> I do believe there is a spirit of open source. Like, if everyone in the world behaved the “worst” they could while fulfilling all legal obligations, nothing would be functional at all anywhere.
Yeah, tell me about it, did I fail to mention I actually write widely used open source software, as opposed to the original complainer whose profile indicates little open source activity?
> In that vein, I hope they do contribute upstream where it makes sense to, at the very minimum, like applicable bug fixes.
And where’s the evidence that they aren’t already doing so? Where’s even the evidence that X410 is repackaging? I don’t know either way, but gp just started trashing the software because they sell licenses for 50 bucks a pop, which is not evidence for anything.
> And they have employed and still do employ many top tier open source developers who contribute open source code to a variety of projects. The money they make makes all of open source better!
I have to question that.
Nearly all of my worst experiences when using Linux have involved software that they or their developers have, to the best of my knowledge, been significantly involved with creating.
I'm thinking of software like systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, GNOME 3, and Wayland, for example.
I've wasted far too much of my time dealing with unnecessary, silly, and inexcusable problems involving such software.
What makes it even worse is that despite me trying to avoid their ecosystem, their software has unfortunately still made it into other major distros, including Debian.
> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions.
That could possibly explain with it ends up in RedHat derivative distributions. It does not explain why so much of it ends up in a lot of the other big distro families, many of who have demonstrated perfect willingness to make choices that go actively against RedHat's direction in the past.
> That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior.
Given the amount of abuse he's taking, he clearly has sufficient evidence to justify making that statement. It might not endear him to people to actually make it, but why would he care to endear himself to people that are giving him everything from rather disgusting levels of abuse to death threats?
>Is the work done bespoke or in support of some company objective?
Both.
>Is the work done critical for support or done for PR reasons?
Yes, the work is critical to the project. PR reasons? What? Its trivial to check what kind of code they're committing.
>It is ludicrous to suggest that corporate largesse alone is responsible for the Linux kernel.
Why? It is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
Do you realize the scale of operations for a project like Linux? Do you know who is paying for all the hardware compatibility testing? You don't just say "it works on my machine" and call it a day. Linux isn't an amateur OSS project. You need to make sure that after every single release, the code actually works on the 94,000 different Motherboard/CPU/GPU/RAM/BIOS combinations. Redhat, Novel, Oracle, etc fund all of this.
>Without the non for profit work, I'd dare say you'd be working on/with your enhanced MS-2014 Pro Servers software or some BSD variant on a VT100 terminal.
And without the proprietary design of UNIX to copy, would an OS like Linux even exist? See? Using hypotheticals to reason is a pointless exercise.
>OpenSSL is another example of open source that is widely used. A lot of companies use it, make money off it yet few contributed resources.
Way to shoot yourself in the foot. OpenSSL needs funding precisely because of the heartbleed bug. It demonstrates that the lack of money in an OSS project can result in a less than optimial quality product.
>Even if those donations continue to arrive at the same rate indefinitely (they won’t), and even though every penny of those funds goes directly to OpenSSL team members, it is nowhere near enough to properly sustain the manpower levels needed to support such a complex and critical software product.
> That's speculative on his part (noone has opened any issues with him, neither coming from nixos nor from any other repackaging).
Which is the whole point of acting on it before it happens...
It's crazy the amount of entitlement I see toward open-source developers. You don't like his stance, then fork it and support it yourself. You are already lucky to have a good base to work on, you shouldn't even be entitled to that!
>I can’t empathise with the author. It seems like they’re only interested in OSS when a) they get credit, and b) for only fixing problems that affect them.
Most people want credit for their work. People enjoy recognition for the things they do, though not all people crave it.
As for part b), isn't that exactly the attitude encouraged in snide style by OSS advocates whenever someone complains about the function or quality of an open source project?
"If you don't like behavior x, you can fork it and fix it yourself <smiley face>"
So someone does some work that many don't do, did it for free, and wants to see their name somewhere on the patch note. Sounds reasonable to me. If that gets more people (self) interested in maintaining one of the world's most important software projects, okay.
> I have no idea why Linux attracts so much drama and carnage amongst its constituents, but it does.
It starts right from the top, just like the similar situation in the Rails community.
When your founder and leader behaves a certain way, it gives everyone in the community license to act like that.
Edit: I seem to have touched a nerve here. My apology to anyone my comment offended.
Nonetheless, I stand by the idea that the culture of a company or open source is heavily influenced by the behavior of those at the top. How could it not be?
As an example of the other end of the spectrum, when I worked at Adobe it was a remarkably courteous place where people treated each other with respect even when they disagreed. I really appreciated that, and I think a good part of it came directly from Adobe founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.
> Two, it seems he is trash talking open source software and using that to justify his own proprietary monopoly software.
I'm sorry, but I really don't see this in any possible way. Can you help me understand? What did he say that you consider "trash talking open source software"?
The reason I like him is that he's been fighting Apple anti-repair policies for years.
> For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.
Not my experience at all. Well sometimes bugs gets closed for no apparent reason etc but I've rarely been shouted at and I think more often than not they try to help.
> The same is true for moving away from win32 GUI API. How many times has Microsoft tried?
I'm not very familiar with this example, but experience from proprietary systems rarely applies to FOSS because the way free software is developed is so different. Furthermore, Qt and GTK apps work out of the box with both wayland and X. The same applies to many other toolkits and libraries.
> I have experimented with wayland and considered submitting patches for various 30-bit color issues, but the community is so catty. Everything is met with snark.
What part of the ecosystem did you attempt to contribute to? I got a couple of patches merged into Sway and some of its utilities and the community always felt rather welcoming.
> I think that includes giving other maintainers the benefit of the doubt. That includes not taking being ignored as a personal insult, I think.
While I wholeheartedly agree with this, and also want everybody to be nice, it's not necessary for open source to work. A maintainer who refuses gratis help in form of bug reports is just a maintainer who leaves gratis things on the table they could pick up. Other projects who take the gratis help will do better. Evolution will weed out the idiots who don't get it.
Think Linux would have gotten big if Linus had said "stupid people, they think I take their contributions for free"? No, he deliberately used a model where thousands of people worldwide contribute to his project for free!
During the AMD vs. Kernel maintainers mailing list slapfight?
It all was discussed there.
> The Linux devs are not doing a singular thing to actively make AMD's life more difficult. AMD is begging them to do something that makes their life more difficult, and they are saying, "no".
AMD has provided a fully working driver with abstraction layers fully implemented, and has offered to pay devs to continue to maintain it.
The maintainers would have had zero extra work.
> If the Linux devs suddenly decide they will compromise to make proprietary software more convenient, then I, the user, will lose freedom. The stubbornness of the Linux team is not just for them, it is for me, for you, and for anyone who uses Linux.
Yes, and that's why the Linux kernel's license is being enforced against OEMs that sell proprietary forks of the kernel and refuse to publish source code...
Oh wait, Torvalds actually support those OEMs. And complains about people who fight them.
> That is the entire premise of Free Software
What good is free software if it is broken?
As I mentioned before, AMD published a fully working solution under GPL, with all functionality there.
I could have much better functionality today, and better stability, and it would all be open.
Instead I have to use proprietary code, because the alternative is an unusable system.
>There is a pattern of deprecating working software and trying to replace it with experimental stuff
This is par for the course. Open source does not have any warranty, it can break or be deprecated at any time. I don't care to discuss Wayland right now, if you don't want to use it you don't have to.
>If two Linux processes are owned by the same user there is no point in restricting what one can know about the other.
This is wrong on several levels. For example, namespacing and SELinux policies still work even when processes share the same user, and there are valid reasons why you would want to do that.
>I am not comfortable airing speculation like this given that some people will feel hurt, but I am in real fear for open-source and Linux
Please do not allow yourself to succumb to FUD that is spread on social media. This type of speculation comes up constantly in these threads and it's completely unfounded. Sorry. It's open source, anyone can pay for support/warranties for it from any company that they like, or you can not pay for support from anyone at all. It's your decision.
> This is the absolute antithesis of the intent of open source.
I disagree with this assertion (...and with Frenck too). There was no need for NixOS packagers to involve HA here, they are outsourcing work upstream. Imagine some small-time driver author/maintainer asking Debian to remove their driver - and Debian's solution to honor this request is to ask Linus to drop the driver from his upstream tree!
The long-held tradition, when you disagree with upstream, is to maintain your own patch-set that you are responsible for and have to labor to keep current - that is not the antithesis of open source - it is very much in the spirit of exercising the right to change the source code as you see fit.
> You can end up with poorly written code generated by unqualified people that addresses short term business needs. Such code tends to be abandoned quickly by its sponsor which causes long term maintenance problems. In the Linux ecosystem, stuff tends to go bad quietly in the darkness.
Care to provide an example of this? I've heard critiques of Linux's model that were basically FUD attempts by others in the past, that sound strikingly similar to this sentence. The FUD was about security holes that could be "snuck" into the code, when no one was looking.
For anyone with a cursory knowledge of the actual process, there is an understanding that this generally cannot and does not happen. The process is specifically design to keep 'poorly written code' from entering in the kernel.
You may be talking about user-space. There, the code quality is largely a function of the maintainers and their processes. No specific OSes user space is immune to this, c.f. OpenSSL.
So, put another way, I'm not buying that argument.
> The BSDs run off of good old fashioned ego driven software development done by people who care deeply about software.
This may be the most cringe-worthy statement I've seen posted on HN in a while. Ego/hero driven development is an antipattern you would like to avoid. Suppose your hero/massive ego person decides that they don't like X, being some thing that industry as a whole, has adopted. As a result, no progress is made on X, proposals to deal with X have been generally slapped down, or slow walked. Because the ego/hero involved doesn't like it.
This isn't theoretical for me, I've seen this upfront and personal recently. This attitude, combined with several co-morbid positions, lead to outcomes that no one wants.
> The solution to this is to change the license to forbid redistribution, not to write an open letter.
That depends on goals and what they're willing to do to accomplish those goals; it's quite reasonable to not want to stop being open source over this and to try asking nicely.
> I think something that is worth discussing is the model of the Linux distribution that leads to poor user experience like this[...]. It's come up many times among criticisms of Linux ecosystems and distributing user software, but it doesn't seem like the message lands well.
Because it's not universally viewed as a bug. Plenty of folks explicitly want to download software from their distro's official repos, get something that's specifically tested (and if need be, patched) to play nice with the system, and stay on a known stable version. Because the flip side of this complaint is distro maintainers pointing out that if you downloaded random 3rd party software and added it to your system, they're no longer capable of assuring you that the result will work.
> It's remarkable how much easier it is to write software on Linux yet equally remarkable how much more annoying it is to reliably distribute it, compared to say MacOS .apps, the iOS/Android app stores, and to a lesser extent Windows. I don't think there has to be a tradeoff here between Freedom and UX.
Some folks would argue that it's harder because you shouldn't be doing it; https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.... . But if you want to go that way, there's always flatpak/docker/snaps to go around the distro and ship directly to end users.
Yeah, tell me about it, did I fail to mention I actually write widely used open source software, as opposed to the original complainer whose profile indicates little open source activity?
> In that vein, I hope they do contribute upstream where it makes sense to, at the very minimum, like applicable bug fixes.
And where’s the evidence that they aren’t already doing so? Where’s even the evidence that X410 is repackaging? I don’t know either way, but gp just started trashing the software because they sell licenses for 50 bucks a pop, which is not evidence for anything.
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