Slackware 10.1 Beta And Pat's Health

phreakuencies writes "The ChangeLog in slackware-current got a distiguished update today on Jan 22: Patrick Volkerding updated us on his health condition stating he is not back in perfect shape but getting more medical tests and results. The initial phrase on the ChangeLog: 'I'm going to call this Slackware 10.1 beta 1, because we're at a state where things are relatively stable.' Read up here"

Comments

Maybe instead of update...

[Anonymous Coward]

Patrick could just post a complete changelog of his health?

Re:Maybe instead of update...

[rah1420]

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.

Re:All well and good...

[SharpFang]

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.

Benevolent Dictator Attitude

[vladd_rom]

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

[RenHoek]

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

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

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!"

Re:Benevolent Dictator Attitude

[Danborg]

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

[squiggleslash]

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.

The Most Carelessly Maintened Slackware Package

[XChilde]

"Patrick Volkerding".

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

Ok, flame away...

[odessa]

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...

[valdrad]

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.

From TFA...

[md81544]

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...

[Vulture101]

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

Re:What are you talking about?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

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.

Infective endocarditis

[Fredge]

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.

Someone got sick

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Health status : Finally !

[DarkTempes]

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>

Re:All well and good...

[MaynardJanKeymeulen]

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