Diseased Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[superscript]

BSD, mostly Free but also others, blew it. In the mid-late 90s BSD and Linux were on the same footing. BSD developers had an elitist attitude and were slow about adopting things that would meet the needs of users, favoring technical obsession over real world troubleshooting. So basic tasks like updating were tedious af but at least they had a better TCP stack! Linux was more forgiving, even to newbies. A lot of BSD's supposed superiority fell away as Linux matured. That Netcraft confirms it guy was loopy but on the right track. OpenBSD is the only version which is healthy.

All this CoC stuff is just a desperate try to get people back without fixing basic problems. SJWs would love to infest Linux but Linus runs a tight ship so they'll go to the weaker project.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Leaving all politics out of it, every time I was confronted with a *BSD system it was a pleasant experience, from the good organized tools to the good organized documentation. I couldn't and wouldn't say the same about a lot of the userland software of Linux (remember, "Linux" is just the kernel kids!) especially with monstrosities like systemd out there (and back then HAL and now dbus, pulseaudio and the list goes on and on..) Now that systems are powerful and you have shit like hardware-backed virtualization even in the weakest of CPUs, several container systems and direct hardware passthrough I think the actual choice for your home desktop daily driver has never mattered as little as it does now.

I almost considered jumping ship from gentoo (yeah yeah, I know the memes) to a *BSD a while ago but didn't because my then desktop system had only very flimsy hardware support and I didn't want to deal with all that. Besides that I never really considered not being mainstream a downside in software. A lot of people are mouthbreathers, just that a majority mostly considering of idiots can handle something doesn't mean that something is good, just that it's kinda idiot-proof which inherently brings disadvantages for powerusers willing to spend the time. Maybe sounds elitist, I don't care, I had to deal with enough idiot IT people in my life.

That's leaving all the politics out of it of course.

https://bryanostergaard.com/blog/2018/07/16/why-i-created-the-exherbo-linux-project/?article=1

I also wanted to leave this here. Enjoy!

nvm fake as fuck, somebody please vote me dumb

 

[awoo]

"I’m a connoisseur of certain material that is illegal in my country Denmark, possession of which can land you in prison and your life ruined."

"I do not believe that arbitrary laws regarding age or consent should determine if I can store files on my computer. For instance, biblical accounts state that at the time of her marriage to Joseph, Mary was 12 years old. Why should we limit the age of sexual exploration to 18?"

PEDO ALERT


(Also why can't you just encrypt your hard drive?)

 

[Marvin]

monstrosities like systemd out there

Heh, what? I never understood all the reeeing about systemd. It's complicated, sure, but init is genuinely a complicated beast of a problem. I think systemd take stock of a hard problem and produces a complete solution in a single package.

I mean, what, do you want to just go back to shell scripts?

 

[PaiZuri]

Heh, what? I never understood all the reeeing about systemd. It's complicated, sure, but init is genuinely a complicated beast of a problem. I think systemd take stock of a hard problem and produces a complete solution in a single package.

I mean, what, do you want to just go back to shell scripts?

Oh god...

 

[CrunkLord420]

Heh, what? I never understood all the reeeing about systemd. It's complicated, sure, but init is genuinely a complicated beast of a problem. I think systemd take stock of a hard problem and produces a complete solution in a single package.

I mean, what, do you want to just go back to shell scripts?

I agree that systemd gets it worse than it should. The two things that annoy me are the failover DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google) and the weird timeout thing on shutdown.

I do not enjoy being forced to wait 2 minutes to turn off my computer because some process doesn't want to quit gracefully. Fortunately you can customize this timeout, and I discovered if you angrily smash your keyboard (CTRL+ALT+DEL 7 times) the system with detect that and bypass the timeout wait.

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

Heh, what? I never understood all the reeeing about systemd. It's complicated, sure, but init is genuinely a complicated beast of a problem. I think systemd take stock of a hard problem and produces a complete solution in a single package.

I mean, what, do you want to just go back to shell scripts?

The major complaints about systemd that I've seen boil down to three things:

1. Its existence goes against unix philosophy (emphasis on modularity and having many small, efficient programs work together to do a big job instead of using one large, bloated program to do a big job)
2. Poettering is an asshole (he is, but so is Linus sometimes)/a spy for the FBI/CIA/NSA (he's probably not)
3. Systemd is so large that it would be impossible to audit, and the task of doing so becomes greater by the day

I don't really care much about complaint 1 since I think that software should be chosen based on your use case and needs instead of philosophy, and you can see from my asides that I don't put much stock in complaint 2. I do agree that the vast size of systemd makes auditing it difficult and that does worry me a little bit, but not enough to avoid a distro entirely because of the presence of systemd.

 

[awoo]

I prefer systemd over the 30 years of historical cruft that a bunch of init shell scripts have built up.

Same thing applies for still being on X server (X11 being the latest protocol from 1987?)

 

[AmpleApricots]

I have my own init solution that has a very minimal PID 1 and is mostly hardwired otherwise and I admit it's not really for production use as it is, as I said, mostly hardwired for these few computers I just know very well, down to individual hardware quirks like fixes for USB ports not working after suspending. The advantage is that it'll still work ten years down the road and I've already had it for many years and I basically never need to touch it. It required more initial knoweldge and work but at the end of the day, it's a lot easier to maintain than to keep up with backwards-compatibility breaking updates of behemoths as systemd. There never will be that one big update that suddenly breaks everything for me, because it's in my hand. You just have to know what you're doing.

For me the strength of the whole linux software landscape is small programs made after the unix philosophy to do one thing and do it well and which you then can chain via scripts to do complicated things. I'm a lot for software minimalism personally (although I understand that it's not always possible or necessary) and systemd is pretty much the antithesis to that. It's simply too complicated and does too many things and none of them really all that well. If I wanted a huge black-box of a software that does somehow everything by magic and poorly documented shortcuts (like that DNS fallback) I'd go back to Windows. What also really many people don't get that something like systemd is not necessarily easier. It seems to be that way in the beginning because it's quick to set up initially, but then you have to learn all the weird quirks (like CRTL+ALT+DEL 7x, I mean wtf) and gotchas and be aware of the changes that are done to it upstream and then suddenly you have this ecosystem-specific knowledge about this one specific application that's not applicable to anything else and in the end you still don't know much about anything.

Besides that, I also really don't like the general attitude of the maintainers, their unwillingness to rethink bad decisions, (or admit fault) their generally hostile attitude to everyone who doesn't accept systemd 100% as perfect and their - lets call it ambitious - attempts to sneak systemd as a hard dependency into absolutely everything. Thankfully it's still about choice.

 

[PaiZuri]

https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-core


The exceptional individual screeching and embarrassing the entire FreeBSD project(Warner Losh) is...

wait for it...

now in charge of the project's Code of Conduct.

Looking back over the past few years of the FreeBSD Fiasco:

* There was only one serious case of harassment over the past few years in the FreeBSD project
* That harassment was by the vile Randi Harper
* Randi Harper was brought into the FreeBSD project by Colin Percival, a disgusting little creep
* Colin Percival was one of the main garbage individuals working secretly behind the FreeBSD community's back to ram the infamous toxic Code of Conduct down community's throat
* Colin Percival worked with Warner Losh(from the embarrassing video above) on the toxic Code of Conduct along with the creepy Benno Rice
* And now Warner Losh is in charge of FreeBSD's Code of Conduct

You can't make this shit up.

The only people who can be surprised by this clusterfuck are the same type of people who still are shocked each week when another male feminist is outed as a sexual predator.

What is amazing about this open source self destruction is before this fiasco unfolded there was massive amounts of developers fleeing the Linux systemd Fiasco to FreeBSD because it long had a reputation of a project run by grownups who were serious about technology and code quality without any wacko ideology.

One look at the mailing lists and forums makes it clear that FreeBSD is teetering on the edge of no longer having a critical mass of development interest. It already doesn't have enough to be a viable general desktop OS for consumers while still being excellent as a development workstation. But with DTrace and ZFS now being ported to Linux combined with the ideological clusterfuck the project has turned into, it is hard to see FreeBSD maintaining enough developer interest over the next few years before it becomes nothing but a legacy OS.

I know the Linux the community is laughing their asses off at what a joke FreeBSD has become after being the joke of the development community with the systemd Fiasco. But this smugness that Linus will always be there to defend the operating system against the SJW cancer is delusional. Linus could be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow and the SJW takeover of Linux would be as fast as barbarians pillaging a city once the walls have been breached.

 

[Marvin]

I know the Linux the community is laughing their asses off at what a joke FreeBSD has become after being the joke of the development community with the systemd Fiasco. But this smugness that Linus will always be there to defend the operating system against the SJW cancer is delusional. Linus could be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow and the SJW takeover of Linux would be as fast as barbarians pillaging a city once the walls have been breached.

I'm not so sure.

To start with, Linus would need to be hit by a literal bus. I don't think while he's functional he'll let much slide.

But beyond that, there's too much money in Linux for it to go down the shitter anytime soon. Big server money, cell phone money.

Hell, I mean, it's not even like BSD in general went down the toilet. Just FreeBSD. The other BSDs, the ones that get used on routers and switches and stuff, are still thriving.

That's the ultimate bane for SJW nonsense: being held responsible to an objective standard, like your main sponsors' business needs.

 

[superscript]

If Linus dies, Poettering will announce kerneld to replace Linux.

 

[awoo]

GKH is second in line and he seems reasonable

 

[superscript]

What is amazing about this open source self destruction is before this fiasco unfolded there was massive amounts of developers fleeing the Linux systemd Fiasco to FreeBSD

Don't take these threats too seriously. The second they're told to write drivers for their Thinkpads they'll go to Void or Gentoo at most. Even people who defend BSD don't use it on their workstations. Since a lot of of them are hobbyists they're not going to multiply userspaces unnecessarily. Corporate isn't going to change stable Debian servers because of systemd breaks the Unix way.

FOSS nerds want to tinker to do things like have their Pi make honking sounds when their favorite camgirl updates her Snapchat. They don't want have to deal with pkg's problems or fix FreeBSD's broken Pi image.

it long had a reputation of a project run by grownups who were serious about technology and code quality

Code quality sure, but technology?

FreeBSD has been behind in every new technology that's come out since the late 90s: 3D printing, IoT, supercomputing, mobile, touchscreen, VR. FreeBSD's prior highlights aren't as compelling. Jails? There's Docker. BSD Handbook? Gentoo has one and the Arch Wiki is fantastic. It's worse in Linux in other areas like out-of-box performance, driver support, application support, processor support, etc. As you said, not even ZFS or DTRACE are compelling since they've been ported.

FreeBSD devs still don't understand. The OS recently choked against Linux in server benchmarks. Their excuse? Phoronix used the defaults as though setting good defaults isn't the responsibility of the project. I'm sure the CoC will fix it. Bonus appearance by Harper and Losh.

 

[CIA Nigger]

I almost considered jumping ship from gentoo (yeah yeah, I know the memes) to a *BSD a while ago but didn't because my then desktop system had only very flimsy hardware support and I didn't want to deal with all that. Besides that I never really considered not being mainstream a downside in software. A lot of people are mouthbreathers, just that a majority mostly considering of idiots can handle something doesn't mean that something is good, just that it's kinda idiot-proof which inherently brings disadvantages for powerusers willing to spend the time. Maybe sounds elitist, I don't care, I had to deal with enough idiot IT people in my life.

At this point Linux has far superior x86 hardware support than BSD does. I know a good friend who's a diehard BSD user who was trying to play with distros for their custom built Ryzen server to see what would run on it, eventually settling with OpenIndiana (an OpenSolaris fork, based on SysV and not BSD) since FreeBSD wouldn't even boot on it. BSD tends to shine when it comes to obscure or orphaned hardware, especially NetBSD and to a lesser extent OpenBSD, but even then you can find ports of Linux to dead CPU architectures. BSD also shines for companies that want to make locked down systems, Sony and Nintendo have both made consoles running BSD since they don't need to contribute a single line of code back or make the system open source.

The main reason BSD has fewer users was the whole lawsuit from AT&T that led to Linux being seen as a legally clean alternative to BSD and slowed down BSD's adoption severely. The license incompatibility between both licenses also means that the BSD people are forever playing catch-up with hardware support and new features.

Heh, what? I never understood all the reeeing about systemd. It's complicated, sure, but init is genuinely a complicated beast of a problem. I think systemd take stock of a hard problem and produces a complete solution in a single package.

I mean, what, do you want to just go back to shell scripts?

Gentoo uses OpenRC by default and some distros like Void use runit instead. runit is damn good, it just needs a basic script to start services and you can add/remove services by making a link to a folder. Did I mention it's fast?

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

Gentoo uses OpenRC by default and some distros like Void use runit instead. runit is damn good, it just needs a basic script to start services and you can add/remove services by making a link to a folder. Did I mention it's fast?

Runit is fast and I generally prefer it to systemd, but it doesn't make up for Void's flaws.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Runit is fast and I generally prefer it to systemd, but it doesn't make up for Void's flaws.

It's also not only on Void either thankfully, especially since Void's had issues with keeping up to date and the project maintainer ditching it, leaving them to hop domains and trying to get ownership of many things passed over.

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

It's also not only on Void either thankfully, especially since Void's had issues with keeping up to date and the project maintainer ditching it, leaving them to hop domains and trying to get ownership of many things passed over.

Believe me, I know; I'm convinced JuanRP got himself killed in Spain. The good news is that they've already got control of a new github account with all of the void stuff, and they're apparently going to be switching to the new domains soon. I'll probably have switched to a different distro by that point though, since I can't deal with Void's relatively low number of packages anymore and xbps-src is awful to use.

 

[superscript]

Other than the decade-long litigation from SCO, nobody argues that Linus hasn't been the main guy behind Linux and overseen its growth. He does not tolerate bullshit. One of the best examples was Sarah Sharp. She was kernel dev who tried a power play years ago when Linus jokingly told another kernel maintainer he should "shout at people."

Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.

The best way to handle a programmer who's sperging is to slap them back to reality. Which he did, accurately calling it "playing the victim card." He knows there are people who can't work with him and they'll find other maintainers who are more their style. It ended in a Sharp's blog complaining about emotional abuse in the kernel mailing list. Harper and Losh show up in the comments hinting at the future BSD CoC mess.

Cut to the present. https://archive.is/ngcV1

Recently, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m non-binary.

For every developer Linus has scared off with his attitude, he's driven off twenty more who would have been more drama than their code was worth.

 

[AnOminous]

For every developer Linus has scared off with his attitude, he's driven off twenty more who would have been more drama than their code was worth.

We've seen what happens to distros that get taken over by this cancer, and what happened to FreeBSD.

The only thing that matters about software is does it work. If it doesn't, fuck off. I don't give a fuck how woke you are.