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

[Positron]

Linus Torvalds is a jerk, but SJWs managed to out-jerk him.
What timeline is this again?

 

[Rand /pol/]

Just use Apple then

 

[AnOminous]

Potential major happening. The recent implementation of a Code of Conduct for Linux devs that reads like the insane rantings of a fat pink haired gender non conformist has many of the devs in the community threatening to pull the licences for their code in the Linux system.

Dude, it literally is the rantings of a fat pink haired troon.

Spoiler: fatass pink haired troon

 

[mindlessobserver]

Dude, it literally is the rantings of a fat pink haired troon.

Spoiler: fatass pink haired troon

View attachment 548318

I somehow missed this thread so I deleted the quoted post (it was from current events). It seems life is now satire though that an off the cuff comment turned out to be true.

Tim pool did a video on this though, and he makes it sound like Linux is about to get nuked.

 

[ectoplasm]

Linus needed to "scare" away people and companies who otherwise would submit bad code from doing it (and thus wasting his time), and he is known to tell large mega companies like Nvidia to fuck off because they were submitted bad code or just making it hard for their products to work with linux.

By all accounts Linus was fine in person. He freely said he was over-the-top on the mailing lists because tone is harder to transmit online. I think he's diplomatically leaving out that a lot of Linux users are autists and don't understand tone unless they're beaten over the head with it.

 

[Least Concern]

Just use Apple then

Man, if Linux and FreeBSD aren't passing your ideological purity tests, Apple is doomed, and I say this as a satisfied and/or deluded Apple drone.

And they've abandoned the server market anyway. Great desktops, but I would never bother trying to host my work on one in current year.

EDIT: As an example, late last year, Apple's VP of Inclusion and Diversity, a woman of color, was hounded out of the position after she wrongthinked that white males can be diverse too.

 

[Jaimas]

OK, here's a question anyone can answer.

Why the fuck is anyone giving this morbidly-obese sack of failure the time of day? She's accomplished fucking nothing in any field except instituting these fucking worthless Codes of Conduct that do nothing but fuck up whatever company they're instituted in.

She has no fucking value whatsoever to this community. She's not a part of it, she's not helpful, and she's not achieving anything other than putting this fucking thing in place. Why is everyone with even a smidge of common sense asleep at the goddamned switch and not telling this self-proclaimed woman to drink an entire keg of lol calm down?

 

[Rei is shit]

OK, here's a question anyone can answer.

Why the fuck is anyone giving this morbidly-obese sack of failure the time of day? She's accomplished fucking nothing in any field except instituting these fucking worthless Codes of Conduct that do nothing but fuck up whatever company they're instituted in.

She has no fucking value whatsoever to this community. She's not a part of it, she's not helpful, and she's not achieving anything other than putting this fucking thing in place. Why is everyone with even a smidge of common sense asleep at the goddamned switch and not telling this self-proclaimed woman to drink an entire keg of lol calm down?

I looked through his github and the only commits I could find were to the CoC and some private repositories. I would guess the private repos is some coc related shit, maybe a wrongthink dataminer or some similar abomination.

As to why this shit is happening, probably a combination of group polarization and large tech companies having more money then they know what to do with making easy for these fucks to weed their way into other projects through what is essentially harassment.

 

[altkiwi01]

Why the fuck is anyone giving this morbidly-obese sack of failure the time of day?

People (and thus projects, companies, etc..) love being seen as "doing the right thing", and on the surface it looks like the CC is a good thing, and it looks like her intentions are fine if you don't look into it enough. Combine that with a big enough group of people that support this person and you've got a recipe for disaster.

If you have a look at the users in the Ruby coc issue, you'll notice that a good portion of them aren't regular contributors and haven't contributed to any other issues. This is a common tactic that they use. It also probably helps that Coraline can make herself seem not that crazy at first glance, especially when drumming up drama (we saw this during Opalgate).

 

[BlueSpark]

Coraline can make herself seem not that crazy at first glance

Presumably you mean in writing.

 

[altkiwi01]

Presumably you mean in writing.

Very much so!! Gosh, that face is enough to scare anyone off.

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

OK, here's a question anyone can answer.

Why the fuck is anyone giving this morbidly-obese sack of failure the time of day? She's accomplished fucking nothing in any field except instituting these fucking worthless Codes of Conduct that do nothing but fuck up whatever company they're instituted in.

She has no fucking value whatsoever to this community. She's not a part of it, she's not helpful, and she's not achieving anything other than putting this fucking thing in place. Why is everyone with even a smidge of common sense asleep at the goddamned switch and not telling this self-proclaimed woman to drink an entire keg of lol calm down?

If you want to go down the conspiracy route right after Ada's CoC was adopted Sage Sharp tried to kick Ted Tso (a high ranking Linux Dev) from Linux (Or just from the CoC review board), Intel was pushing hard for Linux to use only use RDRAND, Linus and Ted Ts'o pushed back on it hard. With Linus now gone, Sage who is a former employee of Intel is now trying to get Tso out.

If you want to put an extra layer the tin foil hat, RDRAND is suspected of also being backdoored or otherwise compromised by the NSA.

 

[Dreamland]

If you want to put an extra layer the tin foil hat, RDRAND is suspected of also being backdoored or otherwise compromised by the NSA.

I mean, it's not unheard of that NSA is monkeying with cryptography before, they tried both the legal- and clandestine route before, and those are only the times we heard of. I dunno how easy it is to poison a CPU module that's supposed to churn out 6Gbit/s of noise using thermal noise, but there is a reason why Yarrow/RDRAND only use these things as additional sources (other sources are usually things like uptime, temp readings, disk activity stats and process tables thrown into a marsenne twister). It's actually surprisingly difficult for a machine built around predictability to find something chaotic and unpredictable enough to act as a reliable way to encrypt data/enrich keys/act as burner for deallocated secure memory, so sabotaging that source of random noise can be an important key for the NSA to "Ease crypto" as it were.

 

[Kosher Dill]

With Linus now gone

He's not gone though. He just had to bend the knee.

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

I mean, it's not unheard of that NSA is monkeying with cryptography before, they tried both the legal- and clandestine route before, and those are only the times we heard of.

I don't know much about RDRAND and didn't want to go "Oh yes its 100% true". The implication of what I was trying to get across was that if true there is a chance that the NSA pressured Intel to get RDRAND in Linux, and when that failed Intel/NSA/someone got Ada to push for her CoC, then Intel used Sage to go after the people who blocked RDRAND out of power, or the CoC was just a "happy little accident"

I don't like tin foil hat shit, but it seems as time goes on "Trust No One" is proving to be the best option.

He's not gone though. He just had to bend the knee.

Linus is on a "leave of absent" with no known end. Some people (including me) are more cynical and thinking its a (near) perm leaving and if he does come back its only as a puppet. Since the CoC and his leaving happened at the same time.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Hi all,

As almost everyone knows, it's been an "interesting" week from a social
point-of-view. But from the technical side, -rc5 looks totally normal.

The diffstat is a bit higher than previous -rc5's, but the number of
trees pulled is lower, so overall, pretty much all is on track. I'm not
seeing any major "these bugs are not being fixed!" type of reports, so I
can hope that the initial churn that -rc1 threw at everyone is under
control.

The majority size-wise of changes here are with more tests being added
and fixed up, but there is also the usual networking, x86, sound, drm,
ppc, and other fixes. Full details are in the shortlog below.

As usual, please go and test this thing, and let me know if anything
technical isn't getting addressed that needs to be.

thanks,

greg "keeping the seat warm for a few weeks" k-h

This was posted yesterday my time. I think it's the first release ever that wasn't made by Linus but I'm not 100% sure. gregkh is pretty much Linus' second-in-command and has been with the project for a long time now and is very apt, he was often imagined as Linus' possible successor. Contrary to Linus, from all I've ever seen of him he's a nice and evenhanded guy. Also he's some sort of freakish gentle giant looking guy, look up pictures of him.

I think all this "Oh god lunux is doomed by trannies and the jews, download the source code before the NSA ruisn it!!1!" nonsense just waters down what the real issue with these CoCs is. I wish people would be a bit more moderate about their critique.

 

[GethN7]

I think all this "Oh god lunux is doomed by trannies and the jews, download the source code before the NSA ruisn it!!1!" nonsense just waters down what the real issue with these CoCs is. I wish people would be a bit more moderate about their critique.

Fair point.

At the same time, since I don't give a shit either way, I would greatly enjoy the saltnado that would result from the Linux community going nuclear, taking their shit with them and leaving the defenders of this CoC a gutted husk that isn't worth shit.

We'd gain 300 pages for this thread in under a week if they actually do it.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Eric S Raymond (ESR) talked about the Linux code revoking threat today and posted it to the Linux kernel mailing list, and this kicked off interesting debates in the comments. The big takeaway though is that the revoking threat does have teeth.
https://archive.fo/3t374

I just posted the following to the Linux kernel mailing list.

Most of you know that I have spent more than a quarter century analyzing the folkways of the hacker culture as a historian, ethnographer, and game theorist. That analysis has had large consequences, including a degree of business and mainstream acceptance of the open source way that was difficult to even imagine when I first presented “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” back in 1997.

I’m writing now, from all of that experience and with all that perspective, about the recent flap over the new CoC and the attempt to organize a mass withdrawal of creator permissions from the kernel.

I’m going to try to keep my personal feelings about this dispute off the table, not because I don’t have any but because I think I serve us all better by speaking as neutrally as I can.

First, let me confirm that this threat has teeth. I researched the relevant law when I was founding the Open Source Initiative. In the U.S. there is case law confirming that reputational losses relating to conversion of the rights of a contributor to a GPLed project are judicable in law. I do not know the case law outside the U.S., but in countries observing the Berne Convention without the U.S.’s opt-out of the “moral rights” clause, that clause probably gives the objectors an even stronger case.

I urge that we all step back from the edge of this cliff, and I weant to suggest a basis of principle on which settlement can be negotiated.

Before I go further, let me say that I unequivocally support Linus’s decision to step aside and work on cleaning up his part of the process. If for no other reason than that the man has earned a rest.

But this leaves us with a governance crisis on top of a conflict of principles. That is a difficult combination. Fortunately, there is lots of precedent about how to solve such problems in human history. We can look back on both tragic failures and epic successes and take lessons from them that apply here.

To explain those lessons, I’m going to invite everybody to think like a game theorist for a bit.

Every group of humans trying to sustain cooperation develops an ethos, set of norms. It may be written down. More usually it is a web of agreements that one has to learn by observing the behavior of others. The norms may not even be conscious; there’s a famous result from experimental psychology that young children can play cooperative games without being able to articulate what their rules are…

Every group of cooperating humans has a telos, a mutually understood purpose towards which they are working (or playing). Again, this purpose may be unwritten and is not necessarily even conscious. But one thing is always true: the ethos derives from the telos, not the other way around. The goal precedes the instrument.

It is normal for the group ethos to evolve. It will get pulled in one direction or another as the goals of individuals and coalitions inside the group shift. In a well-functioning group the ethos tends to evolve to reward behaviors that achieve the telos more efficiently, and punish behaviors that retard progess towards it.

It is not normal for the group’s telos – which holds the whole cooperation together and underpins the ethos – to change in a significant way. Attempts to change the telos tend to be profoundly disruptive to the group, often terminally so.

Now I want you to imagine that the group can adopt any of a set of ethoi ranked by normativeness – how much behavior they require and prohibit. If the normativeness slider is set low, the group as a whole will tolerate behavior that some people in it will consider negative and offensive. If the normativeness level is set high, many effects are less visible; contributors who chafe under restriction will defect (usually quietly) and potential contributors will be deterred from joining.

If the normativeness slider starts low and is pushed high, the consequences are much more visible; you can get internal revolt against the change from people who consider the ethos to no longer serve their interests. This is especially likely if, bundled with a change in rules of procedure, there seems to be an attempt to change the telos of the group.

What can we say about where to set the slider? In general, the most successful – most inclusive – cooperations have a minimal ethos. That is, they are just as normative as they must be to achieve the telos, *and no more so*. It’s easy to see why this is. Pushing the slider too high risks internal factional strife over value conflicts. This is worse than having it set too low, where consensus is easier to maintain but you get too little control of conflict between *individuals*.

None of this is breaking news. We cooperate best when we live and let live, respecting that others may make different choices and invoking the group against bad behavior only when it disrupts cooperative success. Inclusiveness demands tolerance.

Strict ethoi are typically functional glue only for small groups at the margins of society; minority regious groups are the best-studied case. The larger and more varied your group is, the more penalty there is for trying to be too normative.

What we have now is a situation in which a subgroup within the Linux kernel’s subculture threatens destructive revolt because not only do they think the slider been pushed too high in a normative direction, but because they think the CoC is an attempt to change the group’s telos.

The first important thing to get is that this revolt is not really about any of the surface issues the CoC was written to address. It would be maximally unhelpful to accuse the anti-CoC people of being pro-sexism, or anti-minority, or whatever. Doing that can only inflame their sense that the group telos is being hijacked. They make it clear; they signed on to participate in a meritocracy with reputation rewards, and they think that is being taken way from them.

One way to process this complaint is to assert that the CoC’s new concerns are so important that the anti-CoC faction can be and should be fought to the point where they withdraw or surrender. The trouble with this way of responding is that it *is* in fact a hijacking of the group’s telos – an assertion that we ought to have new terminal values replacing old ones that the objectors think they’re defending.

So a really major question here is: what is the telos of this subculture? Does the new CoC express it? Have the objectors expressed it?

The question *not* to get hung up on is what any individual’s choice in this matter says about their attitude towards, say, historically underepresented minorities. It is perfectly consistent to be pro-tolerance and pro-inclusion while believing *this* subculture ought to be all about producing good code without regard to who is offended by the process. Not every kind of good work has to be done everywhere. Nobody demands that social-justice causes demonstrate their ability to write C.

That last paragraph may sound like I have strayed from neutrality into making a value claim, but not really. It’s just another way of saying that different groups have different teloi, and different ethoi proceeding from them. Generally speaking (that is, unless it commits actual crimes) you can only judge a group by how it fulfills its own telos, not those of others.

So we come back to two questions:

1. What is our telos?

2. Given our telos, do we have the most inclusive (least normative) ethos possible to achieve it?

When you have an answer to that question, you will know what we need to do about the CoC and the “killswitch” revolt.

Email archive thread at: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/23/212

 

[AmpleApricots]

the problem with ESR is that he's nuts and left kernel development in a big huff himself.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Most of you know that I have spent more than a quarter century analyzing the folkways of the hacker culture as a historian, ethnographer, and game theorist.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand ESR.