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OpenBSD 4.4 Released
Linux blog writes "The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle."
KDE 3.5.8? Why so old... even if KDE 3.5.10 released in late August was too late to make it, KDE 3.5.9 came out in February, that's over 8 months.
Yeah. I'd really like to like OpenBSD. Technically, it's superb. It's smooth, polished, well documented --- it's got a level of consistency that most Linux distros can only hope to dream of. The kernel is well designed and fast, with excellent hardware support. System setup is consistent and well-thought out. Above all, it doesn't confuse easy-to-use with easy-to-learn --- everything is as simple as possible without oversimplifying, which makes it a joy to admin.
But then, every time I try to use it, I run up against the OpenBSD developers, who are an arrogant bunch of elitist assholes. In a couple of years, on and off, I think I've seen Theo make a civil reply to someone *once*. Maybe twice. No, I'm not kidding. When you see someone ask what looks to my untutored eye a reasonable question about VMs, and the head developer replies publicly with the words 'You are full of shit' and nothing else (apart from a complete copy of the original message, no snipping), there is something very wrong. Most of the other devs are nearly as bad, and of course there are hordes of groupies who assume that if the people in charge are okay with personal abuse, then it's alright for them, too.
Despite this, the actual operating system is definitely worth checking out if you're interested in what a well-designed Unix actually looks like. Linux can learn a lot from it.
How is it that these comments are raised again and again with rarely a genuflect towards the possibility that our social norms and our technical norms exist at cross purposes?
It is often pointed out that humans are hierarchical animals. What's pointed out far less often is that we are also polarizing animals. For the most part, it's pretty darn hard to get a community of people to rest comfortably within a dual hierarchy: the polarizers will either succeed in driving the culture toward a political hierarchy, or they will succeed in driving the culture toward a technical meritocracy, politics be damned.
What evidence do we have that people can be effective and polite at the same time? NASA? I think not. When it became a political culture, shuttles exploded.
Is Linus an ass, or does he choose to occupy the niche that has proven viable? Larry Wall has taken a gentler stance toward his position as benevolent dictator for life, and he's not getting much good press lately. Nice guys finish last or at best, five years late.
Every time this subject comes up, there is a lot of chattering from the "How to win friends and influence people" crowd that despite the technical merits of X, it doesn't suit that person's social worldview, as if technical merit belongs in a marriage with popularity and approval.
As far as I can tell from my experience, the majority of PC marriages of that ilk are functionally destitute, yet the chattering never ceases that the world *ought* to operate that way. On what basis? What annoys me most is that this chattering rarely includes even the slightest nod toward justification.
This is another fact about human nature: we seem to have an inbuilt algorithm for determining that certain kinds of opinions can be safely put forward with little or no justification (e.g. "that's just how things are"), and which kinds of opinion can automatically be called to account. In my experience, the hierarchy of what must be fully justified and what needn't be has been pretty much decided on the grade 3 playground.
There seems to be a lot of people out there who are offended to the core that Theo's objectionable personality has been associated with so much durable accomplishment. In my opinion, that's just a bad case of shooting the messenger. Given broad human instincts toward hierarchy and polarization, it was as inevitable as the rise of the spam king having created a zero-cost anonymous distribution channel.
The underlying problem is that there is no reliable chalk line between civility and brown-nosing, and it's hell to police in a project that could otherwise rely on more objective measures. It's kind of like Sudoku. A complete waste of time, but I enjoy it anyway. We've made almost no progress (as a social organism) at efficiently policing the line between civility and brown-nosing, but so many among our ranks seem to prefer sliding down this slippery moss bank over the firm traction of dystopian merit.