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.

Comments

Thanks

[Hatta]

Thanks for all the hard work. Good luck to the next maintainer. Not much else to say.

Re:Thanks

[Deton8]

After reading the thread on a mirror, it's important to note that after the argument, Alan and Linus continued to debate the technical merits of how to patch the bugs. The ongoing conversation was civilized and concise. Of course Linus is too much of a pompous ass to apologize to Alan for completely misunderstanding the problem and proposing dangerous and useless ways of fixing it, then arguing about it ad nauseum. Oddly, this doesn't seem to bother Alan or maybe he's just used to it. I don't personally care what happens to the linux kernel but let me suggest that any of you who depend on a stable USB stack need to take special note of whatever decision Linus finally makes.

Re:Thanks

[dotgain]

Not much else to say.

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.

• The 'user' side, where you put up with limited, buggy and badly designed software, finding yourself grateful it even exists, and
• The 'dev' side, where your success is proportional to the thickness of your skin. Your willingness to sit there and listen to argue with some other twit whose age you guess at 13 over something you know isn't furthering your project one bit. Oh, and telling people who post "I'm leaving" threads on the forum how wrong they are about everything, and how little their contribution was really worth anyway.

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.

Re:Thanks

[abigor]

Former Gentoo and Debian user here...same experience exactly, except I actually did contribute code from time to time (well, mostly bugfixes). The Gentoo maintainers were particularly rude, and you had to pretty much be rude right back to convince them that what you had done was correct. Totally draining experience.

In an offtopic note, I remember a sort of userland breaking point: I tried to drag and drop a jpg in a browser window (Firefox) to some photo editor. It didn't work. Macs and Windows have been able to do this since at least the mid-90s. I have no idea if you can drag an image from Firefox to the Gimp nowadays, and I don't care.

Re:Thanks

[krkhan]

I tried to drag and drop a jpg in a browser window (Firefox) to some photo editor. It didn't work. Macs and Windows have been able to do this since at least the mid-90s. I have no idea if you can drag an image from Firefox to the Gimp nowadays, and I don't care.

Just tried it, GIMP connected to the server and pulled the image from there. Not sure if that's how you want it to work though.

Re:Thanks

[dynamo]

Agreed. Alan, thank you for all the hard work for so many years. You deserve a vacation.

Re:Thanks

[Knara]

It's probably a case of them both recognizing "it's just business." You can like someone but be totally unable to work with them, after all.

Re:Thanks

[timeOday]

What I find interesting is that the top people in all organisations are like this. Politics is an obvious example. Look at Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Ballmer, you think having a disagreement with any of these guys would be fun, or that they're always right? Even the more senior managers where I work have big arguments and personal vendettas.

I like the idea of owning a business, but at some point I'd probably hire somebody like that, and they'd probably take control over from me. Being willing to go out on a limb and take a stand with no fear of being proven wrong (even though you sometimes are) seems to be a job requirement for gathering a following.

Re:Thanks

[dotgain]

Obviously it depends on the scenario, but the presence of a boss often stops stupid little arguments that don't further the purpose from happening. I've had my boss stick up for me when someone else has been a dick, and I've been told to shut up and listen for a minute when I've been a dick. Sometimes the boss fires someone because it's too hard to stop them from being a dick, in spite of whatever intelligence they possess. Last time I got fired was 12 years ago, I didn't see it then, but I do now: it was because I was being a dick, and my boss was right to fire me. Sometimes I was technically correct, but still giving priority to being a dick.

It's not only IT - in the activity of parenting and marriage both my wife and I have seized opportunities to make dicks out of ourselves to each other. And just like this Cox/Torvalds incident, sometimes the way through isn't knowing whose right or wrong, it's acknowledging you were a dick and apologising.

It's basic social relationships at work here, not bugs in kernels. OSS groups are like relationships, and have their associated problems. Having a boss is in a way like having a full-time relationship councillor on board. Cox/Torvalds happened because nobody stood up and said "hey guys, come on". I don't care which of the two were right about the TTY bug, there was no way that needed to erupt into the argument that it did, yet time and time again it happens. Imagine what the FOSS world would have been by now if people could have swallowed their pride rather than pack their bags and spread the skills thinly by way of forking.

Re:Thanks

[RichardJenkins]

That was an anecdote! no steps, no software versions, no expected result == no bug. let's be a little more formal:

Prerequsites:
    Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, default packages installed, all updates as of 2009-07-29 applied.

Steps to execute:
    1> Open Firefox 3.0.12
    2> Navigate to www.google.com
          * Note the prominent Google logo
    3> Open GIMP 2.6.6
    4> Drag and drop the Google logo to the GIMP toolbox

Expected result:
    1> GIMP establishes a connection to the remote server and downloads the image
    2> GIMP opens the image for editing

Result:
    PASS

Does this cover your needs, or are you just trolling?

Re:Thanks

[commodore64_love]

I can understand his frustration. I've walked-away as well from various clubs. 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.

Re:Thanks

[commodore64_love]

>>>The Gentoo maintainers were particularly rude

Couldn't you just avoid the forums and focus on coding? Then when it's done, hand it over and say, "Here is it. Peer review it and I'll make the changes." Ignore rude persons by killfiling them (first give them a warning; then if they are still rude, block 'em).

Re:Thanks

[commodore64_love]

I don't waste time arguing with my manager.

I simply don't care enough about the project. For me work is just a means to acquire money so I can live comfortably, so I just do whatever the manager asks me to do, unless it's exceptionally stupid in which case I'll suggest an alternative action, but I still won't argue over it.

Re:Thanks

[KangKong]

I switched to *BSD 5-6 years ago, the reason being that the community was more relaxed and there was less politics. I've been really happy, the users are more informed and the developers are more eager to help out and less elitist. The best technical solution is chosen and there is way less "not invented here" attitude among the developers. The development is more structured and is not based on the opinions/goals of a single person.

Re:Thanks

[Mycroft_VIII]

I'm sorry, how is an IMAGE manipulation program connecting to the internet when passed an image from another program the expected result, isn't this kind of crap what made Outlook Express (which WAS expected to connect to the internet!) such a huge virus vector.
      If I drag from app a to app b I expect the two apps to pass the data itself, in this case an image, NOT connect to a third party on the net. The only time I'd expect some other behavior is when app b isn't capable of handling the data, IE passing a pdf file to an mp3 player would be an ok reason for an error message.

    Sorry if that's a pass then I'd rather have a fail the just passes the image across.

Mycroft

Re:Thanks

[iserlohn]

The unstable ABI is the result of the kernel devs wanting for devices drivers to be in the source tree. The implication is that with a stable ABI, there would be no incentive to release source code and to include this code in the kernel.

Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture. Creative's SB Live drivers do not work at all in Vista. They work fine on all recent versions of Linux distros. Because Windows is so widely used, H/W manufactures have to make passable drivers in order to get their product sold. However, once they are finished with selling them, you get situations like these in which old devices are unsupported. Normally this is ok as the backward compatibility works, but it doesn't all the time.

From my point of view, the current Linux dev model for driver is the right way to go with the current state of things in the free software world. Having a stable ABI for kernel modules will fix some short term problems but cause long term ones in the dev model.

Re:Thanks

[Pyrion]

On Windows, you just throw in the disk, click ok, and your hardware is working.

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.

Re:Thanks

[Intron]

A browser gets the original image from the server along with html tags width & height and information about your PC's display mode. Then it mangles the image to fit - losing resolution and pixel depth along the way. An image editor like the GIMP wants the full-size original.

Re:Thanks

[cathector]

this particular exercise can be a bit subtle, at least in windows. (i know this is a linux discussion, but it may apply)
if the image is a Link, then what gets "dropped" onto the target application is the URL of the link, which many apps handle just fine. if it's not a link (ie it's an image tag not wrapped in an anchor tag) then what gets dropped is the binary data of the image itself, which fewer apps handle because it's a pita.

Re:Thanks

[eyrieowl]

no one said it had to pass the resized displayed image. as you noted, it downloads the original image. why would it not pass the original image to the other application? that is the behaviour I expect, and that I've seen. and it doesn't involve my image editor going out to the web to re-get what is already on my machine, in my browser cache if not actually in memory.

Re:Thanks

[Shimmer]

So you spend about half your waking hours doing stuff you don't care about? Let us know how that strategy works out for you after 10 or 20 wasted years.

Re:Thanks

[abigor]

This was on the bug-tracker, not the forums. I've never posted in the Gentoo forums.

To be honest, I was being a bit unfair - I have the feeling a lot of the Gentoo devs are very young and quite atypical in the Linux world. A lot of the times they clearly didn't understand certain concepts.

Re:Thanks

[kriston]

He's only really talking about giving up maintainer of the TTY subsystem. Don't sweat it. He's not actually going away from working on the Linux kernel completely.

Re:Thanks

[dotgain]

You don't understand - it's not the role of the boss to say who's right and who's wrong in this case - it's to decide who's being unreasonable - he knows that all the expertise needed is possessed by the two individuals arguing, what they lack is mediation. This I learned primarily from Slashdot itself. There's many talented and knowledgeable people here (there's also a share of twits) and absolutely no mediation.

What I've learned in this Cox/Torvalds case is

• As well as seeming correct, Linus most assuredly is an asshole, because being correct ain't quite enough for him - he must call someone a douche as well. I never had to deal with him, and I'm now glad I never will.
• That the F/OSS situation is more hopeless than I originally thought. It's not just a KDE vs. Gnome, OK/Cancel vs. Cancel/OK, Gentoo vs. Debian thing. These are two grown men that have worked together for years, among the most technically able F/OSS has to offer, working at the kernel level, and they couldn't work their shit out.

Re:Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why you call it *BSD is precisely because of politics.
BSD vastly fragmented over personality conflicts, power struggles, etc.
In large part that allowed linux to jump to a dominant position.

Re:Thanks

[Pyrion]

Hauppauge still hasn't moved from their stance of being completely unwilling to write functional x64 drivers for the WinTV series of cards. They still insist the cards won't work with x64 systems with more than 4GB of memory. Until my Hauppauge card works without me having to gut myself of more than 80% of its memory, they can go die in a fire.

Re:Thanks

[Pyrion]

Because Windows is so widely used, H/W manufactures have to make passable drivers in order to get their product sold.

No they don't! They just have to advertise that it works, it doesn't actually have to work! This is exactly the sort of crap I went through with Hauppauge in my prior posts below. They can advertise functionality all they damn well please, and once you pay for it, bring it home and void most store return policies by unpacking the damn things, you find out that *gasp* the damn things don't work as advertised and, much later, you find out that they never will! Once they've got your money though, what do they care? You can complain all you want, but if they're not going to provide support, then they're not going to provide support, and short of a class-action lawsuit, you're screwed.

Heck, chances are you wouldn't get your money back anyway even if you won a class-action suit.

Re:Thanks

[im_thatoneguy]

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.

Re:Thanks

[xtracto]

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.

Nah, they take the complaining with a smile, nod and go back to their "dev center" to laugh out loud about the whining guy who will pay another $100 for the next improved, more synergic version.

Re:Thanks

[Pyrion]

Why would it be any different in practicality? Complaining to a commercial entity ultimately means you're complaining to someone who is paid to field your complaint. The "smile and a nod" is what you get before they hang up and move on to fielding the next complaint, whereas nothing of consequence gets done. Not unless a lot of complaints roll in. With commercial entities, it's not about the seriousness of the issue, it's all about how many people complain in a given span of time, so if you're one of their few complainers, they'll write you off as a statistic and continue doing whatever it is they're doing (wrong) despite your better judgment.

Re:Thanks

[smash]

Everyone left FreeBSD for Linux over the bell lawsuit.

For values of everyone that exclude apple and many of the top machines in the netcraft uptime surveys...

Re:Thanks

[evilandi]

After 10 years, it is paying for my, my wife's and my daughter's entire lives, and will shortly pay for my newborn twins entire lives too.

I spend half my waking hours doing stuff I don't care about, and most of the rest of my waking hours doing stuff I care about but don't necessarily enjoy; changing nappies/diapers, trying to persuade a 3-year-old to go to bed, reading the same damned favourite fairy tale over and over again, pretending that I enjoy playing "Doctors" and being poked with plastic implements, unblocking the septic tank after my daughter emptied a whole bottle of anti-bacterial cleaner down it.

But then for a few hours a week I have moments which I enjoy more than anything else I could imagine. Taking my family to the safari park, that was amazing watching my daughter interact with a giraffe. A birthday party. Making sandcastles on the beach. A long boat trip. Playing with my daughter in the swimming pool.

Grow up. Not everyone wants to be a loner with no responsibilities for their entire life. Being the breadwinner for your family of dependants is the role of the vast majority of adult males in the world. Just because you and your small community of like-minded folk choose to do otherwise won't change that majority.

Re:Thanks

[hab136]

So you spend about half your waking hours doing stuff you don't care about? Let us know how that strategy works out for you after 10 or 20 wasted years.

I'm on year 11. The previous 5 years were spent working really hard, and caring about how projects at work went. When projects at work succeeded, I was ecstatic. When they failed or were cut due to outside business demands, I was mad and hurt. Then I poured my heart and soul into a project for 3 months, only to have it canceled on the day it was being rolled out. It turned out later this was a good decision, but at the time I was upset because all I could see was that they had killed my pet project. So I stopped trying to achieve satisfaction and status in life from work, and instead started treating work for what it is - a means to an end. My self-worth comes from things I do outside of paycheck hours, and I've been much, much happier.

I still try to do my best; I just don't get emotionally invested. Think of taking out the garbage or washing dishes. You need to do these things, and it's good to do them well, but you don't need to *care* about these things. You also don't have to hate them. Is it fun and exciting? No, but it's also not bad. It's just kind of there.

What's funny is that when you become emotionally detached from your work, it's easier to make decisions that would have otherwise been painful. Compromising on or sacrificing your "baby" (project) for the good of the company? No problem. Doing something that is technically atrocious but makes sense for the business? No problem. You start to think about ways to do what the business wants instead of what would bring you personally the most satisfaction - which ironically makes you a better employee. Way too many people get caught up in doing what they think is the right thing technically, regardless of what the business needs or wants. There's always the argument of what the business wants right now and what it needs long term, and you can still argue that - in fact it's your job to examine requirements and try and do what's best for the business both in the short and long term - but you don't have to be emotionally invested in the outcome.

Now for the math!

Let's assume the standard "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will", so 40 hours a week of work. Not 60, because after all, we're talking about someone who doesn't care about work.

There are about 260 weekdays in a year. Subtract 12 for holidays, 25 for vacation, and you're down to 223.
There are 365*24 = 8760 hours in a year.
Sleep: 365*8 = 2920 hours (33% of total)
Waking hours = 8760-2920 = 5840
Work: 223*8 = 1784 hours (20% of total, 30% of waking)
Free time: 8760-2920-1784 = 4056 hours (46% of total, 70% of waking)

You spend more time sleeping than you do working! Even if you had no holidays or vacation, work would still only be 23% of your time and 35% of your waking.

If you sleep 7 hours a night like me:
Sleep: 365*7 = 2555 hours (29% of total)
Waking hours = 8760-2920 = 6205
Work: 223*8 = 1784 hours (20% of total, 29% of waking)
Free time: 8760-2920-1784 = 4056 hours (50% of total, 71% of waking)

So for 29% of my waking hours, I'm doing something that I neither love nor hate - and my happiness during the other 71% of my waking hours depends on what happens during those "me" hours, not on what happens in my workplace.

P.S. I wrote all of this at work. Even spreadsheets can be fun when you're using them to calculate silly things like waking hours.

Re:Thanks

[commodore64_love]

>>>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.

Yeah well it's easy to smile when you're getting paid $2000 a week (or more with overtime). When you're not being paid as a volunteer for Linux or officer of a club, you start to wonder if there are better things you could be with your $0.00/hour payment. The answer is usually "yes" like laying on a beach, or watching TV, or partying with friends.

Heck even working at Walmart for $8/hour would be an improvement than listening to all the bitching club members/users. At least Walmart pays.

Re:Thanks

[ukyoCE]

It doesn't matter how smart you think you are, whether it's crunch time, or anything else -- if you're that rude at a real job, you should be fired.

Assholes like that give programmers a bad name. They're are also the reason that many companies have gotten in the habit of "hiding" their developers from the rest of the company and users.

Re:Thanks

[Shakrai]

With commercial entities, it's not about the seriousness of the issue, it's all about how many people complain in a given span of time, so if you're one of their few complainers, they'll write you off as a statistic and continue doing whatever it is they're doing (wrong) despite your better judgment.

Umm, that really depends on how much money you've paid for the software/support agreement, doesn't it? When I worked in the insurance business I had a direct line of communication to the programmers who wrote our agency management software. When I found bugs I could report them directly to the people who could fix them and would usually have a patch by the end of business. I had similar experiences working with Cisco back when I worked in the ISP business, although you did have to navigate more bureaucracy with them to get the desired result.

Mind you, we paid tens of thousands of dollars for that software and those support contracts. You won't get that kind of response out of Microsoft when you find a bug in the copy of Office that you paid $120 for. But I still think it's disingenuous to claim that commercial entities don't care about the seriousness of the issue.

Re:Thanks

[Seumas]

I tend to respect and admire Linus, but his attitude reminds me too much of dealing with all the prima-donas I have to deal with on a regular basis. An entire project may hinge on you. You may be the most prolific, genius, brilliant, fantastic, productive person on the entire project or in an entire company. That does NOT excuse your behavior.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for people who are succinct and simply don't have time for bullshit. That's not what we're talking about here, though. But rather than the dickhead responses a lot of coders have (not just toward people outside of coding, or their own project, but even directly to those that participate on a one-to-one basis with them), they could have a little tact. It doesn't take any additional energy or effort to accomplish and it keeps people from avoiding working with you. I would rather work alongside someone with 98% of your skill who has a better attitude.

For example, in this response on the same thread to someone who admits they are not terribly familiar with the internals of TTY but is clearly trying to contribute however they can, Linus responds as follows:

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, OGAWA Hirofumi wrote:

> If I read that part of emacs correctly, it seems to be assuming the data
> was already sent to master side if the child process was exited.

That sounds like a rather obvious assumption.

(...)

So at what point do we just admit that the commit that caused all this was
a buggy pile of sh*t and just revert it?

Is it really too much to ask for someone like Linus to respond with something like "I agree" rather than insulting the guy for making what appeared to the almighty godly genius as "obvious"? What is to be gained by making someone else feel like a tool? All you've done is given them reason to pause next time they try to contribute and change their mind during that pause. They'll decide "why should I bother trying to help in anyway when even my best effort is going to be dismissed and possibly with a snide insult?". And then people like this complain that "not enough people contribute to this open source project". Of course not, because you aren't receptive to them and make them feel unwelcome! You don't have to coddle them at all, but for fuck's sake at least try to be decent.

Otherwise, you'll eventually not just keep new blood from trying to help out in whatever ways they're capable or willing, but you'll drive away long-standing contributors who have given a LOT to the project and the community. Like Alan Cox.

Hell, it's hard enough justifying tolerating that kind of treatment when you're paid well for it. Much less when you're volunteering your time and intellect. And as was demonstrated here, if you just spend all your time criticizing the process and the people and not contributing a lot to the resolution, people will get tired of your shit and drop the problem in your lap so they can move on.

Re:Thanks

[Unoti]

Your thesis just demonstrates that assholes are somewhat commonplace. It doesn't disprove that they are in fact assholes. I've commonly encountered people like you describe as well. I do what I can to not work with them. Sometimes that means eschewing entire teams or entire companies. Sane, happy people should try to stay away from total assholes. Sometimes people legitimately committed to excellence do step squarely into the realm of being assholes. But they should try not to be total jerks to their friends and coworkers. This quest to be a better person is often called "consideration", "tact" and "self-control"-- attributes that are generally considered good in our society.

Re:Thanks

[tholme]

It sounds like you doesn't understand what Linus is saying. He isn't insulting OGAWA by telling him that what he found out is obvious. He is just saying what _emacs does_ is an obvious assumption and therefore the commit in question is "a buggy pile of shit" and argues that it should be reverted.

Re:Thanks

[kelnos]

Is it really too much to ask for someone like Linus to respond with something like "I agree" rather than insulting the guy for making what appeared to the almighty godly genius as "obvious"?

Actually, the bit you reference isn't Linus being a dick to the person he's quoting. He's merely stating that the assumption *in the emacs code* is obvious, in that he believes that the assumption they make (that when a child writes data, then quits, the master should get the data buffered by the time the master hears about the child quitting) is reasonable (or, as he says, "obvious"). That wasn't a flippant dismissal of the person he was replying to.

Linus

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of that silly myth.

The best programmers I have met were nice people and they were very easy to get along with and work with.

Re:Linus

[kriston]

You forgot to use the word "inversely" in that statement.

Re:Linus

[TheWanderingHermit]

I've worked with programmers, actors, and people in many other groups where some think they can get away with being a prima donna. I have yet to meet anyone who was in top form in their field that I had to work with who really did have that attitude. I know some are out there, but overall, those that want to do something right are too concerned about what they're doing to pump up their own ego. Generally the best are the ones that know more than others, but because of that, they realize how much they DON'T know and that tends to keep them from getting those ego highs.

Re:Linus

[Jurily]

Bullshit. The best programmers don't know if they're awesome. They just think everyone else is stupid.

Re:Linus

[Enderandrew]

Con wrote some fantastic code that benchmarks over years constantly showed to be a huge improvement. Linus refused to incorporate good code.

Con maintained his patches separately, Even better, he took criticism on his work and sought to improve it. Time after time he made changes to his work to try and make it more acceptable to Linus. Linus rebuked Con and said not nice things. Con kept working.

This continued for years. Eventually Linus realized that Con was right on scheduler philosophy. But Linus couldn't admit that he had been an overbearing ass for the past three years on a technical issue where he was clearly wrong. He asked someone else to write a new scheduler from scratch rather than use one that has been tested for three years. When the new scheduler was hastily written, and Con's was faster, Linus said he only cared about superior code and making the right decision for the kernel. But he made sure to make several personal attacks on Con for good measure.

Logically, Linus inserted untested code that was still being developed in as the new scheduler. It didn't matter if it was technically inferior and unstable. His justification was that he felt the new code would be supported, where as Con would never support his code. This assertion flies in the face of Con supporting and improving his patches for years. I've contacted Con on his mailing list. He was always cordial, and willing to support people who wanted to use his patches. Nobody made Con support those patches. But he had the mailing list none the less.

There is no logical justification for taking inferior, untested, unstable code over superior, stable, tested code. Even worse, there was no reason for Linus to repeatedly attack Con personally and lie about him.

It is one thing to suggest Hans Reiser would abandon reiser4 the way he did reiser3. It is another to make baseless accusations at good developers.

Re:Linus

[cnettel]

Yeah, and although this invalidates the original statement (that brilliant programmers have great egos), your statement still means that great programmers give everyone else a hard time. Especially when that belief that someone else is stupid ends up being wrong once in a while.

Re:Linus

[Lord Ender]

Serious question: what percentage of the current Linux kernel was actually written by Linus?

Re:Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you Theo?

Re:Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

About 2% (enormous amount)

Re:Linus

[Jurily]

your statement still means that great programmers give everyone else a hard time

Alright, I'll rephrase: great programmers think they're slightly above average, and they don't understand why other people can't solve problems that easily.

They won't say "use this algorithm because I'm the greatest". They'll say "use this because it's 20% faster and only uses half the memory". And if they're wrong, they're smart enough to realize it.

Re:Linus

[geekboy642]

Being smarter is a big factor in programming well. Being obviously smarter than those around you is, well, a major cause of huge ego syndrome.

Don't you get a swollen head when you walk amongst dullards? Every time I see somebody pushing at the 'pull' on a door, I feel my disdain for others rising. When I stand behind a dunce in line, and hear him ask how many eggs in a dozen, I grow more sure of my position among the intellectual greats. When a waiter is unable to figure sums on his pad to give me a total, that I might reimburse him fairly for his service, I scoff at the fools that populate this world. In fact, in every day, in every way, the imbeciles I walk around cause my ego to grow nigh unto titanic proportions, certain I must be nearly akin to God Himself in my intellectual powers.

And I can only program in Basic. Imagine those towers of mind that must be a C programmer!

Re:Linus

[Bill Dimm]

That's called the Dunning-Kruger effect

Re:Linus

[Metasquares]

Big ego != nasty

Re:Linus

[Grishnakh]

BSD has terrible driver support compared to Linux.

If you don't like the way Linus maintains the Linux kernel, then fork it and maintain your own branch. That's a lot easier than messing around with a different kernel that doesn't have half the driver support that Linux has. All you have to do is take what's there in Linux, then change the things you don't agree with (like dumping ALSA and moving back to the new OSS).

It'd really be interesting if someone seriously made a Linux fork to compete with Linus.

Re:Linus

[Enderandrew]

I'm reading the thread. This is my take.

Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
User -> Reports breakage
Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.
Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.
Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.
Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.

Re:Linus

[TheWanderingHermit]

Harry Truman used to say he didn't want to talk to experts because an expert was just someone who didn't want to learn anything more on a subject because if he did, then he'd find out he didn't know it all and wasn't an expert any longer.

Re:Linus

[iluvcapra]

The quality of a programmer is often proportional to his ego.

Be careful: Humans confuse cockiness with expertise.

Re:Linus

[orkybash]

A programmer with a big ego is more likely to write code that only they can maintain. So, I would have to disagree with your statement.

Re:Linus

[diegocgteleline.es]

You just need to change in your article the name "linus" by "ingo" and then your post may have some sense. Which shows how much you "know" about the topic.

Linus didn't even bothered with the scheduler, Ingo was the maintainer and it was him who was in charge of deciding what should replace it. It was him who argued, not linus. It was him who ended up admitting that the ideas from Con were good and he wrote the scheduler which is now into the kernel. One that, according to Con, was better than his own scheduler.

Re:Linus

[Enderandrew]

I read the LKML for years.

Ingo did write the new scheduler, at the request of Linus. Ingo didn't make personal attacks on Con.

Linus was the one for years who said Con was wrong about scheduler theory. Ingo admitted Con was correct, but Linus wouldn't admit he was wrong. Linus asked Ingo to write a new scheduler, basically ignoring the one Con had submitted.

When several people pushed to include Con's scheduler (which at that point was called Staircase) Linus made more personal attacks and wrapped it up saying that Con couldn't be trusted to support his work.

Ingo had nothing to do with that.

Re:Linus

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Harry Truman used to say he didn't want to talk to experts because an expert was just someone who didn't want to learn anything more on a subject because if he did, then he'd find out he didn't know it all and wasn't an expert any longer.

Yeah, Harry was a real expert on experts.

Re:Linus

[diegocgteleline.es]

I read the LKML for years.

So do I, and I won't ask you to search proofs of what you say because it's just lies. Try to find just one single phrase where Linus tells Ingo to wrote a new scheduler. You won't find it because it was Ingo who decided to write it, as he explained in the initial announcement.

Re:Linus

[caerwyn]

A tested IQ of 151... and you think IQ is related to intelligence?

Re:Linus

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Using myself as an example: I have a (Tested) IQ of 151, [...]

Howdy Forest!

Re:Linus

[tyrione]

You just need to change in your article the name "linus" by "ingo" and then your post may have some sense. Which shows how much you "know" about the topic.

Linus didn't even bothered with the scheduler, Ingo was the maintainer and it was him who was in charge of deciding what should replace it. It was him who argued, not linus. It was him who ended up admitting that the ideas from Con were good and he wrote the scheduler which is now into the kernel. One that, according to Con, was better than his own scheduler.

Ingo might as well the be the secret lover of Linus or his offspring from a parallel universe. The guy talks so fondly of him you'd think they run through the fields in slow motion towards one another as the Sound of Music is playing in the back drop.

Re:Linus

[GrievousMistake]

Basically, Linus' main role in Linux has been to initiate the project.

And manage it, that's huge. He still has the final say on any code that goes into the main line. Any serious kernel developer will have to at least tolerate him, which shapes the direction of Linux immensely.

Re:Linus

[Hikaru79]

By his own measure, he says about 2% of the code in today's kernel is written by him, but about 80% of it goes through him before being included. It's unrealistic to expect any one person to have a significant percentage of Linux code literally belong to them, so it would be disingenuous to use that 2% figure as some sort of argument to undermine Linus' authority with regards to the kernel.

Like him or not, Linus is still the man in linux kernel development circles, and for good reason.

Re:Linus

[Tacvek]

The whole thing is publicly available. See This Google Groups thread

The big problem is that there where multiple issues, at least one of which was a userspace bug. Cox originally questioned the Emacs code on one half of the bug, although he seems to have since taken that back. At first Cox seemed insistent on solving the issue one way which appeared to work but was not technically sound. But now he and Linus appear to agree on the basic solution, although a few issues sound like they still need to be hashed out.

Overall a classic miscommunication flare-up.

Re:Linus

[nine-times]

I would go further than that and say that there's something about "having a relentless ego" that tends to work against "being great". Having some kind of an ego can help. It can make you more bold and assertive and willing to pursue your own good ideas even when others are unconvinced. On the other hand, being unwilling to acknowledge your own mistakes and shortcomings leaves you prone to repeat mistakes. Also, having such a large ego that you're prevented from working well with others often ends up with sub-standard output-- because let's face it, we generally can't do it alone, whatever "it" is.

In this example, Torvalds may be brilliant, but he certainly hasn't built Linux all by himself, and it's very unlikely that he could have built it himself. In order to produce the Linux kernel, he had to work with others. And he must not always be too awful to work with, or someone would have forked the kernel a long time ago.

Re:Linus

[Zancarius]

If you refuse to use software developed by a person who flamed someone else, then I assume you're not familiar with Theo de Raadt?

The OP wasn't specific about which BSD variant he would switch to; neither is de Raadt representative of how all the BSDs are managed. FreeBSD's governance structure has worked marvelously well over the years, so I would say it's unfair to implicitly lump every BSD under the same umbrella as OpenBSD and its management.

(I realize that may not have been your intent, but you used the same generalizations as the OP. Just being fair here. :)

Re:Linus

[dvice_null]

> I found myself pulling on a door clearly marked Push.

That is actually just an UI bug in the door. If you want people to push a door, you should use a handle that is like a plate, where you can easily put your hand against and push it. If you want people to pull the door open, you need to use vertical rod as a handle, where people can easily grab on to pull it. With this very small change, you don't even need to push/pull texts on the doors.

Also, doors should be always pulled when you go in and pushed when you go out. That makes exiting the building easier in case of emergency (people don't rush to the door and jam it, preventing anyone from pulling it open.) and also when people are trying to get in and out at the same time, the person outside is more capable of keeping the door open for the person going out (it is better that people first get out, before new people get in, because inside there is a limited space, while outside contains usually a lot more room). Also outside usually contains more room for pulling, while the inside often has a wall that limits the space for pulling, especially if you want to keep the door open for someone else.

Re:Linus

[FishWithAHammer]

The kernel still contains about two percent Linus-code, which is a staggering amount for one person on a project so large.

Re:Linus

[mcpkaaos]

That's okay, intelligence is simply potential you don't always use. I take pride in this fact, as I'm saving all my smart moments up for when I finally meet Hawking in person and frickin' own him.

Re:Linus

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Ok, I see now what happened. Linus won the technical battle, but wasn't satisfied at Cox's capitulation. Cox wanted to lose the argument with grace, Linus wouldn't let him.

A classic moment in arguing. A sly technique in the midst of an argument when you realize that despite everything you said to the contrary, you are really, really wrong. But, you don't want to admit it and the other person hasn't figured out that you know you're wrong. So you say something deliberately confusing that could be interpreted as supporting your opponent's argument, or your previous one. He assumes you are supporting the same side as ever and continues to hammer the point. You continue to make misleading statements, until you've slowly started to argue his side a little clearer. At this point he's really confused and asks you if you support your original statement, you say that's absurd and would never believe such a stupid thing. He's won, but you don't agree you were ever wrong. Just a "miscommunication" and "we were both right".

My younger brother used to do that to me all the time. Drove me nuts.

Re:Linus

[raddan]

BSD has terrible driver support compared to Linux.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. It wasn't until Ubuntu 8.10 came around (having also tried Red Hat and Gentoo) that I found Linux's driver support to be acceptible. By contrast, my OpenBSD installs always worked for me out of the box. The only driver issue that's ever irked me there were USB-serial adapters. But the ease of configuration in OpenBSD has always been great, especially for wireless.

Anyhow, it probably depends on what you're doing, and with what hardware. Just thought I'd throw that out there, though.

Re:Linus

[hobbit]

Precisely!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227115.500-humans-prefer-cockiness-to-expertise.html

Re:Linus

[MoeDrippins]

He's obviously read "Psychology of Everyday Things" (later reprinted as "Design of ..."), where this door UI issue is discussed in several case studies. "POET" is a classic must-read for anyone that designs anything that anyone might be expected to use.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248908564&sr=1-1

Re:Linus

[Grishnakh]

Interesting. My information seems to be outdated then, and this invalidates most of my arguments.

Re:Linus

[fred fleenblat]

Well said. About the only counterpoint is that a door which opens outward will tend to have hinges on the outside, making illegal entry easier.

Where I live, commercial establishments usually have outward opening doors for the safety of the large number of people that might need to exit in an emergency; whereas residential doors will have inward opening doors so that the hinges are not exposed.

Re:Linus

[recoiledsnake]

I'll do that.

http://apcmag.com/interview_with_con_kolivas_part_1_computing_is_boring.htm

http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/01/1853228&from=rss
vhttp://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/09/14/156234.shtml
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/131240

From my own post here http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=301061&cid=20655809

Re:No you can not (Score:4, Informative)
by recoiledsnake (879048)
on Tuesday September 18 2007, @01:35PM (#20655809)
That is a gross over-simplication of what happened and almost qualifies as revisionist history and brushing things under the carpet. Let me summarize my understanding of what happened and someone please correct me if I am wrong.

Con Kolivas had been shouting from rooftops about slow desktop performance and was submitting feedback and bug reports. One of the kernel devs apparently said "I do not notice the issue on my quadcore machine with 4GB RAM". Rightly or wrongly, this lead Con to believe that the kernel devs do not care about desktop performance and only give priority to issues that big corporates complain about.

In the true open source style, he took upon himself to learn kernel programming and released a whole set of -CK patches and various versions of benchmarking tools and schedulers. On the other side, Ingo Molnar was the maintainer of the scheduler portion of the kernel and maintained that the O(1) scheduler(and the one before it?) is good enough and has no problems. Con conclusively started proving this wrong with his benchmarks. At this point, everyone assumed the -CK branch would be merged into the kernel at some point and Linus says he had been considering it.

At some point, Ingo starts making his own scheduler, which later evolved into the Completely Fair Scheduler. A number of posts claim that it was kind of rip off of the ideas behind Con's scheduler with which it was in a race to get included in the kernel. Then Linus decides to include CFS into the kernel instead of Con's scheduler. The reason he gave was that Con thought SD was perfect and that he ignored and flamed the users on the CK mailing list and that he(Linus) was far more comfortable working with Ingo since he knew him well. He also admitted that he might have formed this opinion on a single incident on the mailing list and he didn't have the time to follow the CK mailing list.

Some people on Con's side in the LKML tried to explain this by saying that the single incident was in response to a troll who submitted faulty bug reports and ignored the reasons for why they were rejected and that Linus was playing favorites. Con couldn't take the non-inclusion of -CK and plugsched(which would have given users a clean way of using a custom scheduler) and quit kernel development totally.

The latest twist in the story was reported on Slashdot here [slashdot.org]. The gist of it was that another hacker(Roman Zippel) was trying work on CFS. He had asked questions about what some parts of the code did, and also made some patches that considerably simplified the code and mathematically proved his patches made things better. In response, Ingo came out with a big patch that ripped out the code that was questioned and included Roman's Zippel's ideas(another rip off?) with hardly any discussion and a tangential acknowledgement of including his changes. Roman complained that talking in patches without explanation is detrimental to collaborative OSS development. /quote

Re:Linus

[Enderandrew]

The only problem with this accounting is that it makes it seem like there wasn't much time between the -ck patches and the CFS. There was a three year period in there, in which Ingo reviewed the -ck patches repeatedly.

Ingo did publicly admit that he took the concept from the Staircase scheduler in writing his own CFS.

Re:Linus

[FireFury03]

Does FreeBSD even have any 3D video drivers for Nvidia or AMD? If not, then it's not worth even thinking about using it on the desktop for most people.

I think you'll find that most people actually don't really care about 3D. So long as the graphics drivers can run their desktop then most people are happy (Compiz Fusion runs just fine on Intel GPUs).

A minority of people are gamers and therefore do care about 3D. These people will be running Windows since thats where most PC games are.

An even tinier minority actually work in the field of 3D graphics.

Re:Linus

[Dan9999]

part of this reminds me of how annoying it is to have people try to get into the elevator before everyone has gone out

Re:Linus

[Phoenix138]

Also, doors should be always pulled when you go in and pushed when you go out. That makes exiting the building easier in case of emergency (people don't rush to the door and jam it, preventing anyone from pulling it open.) and also when people are trying to get in and out at the same time, the person outside is more capable of keeping the door open for the person going out (it is better that people first get out, before new people get in, because inside there is a limited space, while outside contains usually a lot more room). Also outside usually contains more room for pulling, while the inside often has a wall that limits the space for pulling, especially if you want to keep the door open for someone else.

Your door would suffer from issues if installed in an environment where it snows a lot.

Re:Linus

[severoon]

Agree 100%. Something as simple as a door should not require an instruction manual, even if it is a single word ("push" or "pull"). A good designer ought to be able to design any device as simple as a door so that it is easy to use correctly and difficult to use incorrectly, even for users that are minimally observant.

I recently thought about this when I entered a bathroom stall, and the flip lever near the top of the stall door had a coat hook on it as well. When the stall door was unlocked, the coat hook was up against the stall divider and impossible to use. When it was locked from the inside, the coat hook was available for use. Furthermore, if you did decide to hang something on it such as a coat, a purse, even a key, it would take actual effort to ignore the item as you tried to exit the stall. Simple, straightforward design that is functional and eliminates the possibility of leaving an item behind.

(Unfortunately, the toilet paper dispenser gave one lone, see-thru, single-ply sheet at a time and was positioned behind your left ankle. wtf.)

Re:Linus

[severoon]

Let me take a shot at summarizing the summary...

cox: have sum code lol!!!

user: ur kung fu is weak my pooter crashed and it's all ur fault lame! :-/

cox: i feex! i feex! -starts furiously working-

A hush falls over the land, just then...

linus: RAWR! I SMASH!!! -flames shoot out of every orifice; a baby is heard crying in the distance-

cox: zOMG!!! -fills pants; amazingly, continues working furiously to "feex"-

linus: BRAWR! YOUR SLAVISH DEVOTION TO OTHERS ANGERS ME forabsolutelynoreason BRAWR!!!

user: wtf.

cox: -terrified of linus-beast, with singed eyebrow hairs- I leev! -boogies out, stage left-

bill gates (barely visible in background, deep stage right): -twirls mustachio-

all users: srsly, wtf.

me: -bows-

Re:Linus

[machine321]

BSD has terrible driver support compared to Linux.

Wrong. BSD has excellent driver support, but doesn't allow in binary-only black-box drivers nobody can maintain. Instead the developers reverse-engineer the hardware and make drivers anyone can maintain.

I checked this with Netcraft, and they confirmed it.

Re:Linus

[Dirtside]

whereas residential doors will have inward opening doors so that the hinges are not exposed.

...and also so that it's easier to break the door down from the outside in case of fire or police emergency. This is not a coincidence.

Re:Linus

[sarkeizen]

Something Feynman said about working with "Monster Minds". The story goes that he's working on a lecture and progressively it gets revealed that some really important people (in physics and math) are going to show - including Einstein. So he starts worrying about what to do if these people start asking questions. Pauli is the first to stand up and say why he thinks the theory Feynman is presenting is wrong and ending with "Don't you agree Professor Einstein?". Einstein essentially says that the only problem he can see is that it doesn't agree with his theory about relativity but that's okay since there isn't much experimental evidence to support his theory.

This story has stuck with me about how criticism of ideas and especially criticism of ones own ideas are the hallmarks of the very intelligent. That said...any idea of this kind is bound by the "tyranny of small sample" ;-) Still I like it as a rule of thumb.

Re:Linus

[dominious]

In case you haven't noticed IQ is the acronym for Intelligence Quotient and the mean score 100 is the mean of the Normal Distribution for a large enough population.

Personally, that tells me something!

Re:Linus

[gnugnugnu]

>> I found myself pulling on a door clearly marked Push.

> That is actually just an UI bug in the door.

I found myself trying to lift a door clearly marked LIFT.

Interesting...

[wandazulu]

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!"

Re:Interesting...

[Monkeedude1212]

Remember Windows ME?

Bingo.

(Just kidding I have no idea WHAT went wrong there)

Re:Interesting...

[jerep]

Indeed, ive jumped into quite a few projects replacing a previous programmer. Some were experienced and reading their code was really interesting, others were fired for being incompetent and I ended up rewriting most of their code.

In any cases, the first few days, weeks or months depending on the size of the code are spent studying the structure rather than actually coding.

Re:Interesting...

[jtshaw]

That is why you have to have coding standards...

I'd also hope you never have 1 person in charge of 3M lines of code.

Re:Interesting...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Everything.

Re:Interesting...

[schon]

ive jumped into quite a few projects replacing a previous programmer. Some were experienced and reading their code was really interesting, others were fired for being incompetent and I ended up rewriting most of their code.

In any cases, the first few days, weeks or months depending on the size of the code are spent studying the structure rather than actually coding.

The differences here are that A) this is an open-source project, B) this is a *HIGH PROFILE* open source project, and C) Alan was the maintainer, not sole coder (so he both coded, and accepted patches from others.)

It's possible that Alan was the only one who knew anything about the TTY code and how it worked, but I'd doubt it. I'd be really surprised if the new maintainer comes into the role cold.

Re:Interesting...

[amorsen]

It's possible that Alan was the only one who knew anything about the TTY code and how it worked, but I'd doubt it. I'd be really surprised if the new maintainer comes into the role cold.

The tty layer in Linux is really old. Not all of it, of course, but I would guess it's one of the oldest bits left in Linux. It doesn't need to be high performance, so noone has rewritten it for that. It is a bit brittle in general, and it interacts with e.g. hundreds of serial port drivers on almost as many architectures. Also, lots of applications use it, some of them with a long history on their own. POSIX and the Single Unix Specification have tried to standardize it all, but there's just too much ancient history.

In other words, slowly rewriting it as Alan was doing it WILL break things (which users will notice) and most of the improvement is just in prettier code and therefore less work for the kernel maintainers (which users won't notice). It will probably prevent the occasional OOPS as well, but those are pretty rare already.

Anyway, I'm not really a coder, I just read LKML.

Re:Interesting...

[MichaelSmith]

My first job was working in Pascal, but the boss was an old FORTRAN guy and he banned any constructs which couldn't be done in that language.

In another job my boss would write code like this:

int CARSPD; /* Speed of car */
int CARPOS; /* Position of car */

And I would write

int speedOfCar;
int positionOfCar;

...and he would get stuck into me for not writing comments.

No gratitude?

[isd.bz]

I see the tags 'butthurt' and 'whaaaaaaaaa', but no 'thanksforyourtime'. Why won't anyone show any gratitude for the years of work he's generously offered to the project?

Re:No gratitude?

[castironpigeon]

Hello and welcome to /.

Re:No gratitude?

[Chris Burke]

I see the tags 'butthurt' and 'whaaaaaaaaa', but no 'thanksforyourtime'. Why won't anyone show any gratitude for the years of work he's generously offered to the project?

If you really want to know, google up the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" and the Penny Arcade comic that comes up will explain it for you, though you can probably guess the gist from the name. Sad but true.

Re:No gratitude?

[binary paladin]

Because the slashdot crowd is composed mostly of whiner douche-bags. The rest of us are masochists so far as I can tell.

After getting my head ripped off for mentioning that I liked operator overloading the other day, I'm trying to figure out why I still post here. I dunno if the crowd is getting nastier or now that I'm far removed from being a teenager, I see how bad it always was. I can't have a reasonable discussion on this site anymore without some asshat hijacking it and turning it into a flame fest.

Re:No gratitude?

[SCPRedMage]

Because the Internet is composed mostly of whiner douche-bags.

FTFY.

Re:No gratitude?

[binary paladin]

Ha. Yes. You did indeed fix that for me.

(And I got modded insightful for my own whining? WTF?)

Re:No gratitude?

[mustafap]

>After getting my head ripped off for mentioning that I liked operator overloading the other day

Is this the 5 minute argument or the full half hour?

Re:No gratitude?

[SuurMyy]

You know, it doesn't hurt to have us adults around. Sometimes you can raise above the stupid comments and sometimes not. When you can't, just take a break and come back when and if you feel like it. I've been gone and back quite a few times already. These days I rarely get pissed off about stuff because I know that some of us just can't or won't bother to act like decent human beings. I come back despite these people because this is a good place to come to easily get an overview regarding what's going on in the tech world.

Re:No gratitude?

[xaxa]

I dunno if the crowd is getting nastier or now that I'm far removed from being a teenager, I see how bad it always was.

I had the same thoughts a while ago. There seems to be more to argue (rather than discuss) now, maybe it's the articles -- there are more about the environment, transport, politics and censorship than there were a few years ago [citation needed], where anything less than +4 isn't worth my time reading.

I can't have a reasonable discussion on this site anymore without some asshat hijacking it and turning it into a flame fest.

There's haven't been any reasonable discussions on the Internet since September (or so I'm told, I was 3 years too late).

Re:No gratitude?

[chrylis]

Because humanity is composed mostly of whiner douche-bags.

FTFBOY

Re:No gratitude?

[SpinyNorman]

That's an awful argument for not putting useful features into a language, because poor programmers will always write bad code, regardless of language. There's yet to be designed a language that protects you from writing bad code. Maybe one day there will be. The only protection from bad programmers is not to hire them.

What a language can do is provide features that allow good programmers to write good readable code.

There are certain things that you just expect to be implemented by certain operators, regardless of whether the underlying types are built into the language or not. Integer addition, Real addition, Complex addition, Set union, String catenation, List append. Internally we think of these things as "adding" and it's only natural to use the "+" operator for them.

Not only does operator overloading allow the programmer to implement code that maps naturally to out mental models, but it also allows more readable code to be written since it uses infix (operator) rather than prefix (function call) notation. How much easier it is to visualize the set expression (s + t) * (p + q) as opposed to Intersection(Union(s, t), Union(p, q)), or worse yet it's object orientated equivalent s.Union(t).Intersected(p.Union(q)).

The poster you relied to certainly has a point. The level of technical knowledge and experience of the average slashdotter has gone down the toilet in recent years. It used to be a mostly highly technical crowd, but now half the people here have never even programmed, or just done so for a year or two, yet have outspoken opinions on things they know nothing about.

Re:No gratitude?

[Antique Geekmeister]

You meant "spewed Java everywhere", didn't you?

On slashdotting...

[nweaver]

WHY can't lkml.org's mailing list retriever handle a slashdotting?

Its not like the flashcrowds are all THAT big.

Re:On slashdotting...

[TopSpin]

Try Google Groups.

That's the entire thread, supposedly.

Re:On slashdotting...

[maxume]

39 and 40 are the first two messages from the summary.

The third message linked in the summary seems to be from a different thread.

Slashdotted - Google Cache.

[Anonymous Coward]

In before the Karma-Whores.

"stern criticism" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/373&hl=en&strip=1

"decided to walk away" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/375&hl=en&strip=1

"quite clear that he is serious" -> http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/378&hl=en&strip=1

Re:Should I?

[HomerJ]

How long does a bear have to be? Is it proportional to long cat?

Re:Should I?

[jalet]

> but then I realize my bear is nowhere near long enough

so you call it your bear ? then I suppose it's thick enough.

mine is call "my rat", as it's neither long nor thick.

Requisite XKCD answers your question

[Enderandrew]

http://xkcd.com/323/

*It happens

[stox]

Time for all to give Alan a sound round of applause and thanks! The TTY subsystem is a gem thanks to his work.

Re:*It happens

[godrik]

It has been said by a lot of people already. But anyway, thank you Alan for your work in the linux kernel.

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[sugarmotor]

"stern criticism" -> link 1

"decided to walk away" -> link 2

"quite clear that he is serious" -> link 3

Re:Should I?

[jav1231]

Are we talking tail-to-nose or is that a phalic reference? OTOH, how you would know your bear's penis length is something that should probably go unsaid.

Not diplomatic

[rlp]

This could have been handled much better via a private message (or phone call) than in a public forum.

Re:Not diplomatic

[ribuck]

This could have been handled much better via a private message (or phone call) than in a public forum.

No I disagree. Doing this in public means everyone understands exactly what's going on. No room for misunderstandings.

And thanks Alan for all your hard work for Linux over the years.

FTA:

[Wally4u]

> Quite frankly, I don't understand why I should even have to bring these > issues up. You should have tried to fix the problem immediately, without > arguing against fixing the kernel. Without blaming user space. Without > making idiotic excuses for bad kernel behavior. > > The fact is, breaking regular user applications is simply not acceptable. > Trying to blame kernel breakage on the app being "buggy" is not ok. And > arguing for almost a week against fixing it - that's just crazy. I've been working on fixing it. I have spent a huge amount of time working on the tty stuff trying to gradually get it sane without breaking anything and fixing security holes along the way as they came up. I spent the past two evenings working on the tty regressions. However 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. --- MAINTAINERS~ 2009-07-23 15:36:41.000000000 +0100 +++ MAINTAINERS 2009-07-28 20:09:32.200685827 +0100 @@ -5815,10 +5815,7 @@ S: Maintained TTY LAYER -P: Alan Cox -M: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk -S: Maintained -T: stgit http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~alan/ttydev/ +S: Unmaintained F: drivers/char/tty_* F: drivers/serial/serial_core.c F: include/linux/serial_core.h

Open-Source developers are jerks

[kriston]

I maintained an open-source project for several years. Open-source developers are jerks. They never accept it when their code just isn't going in. I know they're all smart and I get really good contributions, but sometimes you aren't meeting the need. The overwhelming majority of open-source developers I have encountered are just that: jerks.

Re:Open-Source developers are jerks

[Hatta]

The overwhelming majority of people I have encountered are jerks. That's nothing open source developers, or any kind of developer, has a monopoly on.

Re:Open-Source developers are jerks

[OrangeTide]

I find the same behavior from programmers of closed source applications too. Any bug or question is taken personally or they run with a bad decision forever because doing otherwise would admit fault. I have the most respect for the rare developer that changes his/her stance and does the right thing in the end. Typical developers are very defensive and need a lot of ego stroking to get useful work out of them.

Re:Open-Source developers are jerks

[kriston]

Sometimes is works the other way. How many times have good developers been beaten-down by inferior, more senior, co-workers who think a "code review" session is really a "watch me brilliantly rewrite your code in front of you" session?

Re:Open-Source developers are jerks

[Skuld-Chan]

I've run into this on closed source internal projects - the difference is you rarely see the emails in public. Most developers take crucial app breaking bugs as a personal affront to their skill or ability, where in reality its just the way things work in big projects. In other words - every product out there has loads of awful bugs, please get over yourself and help me fix them.

Re:Open-Source developers are jerks

[hey!]

When I was in college, I was in a volunteer group. I took a project leadership position, and I was warned that the people volunteering for us were unreliable and unpleasant to work with. Later I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case. Of course people did mess up from time to time and sometimes people found themselves over-committed, but on balance I found the volunteers cheerful, eager and reliable as I could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

I found other project leaders would talk about *the same people* I worked with successfully as if they were totally unreliable. What was mystifying is that I am so *not* a nice guy. I'm not a *bad* guy, either, but I'm kind of gruff and impatient, and I don't mince words either.

So I watched how *they* managed volunteers, and compared to how *I* managed volunteers.

I'd say, "Can you do such and so on Saturday? You'll need to show up at noon and stay until four. You can? Good. Do you want to scare up some helpers or would you like to take care of that? Great, thanks. Give me a call if anything changes."

They'd say, "Look, we really, really need somebody to do such and so. I know you're *so* busy, and I really hate to ask you to do this, but nobody else can and we're desperate. Can you, PLEASE? Really? Are you *sure*? It'll be a disaster if nobody shows up so I really need to know for sure. Really? OK I know this is a HUGE sacrifice for you."

The conclusion I came to was that the other guys were trying way too hard to be nice, and so they were failing on an epic scale. It didn't even *occur* to me to try to be nice, and so I didn't commit any of their horrible mistakes.

I think the problem with the phony "nice" approach was it demonstrated lack of respect in so many ways. First of all their attitude practically radiated their lack of confidence in the volunteer. They assumed the volunteer didn't want to volunteer, and would volunteer just to shut them up (probably true) and then not show up (also often true). They assumed the volunteer would be swayed by flattery (you're so busy), guilt (it'll be a disaster if you don't show up), twisted pride (this is a job so horrible nobody but you would consent to do).

It's hard not to step on that disrespect third rail now and then, but these guys were jumping up and down on it from the get-go. It's ALWAYS a mistake. If you want a guy to leave, you should just say, "Sorry, this isn't working out. Let's move on." Getting snarky on them just means they'll stay and work like malcontents.

Linus's post is perfectly understandable. I don't think it shows towering ego and arrogance. We all get exasperated now and then. He's trying to be nice about it, but he just can't help himself. He's only human. It doesn't *matter* whether he's right or wrong, he let his exasperation show. When you're on the receiving end of that it comes across as disrespectful. Sometimes *trying* to express your exasperation *nicely* is even worse. It's patronizing.

One thing I learned is that people will do good work for no money before they'll do good work for no respect. And the best people won't work at all without respect.

Re:Open-Source developers are jerks

[WuphonsReach]

The bigger thing was that you gave clear expectations and times. So your volunteers knew that they needed to show up at X, what to expect, and that they could leave at Y. People like predictability and knowing that things aren't going to change on a whim (most of the time). It makes them feel like a situation is under their control and allows them to make other plans with certainty.

(Interestingly, you'll see the same thing if you try to lead / schedule raids or events in a game like WoW. Both situations involve herding cats to achieve a common goal in an environment where your members can easily walk away or not show up. There's a good bit of overlap in the people skills required to succeed.)

In other News . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Cox announces he will maintain Slashcode: "After this, it will be bloody easy to maintain the Slashcode codebase."

Re:so much for a "benevolent dictatorship"

[lbalbalba]

No, this pretty much *is* a definition of a "benevolent dictatorship".

Re:so much for a "benevolent dictatorship"

[Tetsujin]

Benevolent or not, a dictatorship is a dictatorship. It can be a great way to get things done (really, I think clearly establishing leadership is essential for establishing a coherent direction for a project...) but of course people won't always be happy under such circumstances.

Alternative Link

[steltho]

Here is a link to the start of thread that has not been slashdotted ... yet.
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=124870096801094&w=2

Rarely the diplomate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, indeed it could have been. But unfortunately that's Linus' modus operandi and we all know from long experience that while a great programmer, his ego is far too big to allow him to apologize publicly in the same fashion in which he slammed Alan. Quite unfortunate really since both are quite talented individuals.

You can't expect to publicly berate people and have them bow to your every demand and not have it backfire on you at some point.

Re:Rarely the diplomate

[shovas]

Linus is respected but not liked. I've acted like him in my youth and couldn't get away with it. I learned to be more personable. The only reason Linus gets away with it is partly because he is an intelligent person and partly because of the stature of his position. One day he will be an old man with no friends.

Re:Rarely the diplomate

[Lonewolf666]

Yes, he can be pretty abrasive. Consider this: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/701694/focus=706950

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't
stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in
that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

(emphasis mine)

This is terrible

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Where can we find another hacker that looks like a yeTTY?

Re:This is terrible

[maxume]

Nearly anywhere hackers can be found?

Could anyone shed some light...

[Lisandro]

...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.

Re:Could anyone shed some light...

[cryptoluddite]

The details are that TTYs in general on any *nix are a huge mess with lots of complicated interactions and weird historical behavior that doesn't make sense. The linux tty stack for a long time was a huge clusterfuck. Now thanks to Alan it's just a normal clusterfuck. That's the context for this incident, which basically happened like this...

Some dudes: there's a bug in the ttys
Alan: ok lets fix it
Some dudes: here's a patch
Alan: that patch breaks a dozen other things
Some dudes, Alan reject a bunch of solutions
Alan: we can fix it with a hack, but it breaks emacs. Emacs is relying on unspecified behavior, so it can go suck an egg.
Linus: well it SHOULD (sic) work like this, and emacs is too holy to break. This problem is easy, are you a retard?
Alan: look we can hack it and break emacs, or do a huge rewrite
Linus: hacks suck, linux should be awesome in every way. Also, your code smells
Alan: it's going to take forever to get this right
Linus: then revert the patch that introduced the bug
Alan: that patch was applied years ago and removing it would break a dozen other things. You didn't think I'd think of that? Who's the tty maintainer anyway, jackass?!
Linus: I don't like your attitude
Alan: Then fuck off I quit!
Linus: Oh yeah did I mention your code smells?
Linus: and let me quote you something you said earlier, so I can show what a bad attitude you have.

The TTY and serial line code is basically a huge Rube Goldberg machine and Linus was telling Alan to tweak something somewhere in the middle of this huge contraption. Having followed the TTY code a fair bit, I totally side with Alan on this. It's a miracle that it even works, and not something you can just stick your head in and give advice about how to fix. Also, if Linus is so concerned about proper behavior for user space programs maybe he should take a look at ioctl... because it's completely screwed up in linux.

Re:More reason to love open source...

[blueskies]

It's good you never allowed windows network code into your company. You wouldn't want any open source BSD code in your company!

Linux?

[n3v]

Everyone serious uses BSD anyways :)

Thank You

[dburkland]

Alan thank you for your contribution to the open source community!

So long and thanks for all the code.

[tempest69]

The TTY code has been pretty decent to me over the years. I've never found a situation that my code could do right with the TTY. Not that Im writing editors.
Overall I hope Alan finds a new project, I suspect that his experience could really help all sorts of userland code.
Coders are stubborn and dislike being told how to do anything. No shame in saying shove it when its time.

Storm

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[AuMatar]

If Alan Cox wanted to work at Apple, it would take 1 phone call. Devs like him don't have problems getting hired. I don't know if he's been working on FreeBSD or not, but if so that isn't the reason.

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[phoxix]

Actually, and bizarrely enough, there is a high level FreeBSD developer named Alan Cox too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[ceeam]

Wow. They are different people?!
Mod parent up somebody.

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[Lemming Mark]

I was just going to reply and say the same thing as the GP - there is another Alan Cox for FreeBSD.

I have a theory that all OSes have their own Alan Cox but maybe they sometimes use pseudonyms to keep that secret!

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[setagllib]

There are two Alan Coxes, one for Linux and one for FreeBSD. It's confusing but there you go.

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[GrahamCox]

I think I need to start writing my own OS...

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[Bodrius]

Oh crap!

Now that the first AC is not working on Linux tty code the chances of him leaving his basement and meeting the FreeBSD AC are much higher.

What happens if they meet? What would happen to the space-time continuum?

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[Errtu76]

Wow. They are different people?!
Mod parent up somebody.

Ok, i will!

Ah damn.

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[Hitman_Frost]

There are two Alan Coxes, one for Linux and one for FreeBSD. It's confusing but there you go.

What? Did they fork him or something?

Re:So long and thanks for all the code.

[Shadowland]

GrahamCox says:
> I think I need to start writing my own OS...

Only if you change your first name to Alan....

Handbags at 10 paces...

[clickety6]

"You claim that emacs sh*ts itself when it gets EAGAIN, and you think
that's an emacs bug. And I think you're full of crap..."

I'm sure there's a job waiting in the diplomatic corps for Mr Torvalds...

I knew it

[oldhack]

The true point of contention? Emacs vs. Vi. Loons.

probably went like this

[FudRucker]

Linus: Hey Alan finger my tty

Alan: No Way! i quit!

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[dgatwood]

132.155.125.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer px-in-f132.google.com.

That said, who wants to bet we can find a google cache of goatse?

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[ChrisMounce]

"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer
care."

You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.

Linux is a great product, and that is the result of the magnificent work of all the coders and contributers. But sometimes they just act like children.

Linus was right

[microbee]

As always.

The argument started when someone found the tty layer had a regression. Linus cares about regression deeply. His basic philosophy is old bug is better than new bug. If a fix introduces a new bug that breaks a real world application, then the fix should be reverted and a better fix should be worked out.

This ensures predictable behavior of an OS that you can actually rely on, and better release management.

Alan didn't think so. He thought his fix was too important to be backed out, although it introduced a regression. Linus was frustrated that he had to explain to Alan, a long time Linux hacker, about the rules. And that's where Alan got impatient too.

Re:Linus was right

[jez9999]

That was Alan's contention, and if true then it would be better to fix emacs than to keep the tty layer broken or crufty for emacs' lazy benefit.

Anyway, I think emacs has its own tty layer, doesn't it?

Re:Linus was right

[microbee]

[quote]has it been factually established that emacs code was not doing something broken and just "getting lucky" until now?[/quote]

And it's irrelevant. The entire point is not to blame emacs. Yes, yes, technically speaking, it *might* be better to fix emacs, but the fact remains that the kernel broke a widely deployed application. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. And even if the emacs should be fixed, it can't be done over night. Sometimes the kernel has to bent over and keep buggy behavior if someone important actually depends on it. It's just the job of a kernel: to keep applications happy.

So Linus was frustrated because he wanted Alan to acknowledge the sentiment. But Alan kept arguing something totally irrelevant.

Re:Linus was right

[istewart]

His basic philosophy is old bug is better than new bug

Having driven both, I must say that I agree.

Re:Not very responsible either

[PeterBrett]

First of all I am very greatful for everything he did. I know he contributed a lot. Hope the handover will be more than this emotional message: "Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer care."

You'll be pleased to hear that not only is Alan helping with the handover, he's been providing some constructive criticism about the way the bug is being fixed now Linus and a few other people have turned their full attention to it.

Re:Should I?

[WaywardGeek]

I once had a bear do exactly that! We were camping at Merced Lake in Yosemite, and had six-man-weeks of food for three of us to take a two week backpacking trip. We put it 20' up a tree, on the end of a 10' limb. In the middle of the night, we heard loud stomping sounds, a bunch of scrapping sounds, then a rope-through-pulley sound, and a loud crash. A damned black bear had jumped from the tree, caught our food bag on the way down, using our rope to slow his crash, and squashed a small tree when he landed.

My friend had a great idea. "Let's go get our food back." I don't know how I let him talk me and my other buddy into it, or why I was the one in front with a dying flash light, as we followed the munching sounds into the woods. Suddenly, the bear stood up on both back legs with his arms out, and I don't know if the roar I heard was the bear, or just the blood rushing to my head. I turned around to ask if we should run, but there was no one there! I caught up to my brave friends at the lake, where we discussed wading into the freezing cold lake vs. making a stand there.

I must say, it didn't occur to me to check out the bear's penis, but he was waving everything else at me!

The butt hurt started with KDESU?

[tyrione]

Hi,

A recent kernel change broke kdesu (from KDE 4.2) on my test boxes. ISTR a
discussion about that, but I can't find it right now. Any clues?

Rafael

Seriously? KDESU is broken, in the first place.

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=kdesu

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[smellsofbikes]

To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".

Drag'n'drop

[HomelessInLaJolla]

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"?

Re:Drag'n'drop

[blue trane]

ad hominem

Re:Drag'n'drop

[lennier]

"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."

But isn't that precisely what object orientation was invented to solve? To find a way of unifying data transfer between absolutely everything, everywhere, by sending not raw data but objects which could then be queried to ask things like 'what kind of thing are you?' and 'give me your data in Format X, Y or Z which I can read'.

Drag and drop to me is one of the acid tests of 'do you actually have a functioning object model?' And pretty much every GUI OS, including Windows and OSX, fails this: drag and drop works in many places, if the developers have jumped through hoops to but not all; there's no way to universally query ANY object and do stuff with it. The only exception I can think of is, perhaps, Smalltalk/Squeak (the original OO system) with its direct-object-manipulation interface.

Why didn't the promise of OO happen? We got COM objects instead which seem to do almost precisely the opposite: be very brittle, add a whole layer of complexity, and only make sense inside huge frameworks which can't be split up into objects. C++ seems to be the anti-Smalltalk in almsot every way and yet it still gets to be called 'object oriented'. How did we allow such confusion of language?

I don't agree that the answer is 'drag and drop is far too complicated and you shouldn't be trying to do that'. We should say 'hey, this poses interesting questions about why our fundamental operating system models are, in 2009, still broken even by 1979 standards.'

Re:Drag'n'drop

[Coward Anonymous]

What drivel. Drag'n'Drop is the shortcut equivalent of 'Save File' in program 1, 'Open File' in program 2. It's a bunch of o' bytes. It makes absolutely no difference if the bytes come through the Drag'n'Drop route or through a file.

Re:Drag'n'drop

[dubl-u]

Why didn't the promise of OO happen?

I wasn't around for it. But I'd say it's just another example of cargo cult programming.

It's much easier to say you're doing something, and maybe to observe some of the rituals, than to actually do the work. A lot of people working in OO languages don't even know what constitutes real OO. And I don't blame them; most intro Java books, for example, just give little snippets of procedural code with an occasional OO gloss.

You can see the same pattern happening today with Agile development. Some people get great results by deeply changing how they work. Others hear about it, adopt a fraction of it, and still see improvement. Then a lot of other people jump on the bandwagon, watering it down to the point where it's worthless, but in the meantime turning a big profit on certification, training, and consulting.

Re:Drag'n'drop

[julesh]

But isn't that precisely what object orientation was invented to solve? To find a way of unifying data transfer between absolutely everything, everywhere, by sending not raw data but objects which could then be queried to ask things like 'what kind of thing are you?' and 'give me your data in Format X, Y or Z which I can read'.

Object orientation does solve this, but only for systems that can share objects with each other. The problem is that, typically at least, objects are represented as a data structure in memory that has, among other things, pointers to code to execute in response to different messages. To execute a method, we find the correct pointer, call that code and pass it a pointer to the object whose method it is. This is by far the most efficient way of implementing objects, so it is almost universally used.

The downside to this implementation is that objects depend on a specific memory map, i.e. they are process specific. You can't just rip an object out of one process and send it to another, you have to serialize it and deserialize it along the way, and the receiving process has to know about that object's class because it has to have access to its methods' code as well the object's data. There are three general solutions to moving objects from one application to another:

1. Run all applications in the same address space/virtual machine. This is the approach that Smalltalk took, and is also done today in some research systems (Microsoft's Singularity springs to mind, but there are others too... and I think Singularity prevents objects being transferred between running processes for its own subtly different reasons, IRRC). It isn't done in mainstream operating systems because there are a few serious downsides:
   • All applications must be written in languages that are compatible with each other's object representation. In most cases where systems like this have been implemented, there is only a single language available.
   • In order to meet the process isolation requirements that we have of modern operating systems (i.e. a failure in one application doesn't cause the entire system to fail) the language _must_ be both type safe and memory safe (i.e. memory used by an object of one type cannot be reused by an object of another type while there is a live pointer to that memory in the system). Memory safe languages almost always do not offer explicit memory management, as the two features are extremely difficult to combine. Some operations are less efficient in type safe environments. Consequently, such environments usually offer poor responsiveness and are not suitable for realtime uses. People avoid such environments.
   • If you don't have a type safe environment, or your type system does not offer protection of private elements and a means to prevent subclassing, it is impossible to implement a secure system. Any running application can interfere with any other running application at will. Smalltalk suffers from this problem: any code running on a smalltalk system can perform any operation it is possible to perform on the system. Smalltalk cannot provide isolation of multiple security domains.
2. Provide a remote method invocation framework. Objects are held in a server process that receives messages from client processes and invokes operations on the object in response to them. Such systems are generally cumbersome to work with, requiring a lot of developer overhead in most cases. COM, which Windows' drag & drop is based on, uses this approach.
3. Serialize the object, deserialize it in the recipient, and provide a copy of the object's methods in a form which can be linked on demand into the recipient. Windows implements this in the form of OLE, an extension of COM, which some drag and drop applications support (e.g. MS Office). The problem with this is that the requirements are extremely complicated so few developers bother registering their objects as OLE-capable. It just isn't worth the effort.

4. I'm not sur

Why is the TTY subsystem still in the kernel?

[Animats]

I'm surprised that the TTY subsystem is still in the kernel. By now, it ought to be in user space. It's rare today that a serial port is attached to an actual terminal (let alone a real Teletype), and separating the serial port driver from all the backspacing and line handling stuff would make both parts simpler. Most of the time, the TTY stuff in the kernel just gets in the way of other uses of serial ports.

They've been separated in QNX for a decade, for example.

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[Beetle B.]

You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.

Please talk to the moderators at Slashdot. I no longer care.

Re:Theo

[Zancarius]

Perhaps Alan can come over to the FreeBSD camp where we are a bit more friendly. He's a good guy and will compliment any project he latches onto.

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.

*cough*

[toby]

Solaris :)

I'm pretty sure they're already separate...

[argent]

Surely the TTY code isn't part of the serial driver subsystem? What the tty subsystem handles is line discipline, and that can be applied to any number of serial interfaces, both physical (serial ports) and virtual (sockets). If you talk to the serial port RAW there shouldn't be a line discipline involved.

(the issue of whether they're in the "kernel" or not is a separate issue, QNX being a microkernel being "in the kernel" there is kind of meaningless)

Re:Not very responsible either

[HiThere]

It's not nothing. The TTY module has lost a very talented maintainer.

OTOH, it's definitely not the end of the world, either.

I ONCE wrote a serial driver for an RS232C port on a CP/M system. This is my only right to criticize. For such right as it gives... Alan deserves full credit for many years of irritating work with a stupid messy standard. And *I* only had to interface three devices. I think that was the project that convinced me to never again touch assembler.

Re:Should I?

[croddy]

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.

Re:hmmm...

[UnrefinedLayman]

3) why isn't Reiser 4 in the damn kernel already?

I'm ready to scream bloody murder over it not being included yet.

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[lawpoop]

"Please talk to the new tty maintainer whoever that ends up. I no longer care."

You know what really gets on my nerves? When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.

You know what I find entertaining? People who are smart enough to see through a fairly transparent dysfunctional coping mechanism, and then continue to let it bother them after they've encountered it for the nth time. "Hey, he really does care! He's *lying* to us..."

Re:He's still posting....

[yossarianuk]

Ignore my post (can I mod myself down ??) .... He has left tty maintainer, but is still posting on the kernel mailing list. I hope he re-considers talent like his is rare .

Especially if he wanted to work on the tty code

[tlambert]

"If Alan Cox wanted to work at Apple, it would take 1 phone call."

Especially if he wanted to work on the tty code.

-- Terry

Re:Especially if he wanted to work on the tty code

[Zaurus]

Parent post should be modded insightful or something, not funny.

Terry Lambert is an actual Apple employee who, if I'm not mistaken, could quite honestly hire people like Alan to work on the "unix" portions of OS X. He's quite active on Apple's Darwin Kernel mailing list.

This is ...

[SlashDev]

... very common amongst programmers, especially excellent programmers. I can see both points of view, one (Linus) who wants to get this done as quickly as possible, machine-like, because he believes that the fix is quick and simple, the other (Alan) wants to dissect the problem, diagnose, understands it, and fix it. It's unfortunate that Alan made that decision, but I think Linus's last email was pushing him towards making it, he was clearly mad; that being said I have one thing to say, from a programmer's perspective: You cannot force a system programmer to think a certain way, do things the way you want them to do, not Alan Cox anyways. Linus's behavior is reminiscent of corporations who employ programmers to write functions (or sub-routines as some call them), all day long, "just do it, don't argue if it is right or wrong".

Looks like I'm the dissident

[hrimhari]

I went to read the thread from around the message pointed by the article.

What I saw was a nervous breakdown from Mr. Cox because he had too much pressure on him and wasn't able to accept that his proposal was less optimal than that from others. See: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/612

Mr. Cox finally comes to reason: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/108

Considering the discussion going on from http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/276 , maybe Mr. Cox will reconsider.

I don't know about other issues, but I wouldn't be too fast to point the finger at Mr. Torvalds in this case.

Thank you, Alan!

[Progman3K]

If everyone contributed as much of their time as you have, the (open-source) world would be a better place.
Thank you.

both wrong

[buddyglass]

Assuming what Linus said is true, about Alan blaming user land code for problems he was responsible for, then Alan was clearly in the wrong. However, Linus is wrong to have taken him to task in such a public forum. If he had any sense, he'd have done it privately, and Alan Cox would probably still be the maintainer. There's more to managing people than simply "being right".

He's left the kernel before (2003)

[yossarianuk]

In 2003 Alan cox stopped kernel development for a year whilst he learnt Welsh.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/759

It seems he left with little notice then (although he was maintaining the older kernel - 2.2) . Kernel development still continued in his absence....

Re:Slashdotted - Google Cache the real links

[squizzar]

I sometimes wonder if it's the very public nature of Linux (and much open source) development that gives that creates this impression of everyone acting like children. I've heard plenty of people describing working environments (no matter the expertise) that sound exactly the same as this, it's just that no one outside the company will ever see it. It's kind of a software development soap opera...

Interpersonal problems derail projects

[skeptictank]

far more often than technical challenges. This incident provides an enlightening view into Linux development. Working for someone with the social skills of a 13 year old girl, who doesn't actually pay you, never ends well.

back in 1938

[transporter_ii]

Back in 1938, a massive alien invasion took place in Grover's Mills, New Jersey -- during Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast about Martians. Maybe it wasn't a hoax? Applications were discovered for social security cards from a list of men with no backgrounds -- all named Cox:

Alan Cox
John Big Cox
Dewey Cox
Dixon Cox
Ima Cox

.

Re:hmmm...

[TheLink]

> why isn't Reiser 4 in the damn kernel already?

Vendor lock-in.

You missed one point: Linus was right

[MikePlacid]

>Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
>User -> Reports breakage
>Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
>User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.

Here they have found the bottom issue: emacs was expecting some reasonable behavior from the kernel: data delivery before notification of producer's termination. The behavior was broken.

>Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.

Hello? The code broke a reasonable expectations of its users. Not buggy? That's technically is a DEFINITION of a bug.

>Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
>Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.

Cox was proposing some strange solutions.

>Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.

Then they had a technical discussion, and it appeared that Linus was right.

Re:MS broke backward compatibility...

[Rockoon]

They broke it on purpose, yes.

Remember that they were also introducing a new security model, which is one of the reasons they HAD to break it. They made that choice, for better or worse.

Then are you doing your job?

[Ritchie70]

Here's my theory....

I get paid WAY too much to just shut up and do stupid stuff. If they wanted someone who would just shut up they could find someone much cheaper.

So if my boss (or her boss, or her boss's boss) tells me to do something I think is stupid, I do my best to explain to them exactly what is wrong with that plan.

So I'll argue about it. I'll disagree with them. I'll be difficult. But the whole time I'm telling them I'm just being difficult because I think it's a bad plan, not because it's personal.

And there may be some reason I don't see that it's actually the right answer.

In any case, once I'm sure they've gotten the concept I'm trying to express, I let them decide - them being the boss - and I go do what they said. Sometimes they change their mind. Sometimes they tell me the reason it's the right answer. Occasionally they tell me that they agree, but their boss says do it.

Always fight the stupidity. Don't take the fight personally - but if you're in technology, the fight is part of your job.

It's human psychology

[argStyopa]

What I find interesting from a psychological perspective is the baseless optimism of the participants.

Do they think that in 1979 (or some specific date since) that Bill Gates stroked an imaginary 'Snidely Whiplash' mustachio and cackled over how he'd dominate the computer market and exploit people for his own wealth?

Do they really think that any corporate/government organization that represents the polar opposite to the Linux 'paradigm' - highly bureaucratic, stifling, top-down organizations - didn't START with a font of goodwill, like Linux?

What, precisely, did they think made their effort unique? Why did they actually think that Linux, as it becomes more relevant, wouldn't ALSO become a balkanized playground of ego, power, and territory-marking?

How many distros of Linux are there? And how many of them have forums filled with not just people who are talking about the postive aspects of this distro or that, but who display the fanboi-attack piranha behavior toward anyone that dares preferentially support some other distro?

Hey, I congratulate the guy for putting up with it as long as he did. He made a valiant effort, regardless of its futility.

But as far as what he was fighting? Q.E.D.

Re:Push-out doors bad for snow and other egress

[manifoldronin]

(Yeah, I know. I keep a bottle of alcohol in my drawer to wipe my keyboard and mouse whenever someone else has worked on my computer. And I avoid shaking hands.)

I keep a bottle of alcohol in my drawer too!