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

[Mr. Boogedy]

The talk going around Twitter is that the employees fired from Mozilla were all from QA, release management and security.
Mozilla announced in September that Firefox would be switching to a 4 week release cycle from 6 weeks starting in January 2020. (archive.is) If the above is true, this doesn't bode well.

 

[ditto]

Mozilla shitcanned a bunch of employees today.

Mozilla CEO says layoffs needed amid shift from browser - SFChronicle…

archived 15 Jan 2020 23:37:17 UTC

archive.md

Brendan Eich claims that 70 employees had been fired from Mozilla, while mentioning that Mozilla's CEO makes more money even as their browser loses market share.
View attachment 1100195


I've seen this firsthand in the real world as well. Techies love to whine about those disgusting normies not installing Windows 10, yet I've seen cash registers and the like running on DOS powered POS terminals or even vintage macs because they just worked. They might end up buying new card terminals that are independent from the main register to process chip cards or LCDs to replace failing CRTs, but other than that they still continue to work.

As long as they're not connected to the internet there's no real issue. Techies don't realize that the average user wants their computer to work.

It's not about installing Windows 10 or not, but running an old unsupported operating system and connecting it to the internet. No complaints about running Windows XP offline for games or word processing or anything at all really. But then connecting it to the internet and running random downloads - that's a paddlin'.

FWIW I'd take a DOS-based POS terminal over anything cloud based.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

The talk going around Twitter is that the employees fired from Mozilla were all from QA, release management and security.
Mozilla announced in September that Firefox would be switching to a 4 week release cycle from 6 weeks starting in January 2020. (archive.li) If the above is true, this doesn't bode well.

That worked so well for Microsoft. Not like 1809 had a major file deleting bug that a QA team could have found before release.

 

[vertexwindi]

That worked so well for Microsoft. Not like 1809 had a major file deleting bug that a QA team could have found before release.

Fucking hell, I remember reading about that. MS has gone down the shitter so hard the last few years.

This is your software on wokeness.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I've seen cash registers and the like running on DOS powered POS terminals or even vintage macs because they just worked.

I've also used to see tons of 286 in the field that did embedded work with DOS as the choice of OS. Retail settings but also Industrial and Manufacturing. Simpler industrial and embedded stuff was usually the Z80 which is still manufactured to this very day, believe it or not. The 286 was garbage compared to the 68k but yeah, back in the day for some reason couldn't throw a stone without hitting a 286 board.

Especially the later ones with these one chip solution chipsets from e.g. Headland and the licensed, second-sourced 286 from Harris. Incredibly cheap but reliable boards. (and low power, for the kids - these were times where CPUs usually didn't have heatsinks) For some embedded stuff DOS being barely an operating system was more of a blessing than a curse really, also for small engineering outfits it was relatively simple and cheap to whip up their own ISA expansions for controlling/measurement stuff.

 

[Dr. Sexbot]

Simpler industrial and embedded stuff was usually the Z80 which is still manufactured to this very day, believe it or not.

The unbelievable thing is that TI still wants >$100 for a graphing calculator powered by one (and that's without CAS).

 

[???]

This is your software on wokeness Pajeets.

FTFY.

 

[AnOminous]

Simpler industrial and embedded stuff was usually the Z80 which is still manufactured to this very day, believe it or not.

A number of voting machines and other tabulation type machines still use this.

 

[Vecr]

Key quotes, read below if you want more.

Bear in mind he's already complained the issue is no-one wants to help at the point at which he refuses someone's offer to help him
...
The least helpful, most confrontational person in this thread is Nikolay himself. It seems to me he's fallen into a victim-trap: he can't see his own behaviour is the cause of his own victimisation. It's a hard thing to deal with -- it feels a lot like the whole "Stop hurting yourself" tease from childhood. However dealing with collaborative team-work requires a focus on technical details and a willingness to be wrong; rather than a focus on perceived motivations, and a desire to be "right".

Edit: someone writing on this topic thinks Rust is dead... Or something.

A sad day for Rust

actix-web is dead. This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September, I assumed that over...

words.steveklabnik.com

Edit: okay, someone involved gave me a working link to the GitHub issue talking about the problem: https://archive.ph/TokNs
Raw API data: https://gist.github.com/bb010g/705c8ffe4b9db9550a7782d25e5a53be
Archived: https://archive.ph/VANUH

I zipped up the bare Git repo and uploaded it, should be linked to this post.
If someone wants to re-host it on the Kiwi Farms Git site, they can, but I'm not sure anyone wants to use the software anymore.
Edit: a source that might be easier to use: https://git.kiwifarms.net/Vecr/actix-web

The history of the Rust crate "actix-web" was just deleted.

What my local copy reports:
origin/master: ahead 3031, behind 5

Edit: the story:

People reported memory safety bugs, and the owner of the project did not care.

They kept complaining, and a "fix" was issued.

The fix did not work.

A respected Rust user created an actual fix, and it was rejected, because it was "boring".

The first "fix" was reverted, and then the Git history of the project was deleted not long after.


Someone else's more technical account of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/eq1ddn/regarding_nikolay_actixweb_and_the_rust/fen9al9/
Archived: https://archive.vn/Je5jh

His rant:
TLDR: Mad at the Internet because of a few "mean" comments (that are exactly right).

Actix prject postmortem

Another day, another "unsafe shitstorm”, I guess I get used to it.
It is interesting how easy to move comment out of context and how hard to comment with very clear intention (especially if you are not native speaker) What was the patch? It was very strait forward, simple, uncreative change, intention was just to remove unsafe not to fix existing code. I believe software development is one of the most creative work we do, and creativity is part of why we love software development, why it is fun. Especially if you combine it with real world projects constraints. “creative constrains” could be source of very interesting solutions. Being on the edge of your abilities is super fun. So uncreative change felt boring (oh! And author gave up copyright claims for that patch (a bit irony and sarcasm)). I’ve never used unsafe unintentionally, I use it because I believe usage is safe. There was no any malicious intentions. I believed it held mutable aliasing invariant and I was very happy that someone found real problem. I wanted to solve the problem, just with a bit of creativity. And use RefCell solution only if it would be not possible to solve it with any other way. Btw, I like the solution I found, it is in master and solves the problem at least one from the issue. If you want to push boundaries you have to touch this boundaries and sometimes you push too hard.
Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help. Seems everyone believes there is large team behind actix with unlimited time and budget. (Btw thanks to everyone who provided prs and other help!) For example, async/await took three weeks 12 hours/day work stint, quite exhausting, and what happened after release, I started to receive complaints that docs are not updated and i have to go fix my shit. Encouraging. You could notice after each unsafe shitstorm, i started to spend less and less time with the community. You felt betrayed after you put so much effort and then to hear all this shit comments, even if you understand that that is usual internet behavior. Anyway, removing issue was a stupid idea. But I was pissed off with last two personal comments, especially while sitting and thinking how to solve the problem. I am sorry for doing that.
It’s been three years since I started actix project (time flies). I learnt a lot, i meet new people, I found language that I really like and want to use it fulltime, I found fun job. But damage to the project's reputation is done and I don’t think it is possible to recover. Actix always will be “shit full of UB” and “benchmark cheater”. (Btw, with tfb benchmark I just wanted to push rust to the limits, I wanted it to be on the top, I didn’t want to push other rust frameworks down.) Everything started with actix, then actix-web and then actix-net. It took a lot of time to design api and architecture. Each of this projects was rewritten from scratch at least 4-5 time. I hope I expanded some boundaries and found few new patterns, I hope other developers will check source code and find inspiration to move even further. Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be part of rust community is not fun as well.
I am done with open source.
P.S. I moved actix-net and actix-web project to my personal github account. I will make decision during next couple days what to do. I don’t want to see the project becomes ghost of what it was. Maintainers must understand how everything work, but don’t anyone who does and those who could are busy with other projects. At the moment I am planing to make repos private and then delete them (will remove benchmarks as well), unless others suggest better ideas.
Everything has to come to the end. It was fun trip but now is time to move on. Life should be fun.

His quitting tweet: https://twitter.com/fafhrd91/status/1218135374339301378
Archived: https://archive.ph/uKacq

 

[Kosher Dill]

Mozilla announced in September that Firefox would be switching to a 4 week release cycle from 6 weeks starting in January 2020. (archive.li) If the above is true, this doesn't bode well.

It doesn't bode well regardless. Rushed release cycles have always been a bad idea. I blame internet companies for the popularity of this idea, since for so many of them the users are the product, not the customer. So who cares if you push out something broken to them? Just fix it later or whatever, right?

 

[Cryonic Haunted Bullets]

Key quotes, read below if you want more.



Edit: someone writing on this topic thinks Rust is dead... Or something.

A sad day for Rust

actix-web is dead. This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September, I assumed that over...

words.steveklabnik.com

Edit: okay, someone involved gave me a working link to the GitHub issue talking about the problem: https://archive.ph/TokNs

I zipped up the bare Git repo and uploaded it, should be linked to this post.
If someone wants to re-host it on the Kiwi Farms Git site, they can, but I'm not sure anyone wants to use the software anymore.
Edit: a source that might be easier to use: https://git.kiwifarms.net/Vecr/actix-web

The history of the Rust crate "actix-web" was just deleted.

What my local copy reports:
origin/master: ahead 3031, behind 5

Edit: the story:

People reported memory safety bugs, and the owner of the project did not care.

They kept complaining, and a "fix" was issued.

The fix did not work.

A respected Rust user created an actual fix, and it was rejected, because it was "boring".

The first "fix" was reverted, and then the Git history of the project was deleted not long after.


Someone else's more technical account of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/eq1ddn/regarding_nikolay_actixweb_and_the_rust/fen9al9/
Archived: https://archive.vn/Je5jh

His rant:
TLDR: Mad at the Internet because of a few "mean" comments (that are exactly right).



His quitting tweet: https://twitter.com/fafhrd91/status/1218135374339301378
Archived: https://archive.ph/uKacq

It's a real shame. Actix was ridiculously performant.

 

[Vecr]

It's a real shame. Actix was ridiculously performant.

It's possible that was it's downfall, with the author going for the top of the rankings with little regard for making the program well suited for use in production environments, or even accepting other people's donated code (that's probably just ego though).

 

[Mr. Boogedy]

Pleroma creator Lain in a thread on the actix-web happenings:

rust is kinda like mastodon, in my mind (might be unfair characterization) - publicly very inclusive, but lots of drama and hurting each other behind the scenese.

 

[ZMOT]

Fucking hell, I remember reading about that. MS has gone down the shitter so hard the last few years.

This is your software on wokeness.

it's not wokeness, just microsoft being cheap. why hire a whole QA department when you can dogfood your devs and have thousands of drones eager to test your shit for free?
companies don't mind, since they have their own upgrade policy which is usually much slower. the more technically inclined know it was a beta "feature" of an insider build and worst case know how to block it. the average consumer doesn't care about the possible bad PR, and microsoft knows those people will never leave windows anyway even when nadella pops out of the screen and goes full poojet on their chests.

 

[Shoggoth]

Key quotes, read below if you want more.



Edit: someone writing on this topic thinks Rust is dead... Or something.

A sad day for Rust

actix-web is dead. This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September, I assumed that over...

words.steveklabnik.com

Edit: okay, someone involved gave me a working link to the GitHub issue talking about the problem: https://archive.ph/TokNs

I zipped up the bare Git repo and uploaded it, should be linked to this post.
If someone wants to re-host it on the Kiwi Farms Git site, they can, but I'm not sure anyone wants to use the software anymore.
Edit: a source that might be easier to use: https://git.kiwifarms.net/Vecr/actix-web

The history of the Rust crate "actix-web" was just deleted.

What my local copy reports:
origin/master: ahead 3031, behind 5

Edit: the story:

People reported memory safety bugs, and the owner of the project did not care.

They kept complaining, and a "fix" was issued.

The fix did not work.

A respected Rust user created an actual fix, and it was rejected, because it was "boring".

The first "fix" was reverted, and then the Git history of the project was deleted not long after.


Someone else's more technical account of the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/eq1ddn/regarding_nikolay_actixweb_and_the_rust/fen9al9/
Archived: https://archive.vn/Je5jh

His rant:
TLDR: Mad at the Internet because of a few "mean" comments (that are exactly right).



His quitting tweet: https://twitter.com/fafhrd91/status/1218135374339301378
Archived: https://archive.ph/uKacq

Came here to post this, find out I'm not getting alerts for this thread even though I'm watching it.
How surprised is anyone here the Rust community is mired in ego, drama and hurt fee-fees. It might actually end up failing on account of its community alone.
Lord, give me a community of autists over a community of drama queens every day of the week.

 

[Gamepad]

Came here to post this, find out I'm not getting alerts for this thread even though I'm watching it.
How surprised is anyone here the Rust community is mired in ego, drama and hurt fee-fees. It might actually end up failing on account of its community alone.
Lord, give me a community of autists over a community of drama queens every day of the week.

They're proud of shunning Reddit for how mean it is (lol) and building an echo chamber, basically circlejerking over how great and amazing their "community" is. Of course it's going to be full of petty people spouting righteous sanctimony.

 

[thx1138]

In the pre-woke days, pre H1B times, I had an IT job and we had some issues with Outlook being fucky on our network. We had MS come in and take a look. They sent "the" senior engineer who developed Outlook at the time, decent guy. We as a group hung out after work, I got this really cool vibe off what he talked about the corporate culture at MS being like.

Fast forward to me being semi-retired, and my Win7 install shitting itself one day and deciding it was no longer a valid install. Call MS after much googling, end up talking to Pajeet - he fixed it despite the language barrier, and one of the funniest damn things was he had to remote in to my PC to fix the registry. I felt like at any minute he was going to tell me to go buy a bunch of gift cards to send to him, it felt skeevy and weird.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Pleroma creator Lain in a thread on the actix-web happenings:
View attachment 1103102

They're not wrong. Rust has a reputation over on /g/ and the like for having one of the shittiest communities of any new programming language. I've seen quite a few jokes about how the Rust compiler will refuse to compile your code if it violates their strict code of conduct. There's also the fact that Steve Klabnik (the book author) is super woke to the point where he thinks there needs to be a violent tech antifa, and was involved when Moldbug got banned from a tech conference.

Even if Rust is the most revolutionary new programming language ever created, the community and userbase overshadows it hard.

 

[Cryonic Haunted Bullets]

Even if Rust is the most revolutionary new programming language ever created, the community and userbase overshadows it hard.

The sad thing is that it pretty much is the former. It's like a drop-in replacement for C++, but faster and not gay. The Redox OS is very promising.

 

[AnOminous]

They're not wrong. Rust has a reputation over on /g/ and the like for having one of the shittiest communities of any new programming language. I've seen quite a few jokes about how the Rust compiler will refuse to compile your code if it violates their strict code of conduct. There's also the fact that Steve Klabnik (the book author) is super woke to the point where he thinks there needs to be a violent tech antifa, and was involved when Moldbug got banned from a tech conference.

Even if Rust is the most revolutionary new programming language ever created, the community and userbase overshadows it hard.

The problem with even bothering to learn something like that is the social cancer will almost inevitably cause development to end in some cancerous social implosion or, even worse, mire it in some never ending legal turmoil.