Crosspost from Hector Martin's thread:
Damn, I wish my bitching and moaning made it into respected publications, but I suppose this thread shows that's a wish made on a monkey's paw.
Let's go through Drew's last two articles:
https://drewdevault.com/2024/07/16/2024-07-16-So-you-want-to-compete-with-FOSS.html (
archive)
This article is, generally, fine. Drew correctly criticizes those businesses who joined the party to make money, and little else.
The economics that drew commercial interest into the movement work specifically because of this collaboration – because the FOSS model allows businesses to share R&D costs and bring together talent across corporate borders into a great melting pot of innovation. And, yes, there is no small amount of exploitation going on as well; businesses are pleased to take advantage of the work of Jane Doe in Ohio’s FOSS project to make themselves money without sharing any of it back.
I dislike his use of the phrase
melting pot here, and
Jane Doe is silly, but we know Drew prefers to ignore demographics if they don't match up with what he wants.
The simple truth of open source is that if you design your business model with an eye towards competition, in which you are the only entity who can exclusively monetize the software product, you must eschew the collaborative aspects of open source – and thus its greatest strength.
Realistically, and everyone knows it, most software has a few key contributors, if not one.
No one is incentivized to work for you, for free, for your own exclusive profit.
Reddit shows
people will do this in exchange for power over others.
Open source ate a lot of lunches.
I just hate this phrase.
This logic is rooted in a deeper notion of ownership over the software, which is both subtle and very important. This is a kind of auteur theory of software. The notion is that the software they build belongs to them.
I don't disagree with them either. My software is Free Software, but it's mine too.
They possess a sense of ownership over the software, which comes with a set of moral and perhaps legal rights to the software, which, importantly, are withheld from any entity other than themselves. The “developers” enjoy this special relationship with the project – the “developers” being the special class of person entitled to this sense of ownership and the class to whom the up-and-coming source-available movements make an appeal, in the sense of “pay the developers” – and third-party entities who work on the source code are merely “contributors”, though they apply the same skills and labor to the project as the “developers” do. The very distinction between “first-party” and “third-party” developers is contingent on this “auteur” worldview.
I get the impression Drew's upset about how this worldview interferes with the infiltration of projects.
This is quite different from how most open source projects have found their wins. If Linux can be said to belong to anyone, it belongs to everyone.
So true, Drew, the Linux kernel belongs to
Asahi Lina just as much as to Linus Torvalds.
I like to think of software with a single primary author, like TeX by Donald Knuth, as a counter example to this article. Anyway, let's move on:
https://drewdevault.com/2024/08/30/2024-08-30-Rust-in-Linux-revisited.html (
archive)
I could swear he thought himself to be nice when he heavily implied Richard Stallman to be a pedophile, but I won't bother checking. I'll be nice too, Drew.
Two years ago, seeing the Rust-for-Linux project starting to get the ball rolling, I wrote “Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?”, penning a conclusion consistent with Betteridge’s law of headlines.
Stop linking to fucking Wikipedia.
The people working on Rust-for-Linux are incredibly smart, talented, and passionate developers who have their eyes set on a goal and are tirelessly working towards it – and, as time has shown, with a great deal of patience.
The cult is so patient and understanding.
Though I’ve developed a mostly-well-earned reputation for being a fierce critic of Rust, I do believe it has its place and I have a lot of respect for the work these folks are doing.
That's not even in the first five things of which I think whenever I imagine Drew.
Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work – and it’s a lot of coding work. Every subsystem has its own unique culture and its own strongly held beliefs and values.
I guess this is the bad kind of diversity. Still, political work is what Rust does best, not that it does it well.
Here’s the pitch: a motivated group of talented Rust OS developers could build a Linux-compatible kernel, from scratch, very quickly, with no need to engage in LKML politics. You would be astonished by how quickly you can make meaningful gains in this kind of environment; I think if the amount of effort being put into Rust-for-Linux were applied to a new Linux-compatible OS we could have something production ready for some use-cases within a few years.
Sure, but how are they supposed to get people to use it if they can't force it on others by infiltrating an existing project?
Novel OS design is hard: projects like Redox are working on this, but it will take along time to bear fruit and research operating systems often have to go back to the drawing board and make major revisions over and over again before something useful and robust emerges. This is important work – and near to my heart – but it’s not for everyone. However, making an OS which is based on a proven design like Linux is much easier and can be done very quickly. I worked on my own novel OS design for a couple of years and it’s still stuck in design hell and badly in need of being rethought; on the other hand I wrote a passable Unix clone alone in less than 30 days.
None of this shit is original or novel, and no one cares.
So my suggestion for the Rust-for-Linux project is: you’re burned out and that’s awful, I feel for you. It might be fun and rewarding to spend your recovery busting out a small prototype Unix kernel and start fleshing out bits and pieces of the Linux ABI with your friends. I can tell you from my own experience doing something very much like this that it was a very rewarding burnout recovery project for me. And who knows where it could go?
That clearly won't happen.
Well, I'm not getting any of this time back.
