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:42PM
Ignorants never freak out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:18PM
She's probably not entirely unreasonable. You can tell because she looks awkward without wearing those stupid glasses and dark lipstick and dyeing her hair purple.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:18PM
She teaches martial arts? The woman is at least 50 pounds overweight.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:41PM
Don't be bodyshaming people! How much do you know about martial arts? A 230 pound weight dropped on you will put you in your place.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @07:30PM
The weight is easily shattered with the breaking point technique.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday February 24 2017, @08:23PM
Maybe, but will single-stepping still work? And what about inspecting variables?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @11:53PM
A 230 pound weight [...]
I see you've not been trained in self-defence. The 16-ton weight is canonical.
(Score: 2) by http on Friday February 24 2017, @05:51PM
Movie sets are very different places from dojos and kwoons. Potential stars are selected with particular visual aesthetics in mind. But skill in a martial art (and skill in teaching it) has exactly zero to do with appearance. Martial artists, unlike movie stars, don't have to look a particular way.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @09:17PM
In the late 80's I was learning judo. We had a guest instructor come in. In comes this fat, old (to my early 20's eye) guy with a long greying beard who looked a lot to my eye to resemble Captain Lou Albano. We were told he was a former US Judo coach, and he was a very good instructor and clearly had the heart of a lion. It was very clear that he commanded great respect from our instructor as well as the other black belts who came with him. He would sing French marching songs as we went through our drills.
Turns out the guy was Rene Pomerelle. Besides just being a former US coach, he coached the olympic teams for the French and Germans and coached judo in the Air Force for decades. Before joining the US military, he was in the French Foreign Legion during the Algerian campaign, knew 9 languages, had black belts in judo, aikido, karate, and kendo. He also was an accomplished cook. The guy was a serious badass; however, to look at him, he looked like some fat redneck-looking guy of about 60 or so.
I was talking to one of his black belt students and he told me that Pomerelle was outside a convenience store as some young "thug" type was walking out the door with a case of beer with the teller yelling "hey, come back with that!". Pomerelle was in in the guy's path, and Pomerelle says "I think you should bring that back." The young guy says "fuck you old man" and goes after him. When the police eventually came, the young guy was on the sidewalk with two broken legs. They looked at Pomerelle, incredulous that the old fat guy messed up the young guy and they asked him how he did it, to which Pomerelle said "oh, I watch all the police shows."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @10:42PM
I wish Bill Cosby hadn't turned out to be such a predatory douche.
His comedy is timeless.
Here I am pointing to his stuff for the 2nd time this week.
Bill recalls the time he saw an old dude in original YMCA togs and Bill figures a game of handball with the old fart will yield a light workout and a quick victory.
He was right--but not in the way he expected. [youtube.com]
Don't mess around with old farts.
This has even been put on t-shirts:
"Old age and [experience] will always beat youth and exuberance."
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @11:47PM
His comedy is timeless.
So is Milo's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:50AM
Fascists can be entertaining, with their goofy little mustaches and cute little uniforms--but they aren't funny.
Props to these guys for their excellent headline (with a little help from me):
Nazi punching bag Richard Spencer claims Depeche Mode is the "official band" of the alt-[Reich] [consequenceofsound.net]
"Accepted" submission: Is It Ever OK to Punch a Nazi? [soylentnews.org]
Consequence of Sound points to an article [gothamist.com] that basically says that the dirtbag wannabe Brown Shirt doesn't understand the band's music in the slightest.
Gothamist, in turn, points to
CPAC Boots White Nationalist Richard Spencer After He Crashes The Party [talkingpointsmemo.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:42PM
Maybe - but WTF is Milo?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @07:14PM
His comedy is timeless.
So is Milo's.
Milo who?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @09:19PM
Being overweight is detrimental to being a skilled martial artist. You lose flexibility and waste strength hauling that flab around. You also can't move as quickly as you would if you weren't a fat ass.
The part of the equation where looks don't matter is mostly in the face.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @11:48PM
Yes, in movie martial arts you are correct, but we're talking about real life where leverage and timing are as important as looking like Bruce Lee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:53PM
Why are you talking about appearance and movie sets and movie stars? Where in the world did that come from? It's not that they have to look a particular way, it's that they have to be able to move in a particular way. And 50 pounds of fat is a major impediment.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:37PM
She looks like a Sumo wrestler. She can probably take any job she wants, and dictate the terms of her employment.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 24 2017, @07:26PM
I know it's you, Kurenai. No one likes a single issue voter...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday February 24 2017, @09:47PM
I did post AC a few replies down from that post, but that one's not mine. One of the other AC posters conjured in my head a scene from an anime about an aquatranssexual, so I made an obscure reference to it.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:35AM
What is an aquatranssexual? Is that, like, Frylock and Meatwad in drag?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday February 25 2017, @11:02PM
It's a way I once saw Ranma of Ranma ½ described. Throw cold water on him, and he's a girl. Throw warm water on him, and he's a boy again. Sort of like one of those Matchbox cars that changed color in hot or cold water. Magical sex change by way of water.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday February 26 2017, @08:36PM
Oh, right. I still think the image of Frylock in a dress is funnier though.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:46AM
Does this Susan Sons, whoever she is, realise that NTP was created by, and is still actively developed by, someone referred to as Father Time due to his age?
It's also particularly rich that someone in a demographic that constantly complains of discrimination is actively discriminating herself against older, more experienced developers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @04:22PM
What has Eric Raymond ever contributed of any complexity to software? He talks about software a lot, but he doesn't seem that much of an engineer to me. More of an open source "personality."
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:07PM
I prefer people who contribute simplicity to software.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:21PM
I prefer people who contribute simplicity to software that actually does something.
All I know of his contributions are "fetchmail" which downloads your email in a batch to read later and a failed configuration syntax for
configuring a Linux bootup or compilation or some such. Really unimpressive from a technical chops point of view.
Do you know of something more impressive that he has accomplished? He is known for his early writings about developer culture when the Internet was exploding, not for his software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @06:24PM
He is an advocate, nothing else.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:07AM
Unlike RMS, he successfully avoided writing EMACS. That's gotta count for something.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:51PM
Did he contribute to vi? No? Then it really doesn't matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:53AM
All I know of his contributions are "fetchmail" which downloads your email in a batch to read later and a failed configuration syntax for configuring a Linux bootup or compilation or some such. Really unimpressive from a technical chops point of view.
He was also the driving force behind some universal application-layer protocol that was heavily promoted within the IETF, chiefly by him, as the mandatory solution to any problem of moving data from A to B. It was such a sucking void that I can neither remember its name (it was a silly one), nor find it with a Google search. My main memory of it was that it made writing new RFCs in some areas a bitch for awhile because you were supposed to use this thing instead of anything normal.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:58AM
Argh, sorry, wrong person, it was Marshall Rose's BEEP. Used by precisely nothing on earth, it allowed you to do roughly the same as what HTTP does but in an incompatible manner.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @07:07AM
An indepth investigation reveals claims that Eric Raymond claims to have worked on or created the following software and/or software projects:
gpsd
cvssync
irker
sshexport
shipper
freecode-submit
coverity-submit
giflib
gif2png
sng
imgsizer
sitemap
lookout
doclifter
xmlif
CML2
INTERCAL
IEEE Pilot
CUPL
MAD
ifdex
deheader
reposurgeon
git-weave
cvs-fast-export
rcs-fast-import
SRC
ctopy
cstrings
hexdump
sccs2rcs
sed
semex
showkey
yacchack
speaker-1.4 (source)
ski
galaxis
wumpus
vms-empire
Super Star Trek
morse
keybind
letterize
mstrans
pmtools (source)
Further details [catb.org].
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Gaaark on Friday February 24 2017, @05:24PM
I've got the obligatory Hendrix perm. And the inevitable pinhole burns.
What are some of the WORST forks Soylentils have seen that somehow still persist?
All Windows after XP SP3: after that, the WALL just got too high... it. is. YUUUUUGE. So: linux.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:49PM
Ehhh - XP SP3 was still 32 bit. I was excited when XP 64 bit came out. But, yeah - there are some minor improvements in 7 over XP64, but nothing to get excited about. From there, it all seems to be downhill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @05:50PM
i'm not going to dig into this whole business to see whether what they did makes sense or not, but it would be nice if there was more cooperation in project goals and organizing for fundraising instead of autoforks every time someone has an idea.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:51PM
From what I read, it wasn't an idea. It was a brainfart and some butthurt. But, what would I know? I'm just another old bastard, probably older than her father.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Friday February 24 2017, @09:52PM
I haven't heard of Susan Sons until now, but Eric Raymond is certainly a legend in his own mind.
A Donald Trump of software pontificating.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:38PM
The linked article is poorly written. Its a page of speculation about Raymond and Sons motivations followed by
I am not going to speculate about Raymond's or Sons's motivations.
(Score: 4, Informative) by steveha on Sunday February 26 2017, @08:01AM
The article is an attack piece. Only negative motivations are attributed to Eric Raymond (ESR) and Ms. Sons, and only the craziest things they said were quoted.
The discussion to date hasn't been super-informative. So I decided to try to see what I could find out about NTPsec, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
Here, this is a terse way to get the idea:
https://docs.ntpsec.org/latest/ntpsec.html [ntpsec.org]
To summarize it for you, they are attempting to strip out cruft, and clean up and modernize the code base. A few key points:
They are trying to make it as secure as possible, so they got rid of functions like strcpy() and replaced them with their modern versions that take a length parameter to avoid buffer overruns. They list stripping out support for ancient systems as a feature, while the article referenced in this SoylentNews discussion quotes the original NTP guy as saying: "If hardware is still in use, from our point of view there is an actual benefit to doing what we can to make sure folks can build the latest code on older machines."
Related to the above, they stripped out 74% of the original code, and made the reasonable claim that it is likely less prone to attack now. Quote: "Since early 2016 and our 0.1 release it has become routine that, in public disclosures of batches of CVEs against NTP Classic, around 75% fail to affect NTPsec at all because we had pre-hardened the code or removed the relevant attack surface."
They made it easier to build. They said original NTP spews a bunch of compiler warning messages even on a successful build; they eliminated all the warnings they could, and silenced the few they could not, so that a successful build has no warnings. They also changed build systems, from "31,000 lines of impacted autotools cruft" to about 1K lines (now using a build tool called waf [waf.io]).
Original NTP syncronizes down to the millisecond. Modern *NIX systems have library functions for dealing with timekeeping at nanosecond precision; NTPsec enabled this, and they claim that sub-millisecond times are actually useful with some time sources (such as reading the time from a GPS).
https://www.ntpsec.org/accomplishments.html [ntpsec.org]
So it doesn't sound to me like this is an ego-driven fork for no apparent reason. It sounds like the NTP guy is really attached to NTP-as-it-is, including support for ancient systems; and the NTPsec guys want a completely reliable and secure NTP that modern systems can use. This whole situation strongly reminds me of the situation with OpenSSL and LibreSSL [libressl.org].
And by the way, in 2015 I read an article about the precarious state of NTP, and how it relied to an unreasonable degree on one guy. Google found it for me: NTP's Fate Hinges on 'Father Time' [informationweek.com] Assuming the claims on the NTPsec web site are true, it should be much easier to get volunteers to work on a code base that is roughly 1/4 the size, much more straightforward and clean, and is easier to build.
I wonder if Bruce Byfield will next write an article about the senseless proliferation of BSD flavors. "Why do we need FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD?"