Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

Maybe instead of update... by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 01:17 · Score: 4, Funny

Patrick could just post a complete changelog of his health?

Re:Maybe instead of update... by rah1420 · 2005-01-23 03:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Perhaps you should RTFA. His illness is in no way over.

From the latest changelog entry, it looks like progress is being made, but he still has a bunch of diagnostics facing him and possible heart surgery. That hardly qualifies as "over."

I think I'll wander over and buy a copy of Slackware now.

--
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Re:Maybe instead of update... by coraxo · 2005-01-23 06:04 · Score: 2, Funny

I checked your posting history and it's not so great either,

--
Strc prst skrz krk and vomit! Can help.

Re:All well and good... by SharpFang · 2005-01-23 01:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

Slackware got mostly replaced by Gentoo on its position of "zealot distro", but Gentoo+Portage requires helluva horsepower under the hood unless you want to wait a week for OpenOffice upgrade. Slackware still is a viable choice for everyone who wants to learn the inner workings of Linux and uses some CPU running below 1GHZ.

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45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Benevolent Dictator Attitude by vladd_rom · 2005-01-23 01:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think this "event" reflects the way in which most open source projects are lead.

Certainly you won't see in a commercial product news about the health of the developers as items in a ChangeLog.

However, in open source, the freedom to fork is often given as an excuse for allowing one person to be the benevolent dictator of the whole thing. On good merits, it seems, because many argue that if it weren't for that, things would never get done and stuff. But this "dictator" stuff gives the project owner a lot of power and a lot of discretion, and someone said once "power corrupts".

Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by gl4ss · 2005-01-23 01:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

slackware *IS* a commercial distro, and mostly an one man show.

a lot of people forget that very often :)

in ultra small businesses(1 or 2 people) the health of the people in it is actually pretty important to know for the clients..

--
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by RenHoek · 2005-01-23 01:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

Hmmm I think the benevolent dictator argument is a good one, but you forget one think. As democracy protects us (in principle) against politicians going corrupt after getting elected, so does the GPL protect us from benevolent dictators going bad..

If the 'people' no longer wish to live under the benevolent dictators rule, then they can just pack up the 'country' (=software) and start one of their own. If the rest of the people agree that the dictator has gone corrupt, then they will flock to the new distribution, leaving the old corrupt dictator with nothing to rule over.

So I don't think giving health reports in a changelog is going to have the people up in arms.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 01:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

I don't see why not. If people don't like it, they can, as you say, fork.

However, your question of whether that would be done in a commercial product needs a more serious answer.

In a word, 'no', you would not expect to see that in a commercial product (at least not typically, see below). The reason is that commercial products are produced by organisations that like to project (the falsehood) that they have transcended the inviduals working for them. I.e. we the organisation will support and stand by, this product, even if all the 'worker bees' that actually build it and know it would all go and croak tomorrow. As anyone who has ever been involved in professional software development can attest, that's simply and emphatically not true. If only a few key personel leaves a product development team then pandemonium (and frequently hillarity) ensues as the organisation reels from the shock and grief and desperately tries to find it's balance again.

As the customers of said (large) organisation already have a feeling this is true, they must always be kept as completely in the dark as possible about the individuals in the organisation actually doing the work (and their well being). If it were otherwise, the customers suspicions would be confirmed within a week and they'll all run away rather than walk.

This is why we've had the 'quality' revolution in the past decade or so. Corporations hate to be in the hands of the worker bees, since said worker bees then can (and will) demand more of a share. Hence every large corporation (or organisation, think the military that practice for a scenario where a large percentage of the worker bees /and even a few queens/ can be killed at any instant) must 'commoditize' the work done for them, making the workers as replacable as possible, so that they can be replaced. Not even cogs in the machinery, because the typical machine will stop with a cog missing, but rather less than cogs.

That's why you see CMM and the like. To make workers less of craftsmen (i.e improving their skils, taking pride in their work etc, as craftsmen have a tendency to make themselves irreplacable) and more like worker bees. Instantly replacable.

This has gone on for quite some time in 'ordinary' industry, started with Henry Ford in fact, and the transformation in the production industry is now almost complete. Less so when it comes to the design side of things as the corporations still need design skil. They're trying as hard as they can though, hence the call for process improvements.

In open source we don't have to try and fool our customers as we aren't dependent on them. Hence we don't have to keep up the pretense that the project isn't in the hands of a few skilled people. Some smaller companies with heroes can operate the same way (as going with them is the long shot anyway, their customers aren't as easily scared). I remember when Dan Hildebrand (the chief architect of QNX) died from cancer. The company put his obituary on the front page and had it there for quite some time. Now, of course, in that business everyone already knew that he'd died, so trying to pretend that it hadn't happened wouldn't have worked anyway.

So, the fact that we all know that Linus is the boss of Linux and that the project will flounder without him if e.g. he were to step in front of a bus (at least for quite some time) is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. We have smarter 'customers' who can handle the truth. "You wan't the truth, you can't handle the truth!"

--
Stefan Axelsson
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Danborg · 2005-01-23 02:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

Dude, cut Pat some slack (no pun intended). He only put his health update in the changelog because it is the most effective way of getting the word out to the Slackware community. Pat doesn't really have a blog, so the changelog is the next best thing.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by squiggleslash · 2005-01-23 02:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

Mod up +5 Insightful. For an example of this actually happening, there's Atheos, which was forked as Syllable when Atheos's developer disappeared from the scene.
In many ways this is one of the major intents behind the GPL: The GPL means you never have to put your faith in someone else when you use someone else's software. You are not limited by them. You are not giving them your testicles and a large hammer whenever you trust your data to something they wrote. Normally it's phrased in the conspiracy-driven language I just used, but it applies equally to situations where the reason for that lack of support could be entirely honest and unforseen, like Pat's situation today.
And on that note, may I wish Pat the best of luck. Whatever I move on to, Slackware will always have a soft spot for me, both as the first distro I used, and as the one that worked closest to the way I want such a distro to work. Slackware is a work of art.

--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Fnkmaster · 2005-01-23 04:43 · Score: 2, Insightful

Your post explains why I have left the software industry (or at least the world of "enterprise software" bullshit).

From a management perspective (I've been there before), I understand you don't want the whole fate of the company to rest on one person's shoulders. You want source code that is clean and well documented so if somebody leaves, somebody else can pick it up and eventually figure the damned thing out. But if a key team member leaves, it WILL have an adverse affect on the project and time lines, and pretending otherwise is just ridiculous.

Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization? In my experience CMM is bullshit anyway. The reason projects usually required heroic efforts wasn't immature, non-predictable development processes, but because project requirements changed throughout development, and deadlines weren't moved to match. If you know what you're building and you have good craftsmen with experience estimating project timeframes, it's not terribly hard to do.

And no, stuff like XP doesn't help when your sales people change their minds about what's critical regularly as they find another client potentially willing to part with a half million bucks if only we have feature X. Those clients never actually parted with their money, I found - feature X as a roadblock was almost always a bullshit excuse, and when we pulled a week of all-nighters to demo feature X, it never actually closed a deal.
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 05:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization?

Amen and not me. I mean, I even went back to finish my PhD because I thought that I'd develop personally from it (not because it would make me more money, over the course of my career it's a net loss). Hence I (and every damn geek I know) are firmly in the 'craftsman' category.

Corporations OTOH is in the business of making money, not making cars, or software or whatever. (They're even required by law to be in this business; increase share holder value or else). When the inefficiencies of corporations have diminished (as a result of competition) then paradoxically, there's less of a place for people in those corporations that are in any other business than making money. I note that very few people are in that business. People instead seem to insist to cling on to old fashioned ideas and outmoded values such as behaving morally (instead of lawfully), programming computers (instead of maximising profit or minimising cost), increasing their skills for self satisfaction (instead of doing a cost benefit analysis) etc. etc.

I think you point to an interesting dilemma in that of course a thousand man corporation can't just be expected to go belly up and die just because one guy walks home and takes the blue prints with him. For no other reason than that that isn't exactly fair to the other 999 guys (or gals) working there. On the other hand, in order to address this the pressure today is 100% on making everybody completely replacable, that's how economy works, instead of finding a balance between the needs of the one and the needs of the many.

With the world (through globalisation) becoming ever more efficient, the pace increasing and the people in it not changing much, it'll be interesting where and how it all will end. It's clear that it cannot just continue on the road it's on now, we'll hit the end sooner or later, we can't all end up worker bees with one (or three) queen(s) on top. Can we?

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Stefan Axelsson
Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude by Cyno · 2005-01-23 06:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?

No, in a commercial product they would just put advertisements in their changelog.

Re:All well and good... by gl4ss · 2005-01-23 01:28 · Score: 2, Informative

you can get precompiled packages for gentoo, no need or point most of the time compiling things yourself.

but slack still has it's following, and is fundamentlly different from gentoo - and damn, it's one of the old and still going distros.

--
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.

The Most Carelessly Maintened Slackware Package by XChilde · 2005-01-23 01:37 · Score: 4, Funny

"Patrick Volkerding".

However, it seems that there has been a bug fix for this package's recent problem :-)

Ok, flame away... by odessa · 2005-01-23 01:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

but I wonder: assuming he has to pay for medical care (I'm British, sorry) - I hope he makes enough money from this project to adequately cover these costs.

Here is my real beef - I love open source, but it pisses me off when I speak to people in business when they talk about free software in terms of monetary cost. I believe that if you regularly use and rely on certain software - OS or not - that you should be obliged to pay something in return to the support the process.

Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.

Sorry folks, rant over...

Re:Ok, flame away... by lars_stefan_axelsson · 2005-01-23 01:50 · Score: 2, Informative

Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.

And hence the GPL as then you're not getting it for 'free'. The code you put into our project, you owe us back in return. So that we and others may remain free (as in libre).

--
Stefan Axelsson
Re:Ok, flame away... by jwdb · 2005-01-23 01:58 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well, that's the idea behind OS - people willingly giving away the product of their mind for others to benefit from. The idea is to expand the common pool of ideas and tools and to do something you enjoy, with the bonus of giving something back to the community.

Compare programmers to artists. You've got your traditional artist (software company) selling his paintings (products) retaining all rights. On the other side you've got the graffiti artists (OS programmers) painting murals on the city walls - everyone is free to enjoy their work. Of course, anyone can sell photos of the work, so it's more along the lines of BSD than Linux, but nobody is obliged to pay to view the original work...

Jw
Re:Ok, flame away... by valdrad · 2005-01-23 07:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

They benefit financially from Volkerding's work, but pay nothing, and they don't even think they should pay anything.
OTOH, The GPL doesn't require Pat to make free isos of Slackware available--that's his choice.
Other than charitable satisfaction, there's no advantage to buying an official Slackware CD set versus downloading the isos or buying them from a generic Linux CD vendor.
Giving away your product for free when purchasing the "official" version of it offers no user advantages (other than funding continued development) doesn't strike me as a sound business model for a _commercial_ software company.
I like OpenBSD and SuSE's model better, which allows the developers to make a decent living while still giving a free product to the public. If you want the OS via FTP download, it's there for you for free, but if you want it on CD, you need to buy it.
I'd like to see Pat finally incorporate FTP installation into Slackware and restrict CDs to paying customers for his own bottom line....and add pkgsrc to Slack, of course. Some of the features people would like Slack to have might actually be feasible if the company started pulling in enough revenues to keep some other developers on the payroll, at least back to the level they had before Walnut Creek sold out and kicked Slackware to the curb.

--
LewRockwell.com: anti-state, anti-war, pro-market
Re:Ok, flame away... by teromajusa · 2005-01-23 11:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

I doubt it. The US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country. Almost 3x as much per person as the UK. See here.
Re:Ok, flame away... by LardBrattish · 2005-01-23 17:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

Thanks for that - wish I had Mod points. That's been my contention for some time. All this BS about privatising health care just introduces more companies that want to leach off more profit.
When the (Right wing corporatist) Australian Government gave a $500 rebate for people with health care to encourage the take up of private health cover (admitedly rather well implemented over here but that's not what I'm talking about) the health funds all raised their prices by - wow, $500! What a surprise...
And the oink oink noises from the trough became deafening.
By definition a public owned system will be more "efficient" than private because it is not obliged to take money out of the system for the shareholders - unless you genuinely believe that all of the shareholders will put all of their profits back into your country - duh!!! It may not make a profit because the government may choose to distribute the money in a particular way e.g. running a privatised steel industry at a loss to subsidise the manufacturing sector.

--
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)

Re:All well and good... by XChilde · 2005-01-23 01:46 · Score: 2, Funny

learn the inner workings of Linux and uses some CPU running below 1GHZ

You mean iPod?

From TFA... by md81544 · 2005-01-23 01:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

So, this verson is going to be wrapped up pretty quickly. I hope people will support the release, because I'm sure I'll have a lot more bills before all of this is through, and I'm blowing through what little money I've managed to save.

This struck me... I use Slack on two *really slow* PCs (233 Mhz) and it makes them perform just fine. And yet I've never paid Pat a dime. I think it's time I started a subscription. What about you?

Re:From TFA... by Vulture101 · 2005-01-23 03:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

at least Pat could put a "donations" link in the site

Re:What are you talking about? by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2005-01-23 01:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'd go further than that, since Slackware is his one-man-show baby, people who use it are very much interested in both his health and what will happen if the worst comes to the worst.

A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus. That was actually a reason not to adopt Linux. Now we all know that people like Andrew Morton and Alan Cox are available and experienced.

What way would people go if Slackware went down the tubes? Debian? I know I found Red Hat incredibly frustrating when my ignorance and Unix inexperience meant I had to leave Slackware and move to something easier to configure. In the end it was SuSE 5.0 I turned to, it's PCnfs printing capabilities worked 'out of a box'. Not sure I'd see SuSE as a migration path for Slackware users nowadays though.

Get well soon.

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.

Health status : Finally ! by DrYak · 2005-01-23 02:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

This guy got finally reasonnable. Instead of trying to take care of by himself, he finally went to a doctor, and, best part : Stayed with the same doctor

Of cours, any doctor usually start thinking of the most plausible and statistically significant cause of disease. Usually patient should come back and only if no improvement has been seen, then only the doctors start considering more unlikely or rarer diseases.
But if the patient is unhappy with the first diagnosis of the first doctor and moves to another doctor, the new will start over again from the very beginning.

It's OK to try change doctors when you're not very sick and when you try to find a nice doctor who you like to have him as the one who you usually refer first to.

BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors. He should try to stay with one (and eventually have him refer to other colleauges if he need more help).
Because each time a patient siwtch doctors, he loose time because of this start-over-again.

And I'm not speaking about the economical problems : doctor switching reases the health cost a lot because a lot of things (lab exams, etc...) are done twice or thrice.
It's a big problem we have here in Switzerland.

There's some work to avoid this kind of redundancy : One exemple of such project in Geneva (CH) is e-toile (Sorry website in french, you have some english info here).
We hope that by building secured networks, doctors could share some information and avoid repeating the same stuffs all over again.

--
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]

Re:Health status : Finally ! by DarkTempes · 2005-01-23 02:39 · Score: 5, Interesting

you really don't understand the current state of medical doctors in the states then...

most don't CARE about every looking for the obscure. they're good at taking care of the low end stuff (a one week virus, a cold) with advice or some small medication, and the high end immediate life threatening stuff (surgery, cancer) but if it comes to some obscure middle-ranged life degrading disease or problem they tend to just do their normal battery of blood tests and then say "you're fine, it's all in your head!"

and so then you must do doctor shopping.
you think people like wasting their time and money utterly with a doctor? they just HAVE to. and they tend to self-diagnose cause the doctor doesn't do his job and diagnose you himself. the medical profession is one of the few BUISNESS professions where you PAY MONEY and are not guarenteed RESULTS of ANY KIND.

I did the whole game, went around for two years with NMH [neurally mediated hypotension] before a cardiologist finally diagnosed me and gave me the proper medicine. First went to my primary care physican, she was just like "yes i know your life sucks and you're losing tons of weight and you look like you're dying but i have no clue so go elsewhere!" and that was basically the same thing, either they didn't know and they didn't care or they just wanted me to see a psych professional (which i saw many of and they all said i was just fine mentally for a person in my condition)
it's easy to judge something until it actually happens to you...
</rant>

Infective endocarditis by Fredge · 2005-01-23 02:09 · Score: 5, Funny

One of Pat's logs mentions that he was diagnosed with and being treated for infective endocarditis. The medical literature I've read informally refers to that disease as IE.

I think we all know what IE can do to your system. I would have thought Pat would have known better than to mess with it. Perhaps he should spend a little more time reading Slashdot? At any rate, the cure is pretty simple.

Good News by datadriven · 2005-01-23 02:11 · Score: 2, Informative

This is good news for me. I've been waiting rather impatiently for the next release of slackware. I've tried every distro that offers a download and slackware is the only one I liked. I liked it enough to get a subscription. I'm sure Pat would appreciate it if some of you did the same.

--
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware

Re:All well and good... by bender647 · 2005-01-23 02:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

Slackware got mostly replaced by Gentoo on its position of "zealot distro", but Gentoo+Portage requires helluva horsepower under the hood unless you want to wait a week for OpenOffice upgrade.

But since Slackware doesn't offer OpenOffice packages, you have no choice but to compile. I use both (3 slackware boxes, 1 gentoo). They each have their merits to us zealots.

Someone got sick by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 02:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

In my prior work we were doing customisation work on our companys own product. Most customisation was done my team of 1 Programmer, (1/3)Project Manager and (1/2)Grapician. Sometimes Pm and graphician being the same person. Programmer was generally doing one project at time. Project manager was managing 2 or 3 and graphician was doing mostly one at time, but was resereved only for hald of the time for a project. Typical project lasted 2 months. Getting specification and connectons from client has half the work.

Employees got sick once in a while like people do.

There was allways the trouble to explain customers.

The usual question was. Why have you not replaced him(her). Our project is prime importance.

a) 25 some will most likely be sick 2 days, geting new programmer to understand takes longer.

b) Puting people in middle of half written code that does not do what is needed, usually means large chunks being rewritten, when original author knows what is missing and only adds that.

c) a lot of specification was usually on the air, and doing the code to interface was the minor part.

d) We sure did not have spare developers.

e) Yes, they all are.

Re:All well and good... by MaynardJanKeymeulen · 2005-01-23 02:41 · Score: 3, Informative

Beside the fact that you CAN install a program like OOo without a package or without compiling,like, by using a installer!

--
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."

Re:What are you talking about? by m50d · 2005-01-23 05:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

I think Debian and Gentoo are the obvious alternatives. Slackware people tend to compile a lot of their own stuff anyway since the default distribution is a bit light on the packages (no OOo for example), and there's a very nice port of emerge to slackware. Debian is quite slack-like but may be too political for many slackers.

--
I am trolling

Re:All well and good... by m50d · 2005-01-23 05:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

Portage doesn't need that much horsepower, just leave it on overnight. I can't do that, but 4 hours a day is quite enough to keep my 800mhz Duron up to date (and it has pretty much everything major installed). nice -n 19 emerge -u world, then your system is just as responsive and it's upgrading. Slackware is still a nice distro, but its lack of a dependency manager hurts it.

--
I am trolling

Re:What are you talking about? by tzanger · 2005-01-23 05:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've been using Slackware since it diverged from SLS so many years ago and I'd have to say that you are 100% correct about Debian... nice idea but if I wanted politics, I'd tune in to CSPAN. Their rabid use of GNU/everything has utterly and totally turned me off of the distribution. Gentoo? I don't think so. I think that I'd move to something like Vector Linux which is Slackware based and has a more sensible set of installer defaults (I use my own tagsets though already). The only real reason I'm not using Vector currently is because the ASCII art penguin has to go for starters but more importantly, Slackware is still the 'root' of it and why go with a little offshoot that doesn't change much at the current time?

Health and version numbering... by Jugalator · 2005-01-23 06:19 · Score: 2, Funny

I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.

WTF!

He shouldn't let his health condition affect what he labels the Slackware versions! :-)

--
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!

Re:What are you talking about? by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2005-01-23 08:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

I have thought of that for one machine of mine (the firewall/proxy), but there is always that one problem: Linux simply supports far more hardware than any BSD variant. Linux hardware support used to be a major issue, now it is almost a given.

Funny, someone here on /. suggested a couple of years back that Linux would one day be mainstream and 'Uncool', and that people would migrate to BSD. I thought they were joking . . .

--
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.

Re:What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · 2005-01-23 09:52 · Score: 2, Funny

A couple of years ago (or maybe even now for outsiders), people were wondering what would happen if Linus went one-to-one with a bus.

What is there to wonder about? Clearly the bus would be completely and utterly destroyed.

Re:Pat: Move to Canada by bluGill · 2005-01-23 11:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

Maybe. IF they allow you to continue to see doctors after the first says there is nothing they can do. IF there is enough money to pay for the tests you need. (Of course if it is life or death it is done, but we do the work here in that case too, when the condition isn't that serious though there may be lines)

Its all a maybe. There are many people in Canada who come to the US for treatment because it is better. You pay for it, but you get better treatment. The reverse is also true because for some things it is better to live under a system like Canada.

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Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

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