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Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough"
The Slashdolt writes "After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel, stating '...I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer
can send them to the new maintainer.'" A response to a subsequent post on the list makes it quite clear that he is serious.
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I'm curious about how projects, in general, fare after someone with rather intimate knowledge leaves for whatever reason. I'm not being specific to Linux; you gotta think some of the kernel developers of Windows have left over the years. That's gotta be hard on the next person regardless of project; "here's his code, all three million lines of it. Oh, he seemed to like Pascal syntax so he wrote all these macros to make his C++ code look like Pascal. Good luck!"
WHY can't lkml.org's mailing list retriever handle a slashdotting?
Its not like the flashcrowds are all THAT big.
Test your net with Netalyzr
...about the details of this argument? I know Linus might not be the easiest person to work with, but he seems to make some sense here.
How about "Nice work Linus, you'll have the entire kernel back to yourself any day now, I'm sure"
Back three years ago I was sure I'd never leave. Now, I was no kernel dev, but I found out what it was like to try. In the meantime I grew up, and realised there's two sides to Linux.
Go and have a look at forums.gentoo.org, where you'll see both at work. I gave up too. For a long time I thought, through contributions and advocacy, I'd help Linux make some real headway in the Server and desktop market. Eventually I came to believe that it would never be big, it'd just mean more communities and more infighting and little real progress.
So I'm sorry, Alan. I'm really sorry, but you've made the right move. Thanks for everything.
Seriously? KDESU is broken, in the first place.
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=kdesu
Drag and drop is quite convenient. It is also a security chasm. Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm. Competing algorithms exist for many data format structures and the presumed same data format may have three or four codecs at use between X, the WM, a monolithic app like a web browser, and a devoted data editor (eg. GIMP), and even a devoted data viewer (eg. a multiformat display application). It isn't the simplest consideration.
With so much of the problem and criticism with the reigning proprietary OS being security related the open source community has tried to remain a little more focused on security related issues. Combine that with the difference in conceptual organization--F/OSS guys don't get paid to go to in house meetings together--and it is completely logical that something as "simple" as drag and drop is not implemented across largely unrelated application development groups.
Within a particular desktop environment using apps which were written specifically for that desktop environment (often referred to as a desktop suite) there is probably a more consistent end user experience.
It is the culmination of (years of) similar situations which has brought many rifts in major F/OSS development groups.
I find myself personally familiar with the situation which caused Alan to leave. The difference is that Alan has enough financial backing and social connections behind him that he likely will not end up living on the streets.
Can you imagine a headline,"Major developer sick and tired of political crap, leaves development group, will take up a section of cardboard on the sidewalk just down the block from Slashdot's HomelessinLaJolla"?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Oh boy, I can't agree more with this statement. I realize this is anecdotal, but here's my own personal experience...
In the Gentoo Freenode channel, it was difficult to so much as type without bumping into someone's ego. Participants were generally rude, crude, and--perhaps most ironically--threatened to kick people for using swear words. I have no idea if this has changed at all in the 4 or 5 years since I last joined... but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Contrasted with the various FreeBSD channels I used to join infrequently, the experience was on the whole much better. People were friendlier, had a sense of humor, were helpful, and didn't get their underpants in a dozen knots over something incidental like a single, mostly unoffensive swear word. Again, it's been years since I participated in that as well and perhaps the FreeBSD channels have changed...
Personally, I doubt it. It's a cultural difference, I think. The BSD crowds seem more product-driven (let's get Y done) versus some Linux distros that seem process-driven (I don't like how you're doing X and it doesn't matter if we're making Y).
This, of course, is purely anecdotal. You don't have to agree with it because it was my personal experience, and as such, FreeBSD folks have come off to me as MUCH more friendly and cooperative.
He who has no
Actually, and bizarrely enough, there is a high level FreeBSD developer named Alan Cox too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox
Once we camped out near a river, in known bear territory somewhere in central California. We hadn't seen any bear tracks, but put our food up in a nearby tree anyway (because that's just what you do in bear territory).
At around 2 AM that night, we awoke to hear the sound of large animals moving in our campsite, accompanied by the rustling of what sounded very much like our bear bag. Getting a fire going as quickly as possible (meaning, a liter of white gas poured onto the nearest thing that looked like wood and then set ablaze), we didn't find a bear. We found a team of TWO bears attacking our bear bag.
The big one climbed up the trunk of the tree, just under the branch from which we'd hung the bag. The little one, presumably a cub of the big one, had climbed out on the branch, and in a series of small steps, had pulled the bag along the branch with one arm toward the larger bear, who could now reach it from her spot on the trunk, and who was shredding the bag to bits as all our food dropped out. The fire, of course, chased the thieving duo away after a couple of minutes, and they thankfully only got away with some sausages and most of a bottle of pancake syrup.
Of course, what we hadn't noticed was that this tree had basically no leaves or branches or bark on it anywhere. Based on the number of large scratches and claw marks all over the tree, we surmised that we weren't the first ones to try to hang our food from this tree, which was essentially a food collection station operated by the bears to tax any humans foolish enough to camp there.
The damn bears are smarter than you'd think.
Unless you're running Vista x64, have 4GB or more of memory, and are trying to install the drivers for a TV tuner. Doesn't matter which manufacturer, they all would tend to fuck up under such conditions. I gave up trying to get TV tuners to work on my rig after wasting close to $250 on various models cuz I found only one commonality amongst them: they don't fucking work.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
You volunteer hundreds of hours of your time, without pay, and all you hear from the members is complaint-after-complaint-after-complaint.
You eventually reach a point where you say, "What am I doing this for? No one's appreciating it or saying thanks. I could be out having fun instead of this shit," and then you stop volunteering.
You just described why I mostly use commercial software. Because they take all my complaining with a smile and a nod and get to work.