SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The GNU project was officially announced on 27 September 1983 by Richard Stallman. Thirty-five years of a project that has now become the fundamental building block of everything we use and see in technology in 2018. I would not be wrong to say that there isn't a single proprietary piece of software that anyone is still using from 35 years ago – please post comments if there is something still being used.
There is only one reason for this longevity: the GNU project was built upon the premise that the code is available to anyone, anywhere with the only restriction that whatever is done to the code, it shall always be available to anyone, forever. Richard Stallman's genius in crafting the copyleft license that is the GNU General Public License is probably the best hack of the 20th century software industry.
Extra: Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Friday September 28 2018, @12:29PM (12 children)
Unfortunately interest in things like BSD and GNU's Mach kernel hurd pretty much lost interest as Linux took over the world
Interest can be rekindled.
The hard bit is separating politics from an engineering project. Unfortunately, wherever there are humans, there is politics, and the result is usually that people who are better at politics than at engineering get the power. I am not aware of any successful means of insulating scientific and engineering projects from political influence - if there were one, I expect it would be insanely popular.
The problem that engineers have is that they frequently approach political problems as though they were engineering problems, then get mystified when standard problem solving approaches don't work. People who excel at both are vanishingly rare. I know I do not have such skill, but at least I am self-aware enough to know that, and aim to avoid getting into political deep water. I don't succeed in that, as I have drowned in office politics more than once.
You only need to look at the stereotypes satirised in Dilbert: Dilbert is a knowledgeable engineer, but the technically clueless Pointy Haired Boss is still the Boss. It is a stereotype, but stereotypes often contain a kernel of truth (or maybe truthiness ;-))
4.19-rc3 could become a turning point*. We'll see.
*Linus' announcement of 4.19-rc4 was after after the actual the commit of 4.19-rc4, which was after the commit of the new Code of Conduct.
Timeline:
- at 2018-09-16 11:42:28 -0700 the CoC commit is here [kernel.org] ;
- at 2018-09-16 11:52:37 -0700 the actual 4.19-rc4 commit is here [kernel.org]
- at 2018-09-16 12:22:43 -0700 Linus' announcement is here [lkml.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:48PM (8 children)
It's not possible to prevent interpersonal or political squabbles. Amending the GPL to prevent takeover of projects by individuals demanding adherence to some political dogma may be possible. If a way were to be found, all the hatred thrown at the GPL back in the day would reemerge and the same people would be behind it. The objective of the enemy is excerting control over others by disempowering them and the mechanism (closed source, imposition of CoC) doesn't matter.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday September 28 2018, @03:18PM (7 children)
How exactly does amending a legal agreement regarding the distribution of source code with compiled code have jack squat to do with efforts to establish code of conduct? The code of conduct affects the organization creating code, not the code itself.
Under the current rules, there's a mechanism for dealing with any organizational move from the people creating code that you don't like: Build your own version. (With blackjack! And hookers!) For instance, you could fork Linux right now. And as the BDFL, you could decide what gets included in your fork completely arbitrarily, and also make the promise of no Codes of Conduct ever. And what's more, you could even pull in any changes from Linux into your fork you wanted to, since they're both GPL'd.
But instead of doing that, what you'd like to do is use copyright law (a.k.a. government intervention) to force organizations you're probably not even a part of to conduct their internal affairs according to your own views about what is and is not acceptable. Not what Congress said, not what the EEOC said, not what those organization's leaders/boards/members said, but what you said. Now I want you to re-read this sentence:
How exactly are you different from "the enemy"?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @04:32PM (6 children)
Correct but no one person could maintain it. The GPL turned copyright against itself to ensure the code would be free and I suggested the same freedoms should be preserved for those writing code. Why is it important? It's important because millennials take freedoms for granted, they don't appreciate how hard won they were.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 28 2018, @05:05PM (5 children)
Sure they could. I even demonstrated how. To put it more specifically, your simplest approach to maintaining it on your own looks something like this:
Done. You now have any changes done by all those Linux nannies with their annoying CoC, and you also have any changes you did without being subject to a CoC. And of course you can also try to convince other developers to contribute to your OS rather than Linux, in which case you aren't working on your own anymore. And I should also point out that since your stuff would have to be GPL'd, in the event that it's technically superior you may find your stuff pulled into Linux as well.
As for the rest of your argument: Freedom means that the Linux Foundation can adopt whatever non-illegal rules they want for how they conduct their activities. Your freedom is to walk away if you don't like those rules. This is no different from your boss saying you aren't allowed to tell customers to go f*** themselves no matter how much you want to, and if you don't like it you can find yourself another job.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @06:10PM
A slight change to your analogy reveals the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @07:24PM (3 children)
Please get off your magic unicorn and do remember the sizable amount of work that Gentoo, Slackware, Devuan etc. teams now have to do to unfuck the parts of system deliberately twisted to "require" a systemd infestation.
People with an agenda having a free run at the kernel itself, can of course inflict even more and harder-to-counter architectural damage on the OS.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 28 2018, @08:18PM (1 child)
1. It's entirely possible to use an unpatched vanilla Linux kernel without systemd. If you compile your own kernel, the help sections for the relevant options will even helpfully point out exactly what you can turn off to make systemd impossible to run on your system, but the system will run just fine on sysvinit or upstart or openRC with those options enabled. The work you're referring to is in userspace (e.g. undoing the reliance of key system utilities on systemd's crappy binary logging system), not the kernel. So from a technical standpoint, you do not appear to have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
2. Even if that were completely true, you'd still have the right and the ability to fork the kernel. My simple "pull in whatever happens to the mainline kernel" is just one way of handling the maintenance if you're understaffed. You could, of course, pull in the mainline kernel to a branch, evaluate and/or eliminate the patchset to your heart's content, and keep only what you like.
From your statements, I think it's safe to assume that you are not a kernel contributor, and thus not affected by any kernel contributor code of conduct in any way whatsoever. You are unwilling to fork off the code now before any "more and harder-to-counter architectural damage" occurs, and are unwilling to create your own version of the OS that is presumably without this architectural damage because it's too much work. I'm going to suggest that your concerns have nothing at all to technical issues and everything to do with the fear that your chosen hobby or profession isn't a place where you can do whatever you want.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @09:11PM
When I say "system" and you bloviate about kernel it's disingenuous at best. From a technical standpoint.
But when you start telling me how I'm "not affected" by how and by whom the kernel of the OS that I run is made - you get firmly into the realm of the crazy. Go tell Windows users they're "not affected" by the consequences of architectural decisions within MS.
Please do not insult anyone's intelligence here with such ham-fisted rhetoric. Thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @12:52PM
I still don't really understand why the desktop really needs the init system as a dependency. Why should it care?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @03:40PM
> I am not aware of any successful means of insulating scientific and engineering projects from political influence...
On a small scale there is someone called "a good boss". The definition of a good boss (or group leader) is a politically savvy & empowered person with enough understanding of the engineering process to isolate one from the other. I've worked for some good ones and strive to do the same now that I'm a manager (but in my case I only manage one highly productive engineer).
One of the best I worked for was in the heydays of the arcade game business. In a company where the normal product cycle took about 6 months, he managed to get three years of development time for a "game changing"(sorry) new way of developing the hardware and software for arcade games. This manager had come off a very successful project (so he had cred with the company top managers). He challenged his group of 4 engineers with the new approach, finding budget and resources so they could keep working, while he attended all the hand-wringing meetings and dealt with the normal corporate in-fighting. Only near the end of the development did the group pull in resources from the rest of the company (cabinet design, testing, marketing, etc) to complete the product. It all worked out and was a big money maker.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 28 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
Well, that's easy: Just make sure the project is done by a single person, and has no success whatsoever.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Friday September 28 2018, @05:34PM
TempleOS by Terry A. Davis. The CIA niggers finally got him.