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

[emuemuemu]

You want a lot of randos contributing to the kernel to maintain all the obscure hardware that like three people use. But yeah, you also want people screeching at them to avoid losing pointers and things like that.

I'll try and simplify:
1) C is not a language you can just Stackoverflow your way through, you have to actually know what you're doing to get things working and make it safe
2) Even the tiniest most obscure piece of kernel code you didn't know was running can bring down your whole system, destroy your data and fuck up your hardware

Conclusion: you don't want randos contributing to the kernel, CoC redundant and unjustifiable
Bad developers scared away by Linus's absurd ranting == good
Bad developers given encouragement and false sense of worth != good

 

[Marvin]

I'll try and simplify:
1) C is not a language you can just Stackoverflow your way through, you have to actually know what you're doing to get things working and make it safe
2) Even the tiniest most obscure piece of kernel code you didn't know was running can bring down your whole system, destroy your data and fuck up your hardware

Conclusion: you don't want randos contributing to the kernel, CoC redundant and unjustifiable
Bad developers scared away by Linus's absurd ranting == good
Bad developers given encouragement and false sense of worth != good

That's cargo cult nonsense.

Linus' absurd ranting (well, and the lesser sperglords inspired by his behavior) also scares away good developers, like Con Kolivas. And the most vulnerable developers are the ones working on desktop stuff, because no companies are paying for desktop linux development.

Getting one result, like losing random bad developers, but failing to analyse the mechanism behind it, is cargo cult behavior. Primitive people in the south Pacific would build symbolic landing strips because they believed it'd cause American planes to land bringing cargo.

Linus-inspired nerds sperging away contributors is inefficient in the opposite direction from the SJW nonsense.

You do need a lot of people contributing to the kernel for the sake of device drivers. The only reason many people use Linux is because it actually runs on their hardware. That's because many, many people gave it a try, found it supported most of their hardware, and worked their asses off to write drivers for the rest.

There's a reason why no one uses the BSDs or HURD on their computers. Because it can't run half their hardware. Right now I'm building a NAS box and I'm using a BSD, and I'm pissed I can't just put my tv tuner in it, because there's no drivers on BSD.

Linux development has always been open to driver contributors. Linus' sperging was ancillary to that.

The proper approach shouldn't be comparing Linus sperging vs a SJW hugbox free-for-all, like we have to decide which bowl of shit is less nasty to eat. The proper approach is just being polite but firm. Keep your spaghetti in your pockets.

Again, Linus himself is one aspect of it, but the real issue is every dipshit who looks at him like he's an example. The kernel mailing list is full of shrieking dipshits.

 

[AnOminous]

Getting one result, like losing random bad developers, but failing to analyse the mechanism behind it, is cargo cult behavior. Primitive people in the south Pacific would build symbolic landing strips because they believed it'd cause American planes to land bringing cargo.

Linus-inspired nerds sperging away contributors is inefficient in the opposite direction from the SJW nonsense.

I think the problem is less Linus himself than the other nerds who think they're Linus and act like toxic assholes without having any leg to stand on.

Linus may sperg about things that are more his personal design prejudice than objective fact, but mostly, he's right about what he says when he gets agitated about something.

Following the cargo cult analogy, I'd compare it to Steve Jobs's sperginess on issues like just having a single button on things or otherwise doing away with things he'd decided were obsolete. He did this and created a design style that people mostly liked, even though some people complained.

Fast forward to after Steve Jobs dying and you have Apple doing the same kind of shit, but because they aren't actually Steve Jobs, the result is just stupid. Example: doing away with the F keys on their keyboards and instead having this shitty bar on the keyboard.

Congratulations, all you achieved was pissing every emacs user the fuck off. They're a tiny minority of your users, sure, but almost all of them actually develop shit.

If you could come up with a spray repellent that would drive off troons like Ehmke and not hit any innocents, that would be wonderful. In the interim, we had prickly assholes like Linus who would make it very uncomfortable for useless people. He certainly didn't seem to drive off many really good developers, at least not to the point you don't have drivers out the ass for Linux.

I seriously think the Ehmke cancer is going to drive off a lot more people if it isn't kept in check. If they had to have a code of conduct at all, it should have come from within the community, not been thrust into it by an interloper hated by much of the community.

 

[Marvin]

I think the problem is less Linus himself than the other nerds who think they're Linus and act like toxic assholes without having any leg to stand on.

Linus may sperg about things that are more his personal design prejudice than objective fact, but mostly, he's right about what he says when he gets agitated about something.

Following the cargo cult analogy, I'd compare it to Steve Jobs's sperginess on issues like just having a single button on things or otherwise doing away with things he'd decided were obsolete. He did this and created a design style that people mostly liked, even though some people complained.

Fast forward to after Steve Jobs dying and you have Apple doing the same kind of shit, but because they aren't actually Steve Jobs, the result is just stupid. Example: doing away with the F keys on their keyboards and instead having this shitty bar on the keyboard.

Congratulations, all you achieved was pissing every emacs user the fuck off. They're a tiny minority of your users, sure, but almost all of them actually develop shit.

If you could come up with a spray repellent that would drive off troons like Ehmke and not hit any innocents, that would be wonderful. In the interim, we had prickly assholes like Linus who would make it very uncomfortable for useless people. He certainly didn't seem to drive off many really good developers, at least not to the point you don't have drivers out the ass for Linux.

I seriously think the Ehmke cancer is going to drive off a lot more people if it isn't kept in check. If they had to have a code of conduct at all, it should have come from within the community, not been thrust into it by an interloper hated by much of the community.

Definitely. I like the comparison to Steve Jobs.

Now I'm curious about who in the Linux community will exploit the CoC. Ehmke herself doesn't have the cojones for kernel development. But I suspect there's some lurkers, like Sarah Sharpe, who've just been quietly seething about shitlords while overall contributing to the kernel. I think the termites are already there and they'll come out now that the CoC is in place.

 

[Least Concern]

My two cents on trusting Google:

You have to consider the profit motive. How does Microsoft make money? Largely, by selling software, so their incentive is on making decent enough software that you want to continue purchasing it in the future. How does Apple make money? Largely, by selling hardware, so their incentive is to incentivize users to continue buying Apple hardware (and that includes making decent software that runs on that hardware).

How does Google make money? Largely, by selling advertising, so their incentive is to make their advertising model successful enough that the advertisers continue to throw money at them. When you use an Apple or MS product, you are Apple or MS's customer; when you use a Google product, the advertiser is the customer. And while they at least want to make their products good enough that users continue to use them, they have every incentive to pander to advertisers' needs over those of users.

Now I'm not saying you should never use a Google product. But I am saying you should be fully conscious of Google's motives whenever you use one. And it certainly wouldn't hurt to diversify your choices when decent enough or superior alternatives to a Google product are available. There's no reason to continue using Gmail for your email hosting in current year, for example, and why on Earth anyone aware of Google's motives would still choose to use Chrome is beyond me.

 

[Kosher Dill]

You have to consider the profit motive. How does Microsoft make money? Largely, by selling software, so their incentive is on making decent enough software that you want to continue purchasing it in the future. How does Apple make money? Largely, by selling hardware, so their incentive is to incentivize users to continue buying Apple hardware (and that includes making decent software that runs on that hardware).

How does Google make money? Largely, by selling advertising

Or as I put it: Microsoft just wants your money, Google wants your soul. (Though with the advent of Windows 10 I can't quite say that and mean it anymore)

 

[Vivec]

Or as I put it: Microsoft just wants your money, Google wants your soul. (Though with the advent of Windows 10 I can't quite say that and mean it anymore)

and Apple wants your faith and loyalty.

And your money.

 

[Cubanodun]

and Apple wants your faith and loyalty.

And your money.

Being a insufferable bragger for having Apple products is encouraged

 

[Vivec]

Being a insufferable bragger for having Apple products is required

fixed

 

[MI 814]

It's been a week or two, what's the recent happenings with the CoC?

Any one pulled their code from a project?

 

[CrunkLord420]

It's been a week or two, what's the recent happenings with the CoC?

Any one pulled their code from a project?

Just that user-space driver for Steam and PS4 controllers AFAIK. Nothing will happen until Caroline and Co. find some wrongthink tweet from some developer like during OpalGate. Caroline wants to created some enforcement group that trolls around projects, but so far has only started taking money via Patreon with nothing to show for it.

 

[AnOminous]

Just that user-space driver for Steam and PS4 controllers AFAIK. Nothing will happen until Caroline and Co. find some wrongthink tweet from some developer like during OpalGate. Caroline wants to created some enforcement group that trolls around projects, but so far has only started taking money via Patreon with nothing to show for it.

You mean Coraline? (Or, really, Corey.)

 

[Marvin]

It's been a week or two, what's the recent happenings with the CoC?

Any one pulled their code from a project?

Heh, no. They'd need to sue fucking google.

 

[Tiberius Claudius Nero]

I know this thread has cooled down a bit, but over the last couple of weekends I've been looking into HardenedBSD, which is a FreeBSD fork that forked off before FreeBSD got it's CoC. So far it's looking nice but the security features, while very useful, are a bit of a pain to get used to and it is missing a couple of ports for Debian packages I have. But other than that it's fine if you want an OS that has a native ZFS filesystem. If Linux goes downhill in the future, I think NetBSD and this would be good OSes to migrate to depending on what you want for your system.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I didn't really manage to make the transition I have to admit. I started with Linux around the late 90s/early 00s because I really, really disliked WinNT, having to give up DOS for good and how much of a black box it all was (little did I know about the horrors of Win10 20 years later) and while I fell in love instantly, Linux wasn't what it is today. It was often slow, and some things were either poorly supported, buggy or just plain missing. Any kind of help was pretty hard to come by. Without wanting to discount the work of the people, the *BSDs feel a lot like these pioneer days and I guess I must be getting old because I simply don't really feel like going through that phase of an OS again.

In regards to OpenBSD specifically which I tested - Even though you could sometimes say that Linus maybe didn't pay enough attention to security, the OpenBSD guys are on the other end of the spectrum and clearly overdoing it, often sacrificing functionality for gains I'd actually call dubious. Also if you move away from their choices of programs, you are quickly very alone. I also don't like their approach on being quick to sacrifice backwards compatibility without much of a warning. I didn't suffer personally from it but from experience I can say that stuff like that in an OS is cancer and is one of the things that makes Linux so great. Even with the newest Kernel version I could still get my Matrox graphics card and a Sound Blaster+Gameport working, not to mention that they never fuck with the kernel in a way that breaks userland. (And if they absolutely have to, they always will with plenty of warning and mitigation options)

Also Linux can also be very secure with MAC and namespaces and all that fancy stuff, saying that OpenBSD is inherently more secure is a bold-faced lie. Alright - Out of the box, maybe! Maybe some Distros are really shittily put together security-wise, but then again in the end security is the admins responsibility. Linux and Linux userland gives you a lot of tools to mitigate (reasonable) threats and is in no way behind here. Being used in wrong ways and have a badly configured userspace is not the fault of the Software itself.

Also you have tons of choice with Linux, I'd even say more than ever before. This little CoC drama made me personally even more convinced than I already was that in the end, I don't really care what happens on the well-walked paths. I have my strongly customized system without dbus, pam, pulseaudio, systemd, udev, openrc and all that crap (remember: do your own init, like a white man) and you know what? It's certainly possible and will be for a long, long time. Maybe Ubuntu won't be doing it, but who cares? This stuff isn't for normies to begin with. Linux is positively huge compared to, let's say, 2002 and it's just natural that there are different kinds of users with different wishes. People need to get away from this mindset that Linux is some small thing belonging only to a small group Hackers and Nerds and everything threatening what Hackers and Nerds like will destroy Linux for good, because it won't. It's big enough and has enough momentum for all kinds of people and users. I have my minimal herbstluftwm setup with vis (excellent lightwight vi clone - am curious about acme now though - if anybody has experience with it feel free to share) as editor I do everything with (pipes terminal emulators and bash, I don't really need more) and if somebody else wants the full-blown Gnome experience because he can't imagine any other workflow, I say let him have it.

/rant

 

[Least Concern]

So @AmpleApricots, did you make the migration to OpenBSD full-time, or not? I'm a bit unclear by your post. Certainly, if all you need are common CLI tools, OpenBSD should suit you fine, but elsewhere in your post you're singing Linux's praises.

You're certainly right about OpenBSD being very opinionated about certain things. And for people in general looking for a Linux replacement… Certainly you might be able to find alternatives that are good enough, but the fact is that no other FOSS operating system has gotten nearly the attention and man-hours put into it as Linux has, for better or worse. So you should expect things in general to be a little more incomplete compared to Linux.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Yeah that was sort of rambling -sorry- it was kinda late where I am when I posted this.

No I didn't. there were just too many things missing that bothered me. Also if you follow development a little (by reading mailing lists and such) they seem to have kind of the tendency to make sudden and big changes that break backwards compatibility. I don't feel like dealing with all that. Also I have a pretty mainstream amd64 system that's also quite a few years old by now and hardware support for it still isn't 100%, which does not bode well.

It does have quite a few neat sides though. That pledge() (too hard to explain in one post, google it) stuff is a pretty neat idea and well integrated in the programs that come with the OS and the firewall stuff is worlds better than what linux has. Documentation is often praised but I didn't find it more or less complete than manpages of the better or more common software, tbh.

Might be worth it to look into another *BSD which is a little bit less opinionated about security at any price. I want to look at NetBSD because it supports lua in the kernel and I'm still not sure what that even means but I love lua.

 

[Marvin]

I know this thread has cooled down a bit, but over the last couple of weekends I've been looking into HardenedBSD, which is a FreeBSD fork that forked off before FreeBSD got it's CoC. So far it's looking nice but the security features, while very useful, are a bit of a pain to get used to and it is missing a couple of ports for Debian packages I have. But other than that it's fine if you want an OS that has a native ZFS filesystem. If Linux goes downhill in the future, I think NetBSD and this would be good OSes to migrate to depending on what you want for your system.

Linux has native ZFS.

Might be worth it to look into another *BSD which is a little bit less opinionated about security at any price. I want to look at NetBSD because it supports lua in the kernel and I'm still not sure what that even means but I love lua.

I would imagine you'd have access to the same functions you would if you were, say, writing a driver. Just in Lua.

Someone did it with Scheme and Linux (although unfortunately unmaintained). The FAQ is illuminating. It provides a device that you can write Scheme expressions to and read out their results. You can fuck with kernel structures in real time.

Neat stuff.

 

[Least Concern]

OpenBSD 6.4 was released this morning. Here's the abbreviated changelog.

 

[Marvin]

So I'm fucking around with ffmpeg, and I noticed they have a code of conduct. But, like it was a code of conduct from a long time ago. It's pretty good, I like it.

It reminded me of what I found so weird about the recent CoC thing. There have always been codes of conduct in open source projects. Nerds can be assholes sometimes, even if they don't mean it, and it's good to remind them once in awhile to chill out.

It was weird that an existing, benign feature of open source development was suddenly turned into political weapon.