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Matthew Garrett Forks the Linux Kernel
jones_supa writes: Just like Sarah Sharp, Linux developer Matthew Garrett has gotten fed up with the unprofessional development culture surrounding the kernel. "I remember having to deal with interminable arguments over the naming of an interface because Linus has an undying hatred of BSD securelevel, or having my name forever associated with the deepthroating of Microsoft because Linus couldn't be bothered asking questions about the reasoning behind a design before trashing it," Garrett writes. He has chosen to go his own way, and has forked the Linux kernel and added patches that implement a BSD-style securelevel interface. Over time it is expected to pick up some of the power management code that Garrett is working on, and we shall see where it goes from there.
Seriously...
My code didn't meet the project leaders quality requirements, I'm leaving.
Waaaahhhh!.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Linux is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Linux community when IDC confirmed that Linux market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
All major surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Linux continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, LInux is dead.
Good on you for putting wotrk in and not just words in. I'm interested to see how many contributors will support the fork.
Twinstiq, game news
I don't actually mean to sound snide but can someone explain to me why I should care about this as an end user? TFS reads like someone got their panties in a bunch over some arcane detail and couldn't bear to not get his way. Is there some amazing benefit to users in this or is this just some developer having a snit because Linus disagreed with his preferences?
Fork off Matthew!
I like Linus, but I agree, things are getting weird w/existing kernel architecture.
Will nVidia driver support continue to be (mostly) plug-n-play?
CAP == 'module'!
Just for the people who don't know what the fuck securelevel is (NetBSD's flavor in this case)
Not going back to Linux, but this really is a worthwhile addition.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Anyone can fork the kernel - it used to be pretty common in the early days, until distro and use specific modifications eventually got accepted back into the main tree.
Garrux - the OS with a kernel that loves you!
Hopefully he will keep his branch in sync and offer back his contributions like other developers who have done the same thing.
Many developers felt that working on the main Linux kernel tree involved too much politics and in-fighting and chose to maintain their own dev branches for their patches. Any that keep their trees in sync have successfully continued to contribute, and left the politics for when their projects were ready for merging. Any that didn't keep in sync, well . . . at least we don't worry about those projects anymore.
This is how it's supposed to work. Whether he can make a functioning team or not is an open question, but at least he can see if a more polite environment gets better results.
The ideal Linux kernel fork would panic if it detected a systemd infection.
If he's able to gain enough traction with former and future devs, it will be interesting to see how the major distros (aside form Gentoo) pick up the alternative kernel. If they can do it for HURD, then surely they can do it for other kernels as well.
SJW Linux v1.0
Now with kernel-level privilege checks.
Branching happens all the time, either to develop a feature or because it's doing something that upstream won't accept. One man maintaining his own patches isn't a fork. A fork would imply that that you're planning to diverge from or replace the project you branched from, nothing in his post indicates he wants to compete with Linux or the LKML. He's just saying I'll make my own patches and provide them for those who want them, but I'm not going to bother trying to upstream them. Kinda like Debian and Ubuntu, Canonical made a lot of patches for Debian but they weren't trying to fork it. They just rebased off it every six months, being a downstream variation. He's making a downstream variation with some interface from BSD. Big whoop.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've tested systemd's handling of stderr on OpenSUSE Linux distribution and found it works just fine. What problem do you see with how stderr is handled?
The last round of big attacks on Linux happened abound 2003-2004. Remember SCO, Laura DiDio, Ken Brown, Ballmer, etc ?
Those were external attacks and it only made the community stick together even closer.
Now a bit of astroturfing, staging some discontent inside the community. After all, nothing divides a community the way success does. Looks like a short-lived stunt.
Finally someone has done something about the alleged toxic environment on the LKML.
Soon, when this project fails by lack of competence (no matter how nice the internal communications are handled) and after LKML had lose some developers for Matthew (due how internal communications are handled), some common ground will be reached.
There's nothing like the good, old, competition.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
... Is how open source grows.
Is why didn't all those people opposed to systemd fork at that point ?
Is it worth getting a large box of it and watching the fun or will it all be over by the time that I am back from the shop ?
Remember that forks sometimes do succeed.
Take Linux. It forked from OpenBSD which itself was forked from QNX with smatterings of FreeBSD code.
QNX programmed itself from vacuum tubes and trace wires left on the ground at Quantum Software in Ottawa one evening. Dan Hildebrand (RIP) apparently had something to do with this metamorphosis.
Meanwhile across the ocean, FreeBSD was forked from Windows 95 which itself came from the unholy union of MS-DOS and the GEM environment. MS-DOS was bought from a company in Washington State and was a fork of CP/M. GEM was a stand alone thing and should never have been born.
Where was I? Oh yeah, CP/M. CP/M was a copy of Apple's SOS used in the Apple
Apple SOS was a mix/fork of Apple ProDOS and TRS-80's OS; I forget the name, not important. Radio Shack forked their TRS-80 OS from some source code they saw in Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition.
Fact.
Trolling is a art,
I'm all for the idea of being able to fork an entire source tree just because you can. That is a wonderful thing on its own.
However, I don't see what makes this such a profound fork that it merits special attention. Github alone reports there have been over ten thousand forks of the kernel and I'm sure that prior to Github there were many others for similar reasons as this. Why should this one be any different? Because someone was so mad that his patch set didn't jive with the direction Linus wants the kernel to go that he had to maintain it on his own? Let me know when he steals away several commercial endorsements from the linux kernel foundation and some key kernel developers and then we have a story worth writing home about.
Nice to see someone actually following through. It might not go anywhere... but I fucking hate ego-driven development so much that I would back this type of move regardless of the dspecifics. Linus (and the mentality he spreads) can die in a fire for all I care.
It sounds like he fits right in: "because Linus has an undying hatred of BSD securelevel, or having my name forever associated with the deepthroating of Microsoft because Linus couldn't be bothered asking questions about the reasoning behind a design before trashing it."
Besides, "good luck" with forking the kernel. If anyone is stupid enough to build on a Microsoft fork of Linux, they deserve what they get.
Systemd, although not technically a part of the kernel tree, depends heavily on certain kernel configurations. Furthermore, the systemd cabal is pushing for its own kernel modification known as kdbus.
Because of the extreme consternation and divisiveness within the Linux community that is caused by systemd, the entire systemd project should fork from the mainstream. In fact, the entire systemd project should have begun as a fork.
To fork is better than to induce excessive disruption and infighting and thus the obvious path for systemd is set.
Are you asking about the benefit of securelevel or the benefit of a fork that doesn't have an asshole culture?
Securelevel is of benefit to systems that run for a long time in the same configuration, making them more secure. This applies to many servers. Basically, it separates having the machine RUNNING from the setup process of CONFIGURING the machine. 99% of the time, the machine is in run mode (securelevel > 1) and in this state it's configuration can not be changed. To change the configuration, you boot into configuration mode (securelevel 1). That's a basic summary.
The submission is more about this dev getting tired of the culture, the environment that Linus has created and doing his development outside of that structure. It's not clear if he intends to lead a group of developers who aren't assholes. If so, that could mean more developers would contribute and they might be more productive in a less caustic environment. More developers being more productive would mean end users get more features, done better.
Why should a person face a gauntlet of incivility and vitriol, one that you liken to a frying pan, to contribute to an open source project?
Code reviews, design reviews, that makes sense. Being referred to someone at a lower paygrade rather than the top tier of kernel devs, sure. These things are stressful but essential. I'd stand to lose considerable self-esteem from them, but there's nothing I can do about that but get better.
But if I went into a code or design review at work and got a Torvalds-style response, I'd be reporting the person to HR and finding a more civil person to work with. If I couldn't work around them and nobody was making them change, I'd find another job. I could try to modify the problematic person's behavior, but that would be stressful and unlikely to work, and I shouldn't have to act as my coworkers' parent.
Garrett found that there was no HR to appeal to, no way to work around Torvalds, and no way to change him. So he did in fact get out of the frying pan. He doesn't deserve to be seared whenever he gets anything done, so he's not tolerating it. Now he's getting the same things done in a way that normal people will be happier with.
This isn't a deficiency on his part. He merely doesn't want to deal with something that normal people shouldn't have to deal with.
"Configuration mode" would be securelevel less than 1. Or indeed less than zero. Theoretically, different levels could allow different levels of configuration changes - one level could allow you to add email aliases, but not allow you to set it as an open relay.
People don't use Linux because it's "professional"; people use it because it's free as in beer. /thread
Maybe if Eich wasn't a bigot, DRM wouldn't be in Mozilla right now. Lesson: Don't be a bigot.
Yet DRM is in the Linux kernel.
Yeah you do, otherwise you wouldn't have said this:
No I don't which is why I wrote what I did. If I mean to be snide I'll just go right ahead and do that without bothering to claim otherwise.
Guy gets finally fed up with dealing with insane LKML politics and decides to have his own tree with his own patches. Guy isn't some rando, guy is a long term contributor to the mailing list.
None of which I care about as an end user nor is the politics involved remotely interesting to me. My question was whether this mattered to me as an end user. It sounds like you are confirming that this is a developer having a snit.
You should probably care because the politics driving away good people means that inevitably the quality will go down when those good people find more enjoyable places to work. And good people always have options.
People leaving does not mean quality will "inevitably" go down. I run a company and have had to deal with good people leaving many, many times. It's rare that someone cannot be replaced. Did this fellow bring something to the table that cannot be replaced? If not then I'm not worried in the slightest. If the kernel dev team isn't robust enough to withstand people leaving (including Linus) then it probably was doomed anyway but that seems rather unlikely given its prominence these days.
The thing is, anyone can checkout and fork the Linux kernel. This is what Git does best. Developers can fork and remerge to their heart's content.
Most forks in a Git tree maintain some relationship with the parent. My guess is the maintainers of this fork will still merge in updates from Linus's kernel. So what is the big deal? Depending on how the do it, some of their features may eventually get merged into Linus's branch as well.
Forking the kernel and creating are exactly the way Git development is supposed to work. If enough people like it and it proves successful, it can easily be merged back in. This is massively distributed development. It may be a hard concept for some corporate-led programmers to understand, but this is seriously nothing of significant importance. Things are working as expected. There is no central brain in Linux development, only trusted repositories and relationship, and the merges between repositories. As long as the crowd trusts one repo more than another, that will be seen as the main repo. If Linus dies tomorrow, Linux would go on under another trusted repo.
he's probably a victim of just reading troll posts about it and thinking they are true.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Take your ball and go home
I say good luck but I can't imagine any users ever choosing to use anything other than the "official" kernel.
a) A fork is not the end of the original project. It can be. But usually it's not.
b) "In October 2014, Garrett stated on his blog that he would no longer contribute Linux kernel changes relating to Intel hardware" - That's pettiness, and I'm sure the kernel came to a grinding halt that day too.
c) If you can't get your changes past other people, to the point that you have to fork and maintain an entirely separate branch on your own, that's usually the sign of messy code or absolute loss. It means that you want only YOUR way to be the way. That kind of lack of co-operation isn't the way forward, but you are more than free to pursue that. The number of followers of that fork versus the stock kernel is likely to be tiny, and changes likely to come back in the "accepted" format into the stock kernel before you see any real usage of it outside developers and testers.
d) "He is a recipient of the Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel". Ah! All the bits that I *don't* want in the kernel. Did he work on systemd too?
JUST what Linux needs to be seen as "Supportable" by major peripheral manufacturers, software publishers and corporations...
Yassiree, Bub! 20216 is for SURE gonna be The Year of the Linux Desktop!
If the fork changes the kernel so that in no way will systemd ever run on it, I'm all for it.
It's not about "interminable arguments over the naming", the only one doing that is no else than Matthew, in attempt to pigeonhole his agenda.
This dates way way back to 98. Matthew tried to push gradual openbsd-ish "lock down everything" levels few times, while Linus and his club keeps firm stance "inherited bitmaps or gtfo" every time.
This is ultimately BSD "give user limited but easy to use tool" vs linux "provide powerful [albeit not as intuitive] tools, let user do the job". Think pf vs iptables. I personally stand with linus on this one, as providing flexible tools (instead of easy to use, but limited) is ultimately what made Linux a winner - people can bend the system for more usecases, instead of being restricted by simple and easy to use, but often hopelessly limited tools.
You've probably never heard of it because you're not in my enclave.
Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's *your* issue. That has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain. It's trivial for you guys to have a signing machine that parses the PE binary, verifies the signatures, and signs the resulting keys with your own key. You already wrote the code, for chissake, it's in that f*cking pull request.
By the time SCALE 11 hit, Matt was no longer working at redhat. people moved on. A Fork was always an option for Matthew...just perplexed as to why he decided to do it 2 years after...
Good people go to bed earlier.
pretty sure /g/ already forked it for them:
https://gitlab.com/femsf/toleranux
Linus is the honey badger of kernel development? Eh doesn't afraid of anything!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
i have little coding knowledge and have no idea how kernel coding collaboration works
but i tend to side with linus
if he verbally abused me i'd first make sure i didn't do something so stupid it warrants such a response (in case you want to say 'nothing warrants verbal abuse', we're adults, not children) before deciding to move away.
> Why should a person face a gauntlet of incivility and vitriol, one that you liken to a frying pan, to contribute to an open source project?
They shouldn't, but you're assuming this is actually the case. Everyone is civil until people start getting arrogant, then the gloves come off. So if you don't want abuse, don't act like a dick and expect others not to say anything.
> But if I went into a code or design review at work and got a Torvalds-style response, I'd be reporting the person to HR and finding a more civil person to work with.
You wouldn't get that kind of review unless you were an asshole to the reviewer first. And this is an open community, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. You don't have the right to decide that other people should be forced to like you or that they cannot call you out for being a jerk when you act like one. And if you don't like it, you don't ever have to talk to them.
> Garrett found that there was no HR to appeal to, no way to work around Torvalds, and no way to change him.
It's a free country. If there was such an HR, he could be sent there too. But we don't have social police to crack down on anyone who makes you feel bad and that's a good thing. What he does have is the option he used: the option to walk.
And guess what? If he's a dick to contributors, there still won't be any "HR" for anyone to talk to. That's how it works. It's open and free and... apparently some people hate that.
Dude, just use BSD already.
Or maybe, just maybe, RHEL et al pushed systemd out the door way to early, with absolutely no interim process and it would break relatively stable systems in new and difficult to determine methods.
I know that the conversion from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 expanded any simple sysadmin task by at least 5 to 10 times longer. Part of this is a complete lack of training on my part, and part of it is a complete lack of understanding of *NIX by the developers. What they have created has merit, and maybe as a standalone / fork it would have worked. But the wholesale sea change in 7 basically made me seriously consider abandoning my "linux first" approach to projects. It sort of reminds me of the attempt of Solaris to implement SMF, and the utter #$%@fest that would cause. Over time it got better, but by then, I abandoned a "Solaris first" policy.
My biggest quibble with systemd/RHEL 7 - on a minimal install, it requires WPA-supplicant. On a server. WTF???
--WooooHoooo--
Sounds like someone couldn't handle tackle football and is starting a flag football league. Action is where the hard hitting is.
i have little coding knowledge and have no idea how kernel coding collaboration works
but i tend to side with linus
if he verbally abused me i'd first make sure i didn't do something so stupid it warrants such a response (in case you want to say 'nothing warrants verbal abuse', we're adults, not children) before deciding to move away.
Here's an example of Linus ranting on someone:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/...
Yes, it's pretty harsh. But I can't honestly say that what Linus said was wrong.
Furthermore, should something like this be omitted simply because Linus doesn't like it? Is his opinion the only one that counts? Among other things, securelevel is used to implement "jails" but the functionality can be completely disabled (securelevel = -1) -- so Linus can turn it off if he wants.
I'm not claiming to be a kernel developer nor do I claim to know enough about the subject at hand to judge who is right and who is wrong. But I can definitely guarantee you that Linus is not someone who makes decisions for random reasons and there is a reason why he doesn't want securelevel in the kernel. Some of you may not agree with it and he is not perfect so he might actually be wrong, but I think it's very misleading for many of you to imply or act like he doesn't want it in there just to show off his power. There is a reason for what he does. Now if you some of you who care about this want to find out what that reason is and debate it, I'd be interested, but he's not being a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk. That's a lot closer to how Theo de Raadt works and that's a misleading and unfair statement to make of him, even if (in my opinion) it's a lot more accurate than to say that of Linus.
You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
And somehow it's always the other guys fault?
Look torvolds is a smart guy. He accomplished something impressive. That's great. It does not mean he is a good person or a good leader. He can be a total asshole. That doesn't make him a bad developer but it sure as hell would make him someone that most sane people would choose not to work with.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
People, in general, are terrible. So putting people in charge of things is, in general, a mistake. But, and this is important: just because somebody terrible is in charge of something, it doesn't automatically make it a good idea to put somebody else, also terrible, in charge of that thing. If around fifty percent of people think that the the first person's terribleness is manageable-to-nonexistent, that person is probably actually less terrible than average. So the inevitable terribleness of the replacement plus the significant terribleness of the replacement process itself would only serve to increase the total terribleness in the system.
I don't like people yelling at me about how bad I am at doing stuff, especially when they're right, so I don't contribute to open-source projects. But it's not because my critics use swears. As far as I'm concerned, the phrases "no thank you" and "go fuck yourself" are precisely equal in this context. Maybe all that Linus's critics really need to be comfortable is a macro in their email reader that turns "d_ck-sucking" into "corporate partnership" and "deep-throat" into "overadopt" and "f_cking" into "".
Good link. If he thinks GamerGate is "anti-women" then he is an SJW. Or, at least, he totally missed the point of that movement. Which is, at its root, that everyone (including women) is welcome in geek spaces; however, people are not welcome to walk in the door, get offended, and demand that geek spaces change to suit them. If you join a group and don't like how it behaves, the door is right over there.
(N.B. GamerGate started about ethics in journalism, but quickly moved beyond that.)
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Because if you are always nice, the useless idiots stick around and remain useless idiots, and you end up wasting your time coddling useless idiots instead of getting things done. Linus is more considerate than the majority of HR people, because they manipulate you while pretending to be honest, kind, and such. Linus has the courtesy to drop the farce, so you don't have to waste efforts with pointless social games.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
A guy complaining about unprofessionalism uses the term "deep throating". Ok then.
Hey, this is open-source. People join and quit projects all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. In this case, is the departure over the attitude as stated in the article or is it over the direction (Linus not wanting to include a BSD-style secure level interface)? Both are acceptable reasons. Why? Because the contributors are volunteers and can leave for any reason they want.
There isn't a story here. People already know that people join and quit OS projects all the time, so this departure isn't news. People already know that LInus can be brutally honest in his comments to others, so the reason for the departure isn't news either. Even a fork of the kernel isn't news because there are a number of them.
So, unless I'm missing something, there is no news here and we should all just move on.
That's the beauty of FOSS. If you're in a pissy, childish mood, you can take a copy of someone else's ball and go home to pout. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What the hell have "sane" people ever accomplished?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
1. There is no gauntlet of vitriol, only for quality code and design. Linus only whips out the big guns for deserved behavior/code. It's very rare, but, historically, when it happens, it saves a ton of time and stress for everyone else. Honesty is more important than shielding sensitive people from bad feelings.
2. garrett wasnt' seared 'whenever he got anything done.' That bit about the PE binaries was pretty stupid on his part.
3. appeals to what 'normal people' are, implying that kernel devs are not, is just ad hominem.
A clue: saying you're not doing something and then doing it doesn't mean you're not doing it.
A clue: When someone clarifies their intent because they are aware that others will misinterpret them you might consider actually taking them at their word. The word snide means to mock and I was in not mocking anyone. I merely wish to understand the motivations at work here. Had I wished to mock it would have been trivial to do so.
Saying you're not being snide then making snide personal attacks on the person in question means you actually lied about not being snide.
Never made a personal attack on anyone. I asked if the guy was "having a snit" (the word means to sulk or to have a fit of irritation) which is a reasonable question in this context. I've seen plenty of projects fork because of personality disagreements. Merely curious if that might be the case here. I also asked if there was any tangible benefit to his proposed additions to the kernel that an end user like myself would care about. If he has a good point and it matters to me then I'll sit up and pay attention. But it seems to merely be a personality conflict based on what I'm reading so I no longer care.
Well done on not reading my post or utterly failing to understand it.
Likewise. Pot meet kettle. (see THAT is being snide...)
Because she talked all about her butthurt yesterday?
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yes it is harsh and I wouldn't put up with it. It doesn't matter if what he says is right. It's the way he communicates. In this case it was a bug and the trash talk seems justified. But in other cases it aren't bugs but design decisions that he doesn't agree with, but where he might not be right. In these cases he uses the same language, and that's depressing and demotivating for the contributor.
YOU say "hosts=bad" (but they add security, speed, & reliability) & bitch on admin privelege to UPDATE vs. threats:
"So, have you figured out why privilege escalation is a bad thing yet?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @05:15PM (#50577809)
Hypocrite - You admit you use admin priv
&
How else can I programmatically update hosts minus it in Windows?
---
"Of course it requires elevation to write to the hosts file" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#50585879)
You FINALLY later admit there's no other way!
FACT:
Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS you use admin privelege (you saying it's "bad" too?) it can't do its job fully otherwise, like many security tools do!
---
Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET says hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
Oliver Day (Symantec) does-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts hosts & recommends my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
---
* HOW MANY SECURITY PROS DO I NEED TO KNOCK THE CHOCOLATE OUTTA YOU?
---
Those security pros INCLUDE me: I work w/ guys from malwarebytes' hpHosts on a regular basis!
I've professionally worked for decades as a combined domain-wide network admin & software engineer since 1994 (Even showing you HOW to migrate a hosts across an enterprise-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )
I've also been securing computers + WRITING GUIDES using CIS Tool (who took fixes from me too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - bonus) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
You told me you learn from guides? I write good ones that MILLIONS USE & was PAID FOR IT http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...
+ WARES TO PROTECT USERS endorsed & hosted by security pros -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...
You did all that? No & that's a small part of what I could put out.
APK
P.S.=> You're all TALK -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & a "ne'er-do-well" as far as security
...apk
It's been linked already, but this guy is pretty much going to be a mad whiner no matter.
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33...
"It's natural to write software to satisfy our own needs, but in doing so we write software that doesn't provide as much benefit to people who have different needs. We need to listen to others, improve our knowledge of their requirements and ensure that they are in a position to benefit from the freedoms we espouse. And that means building diverse communities, communities that are inclusive regardless of people's race, gender, sexuality or economic background."
Ok, so that means...
"We are a community that is disproportionately male, disproportionately white, disproportionately rich. This is made strikingly obvious by looking at the composition of the FSF board, a body made up entirely of white men. In joining the board, I have perpetuated this. I do not bring new experiences. I do not bring an understanding of an entirely different set of problems. I do not serve as an inspiration to groups currently under-represented in our communities. I am, in short, a hypocrite." ...oh so it doesn't count as "regardless of gender" if you are white. That doesn't count.
This guy is a self flagellating loudmouth dripping with white guilt, and subscribes to a specific type of racism that, in opposition to the dictionary and common sense, defines his OWN kind of racism as not ACTUALLY racist, so he can get away with it. He lays into himself (but obviously he can't really, it's just words) and other white men, and makes it their fault that they are busy writing free software, instead of somehow making a bunch of people who are neither white nor male do that work for them. Wait a minute...
Anyway, the whole thing drips with social justice babbles. It's good that this guy isn't on the linux kernel proper- Linus and others shouldn't have to waste their time with these whiners.
There are certain things that BSD just does better than Linux, and some things that Linux obviously does better than BSD. It should be a good thing if we bring the best parts of both together. BSD is horribly difficult to get running and administer, and Linux could clearly use some help in the performance department. Apple has done a great job of hiding BSD while taking as much advantage as they can. The overall Linux community has failed to take note.
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
On the occasions when Linus has responded to criticism that he's an... asshole? It basically seems like he says, "1) This is my sandbox and I can do what I want. 2) This communication style solves more problems than it causes." Linus may be correct on both these points. Linus is certainly an important enough person on an important enough project to probably be able to get away with some stuff that others might not. And its often pointed out that the people on the receiving end of these kinds of rants "had it coming" for one reason or another. That may be true as well. On the other side of the coin, though - I see participating in an open source project as a kind of volunteer work. What you stand to get out of it are mainly intangible rewards. And, if you reach a point where the stress and BS you have to put up with as a volunteer outweighs the intangible rewards, then by all means, step away and do something else with your time. In my own life, I was formerly a volunteer for a certain project (not software-related). Some parallels could be drawn between our head honcho, and Linus. Our guy had years of experience. To be fair and objective, the guy was smart, a hard worker, and his heart was in the right place. A lot of stuff got done, that wouldn't have otherwise gotten done if not for him. The guy, however, was simply an asshole. Just rude, arrogant, insensitive. I worked with/for/near/around this guy for a few years, because I believed in what we were doing, and was trying to find some admirable or redeeming qualities about this person. But, after a few years, it just got to the point where I grew tired of trying to deal with this guy, on top of my actual responsibilities, which were difficult and time consuming in and of themselves. So I walked away from this organization, which was a painful and frustrating decision because there were certainly things about it that I did enjoy and get a lot out of. But, it just wasn't worth being treated poorly by an asshole. Now its entirely possible that I should have grown a thicker skin, or that the asshole was smarter/better/righter than me and I somehow "deserved what I got" or whatever. But, fuck it, eventually I realized, 99% of my interactions with my fellow human beings were more pleasant than dealing with this guy. So, I walked away, and sunk my efforts into something similarly rewarding but without a bunch of intolerable BS. So if that's all that's going on here... then godspeed.
How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
"Break things and blame other people" is not a bug nor a design decision, and is worth much more verbal thrashing than accidentally including a bug with your patch.
Forking a large project is a tough, many-years job, it will need a lot more than just a few patches that weren't accepted to make it fly and it will need dedicated developers. But I think it's possible and I wish him luck.
There is a conceivable advantage to doing this. With some care, the forked linux kernel could be stabilized (something Linux really needs at the current juncture, frankly) and provide a goal for the FreeBSD linux emulation layer to go after, resulting in significant synergies between Linux and FreeBSD. Ultimately it might be possible to merge the device framework and solve the major problem that all kernel projects have of device-driver chasing by allowing developer resources to become more concentrated. That would be a difficult, but worthy goal.
-Matt
I post to Slashdot maybe one every few years... and it still can't convert line breaks to
's?
How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
> But if I went into a code or design review at work and got a Torvalds-style response, I'd be reporting the person to HR and finding a more civil person to work with.
Linus has explicitly rejected corporate "professionalism" as useless wankery that gets in the way of getting shit done. You should know what you're getting in to when you send patches to him by now, it's only been like this for twenty years.
I told all you assholes on /. 25 years ago this linux thing would never take off!!!! but did you listen? NOOOO...
I never had a look at secure mode before. But it seems like a too coarse approach to me. You can not cut privilege level in three blocks and claim that is all you need. You might want access to some devices but not other, access to some part of the network but not other. secure mode looks too blocky to be useful in a real scenario.
How was unprofessionalism any part of his point? The baselessness of a kernel inclusion request was the point. It wasn't unprofessional to request that inclusion, but it was irrational and possibly (suspiciously?/probably?) vendor/employer-motivated -- which outside an overtly professional discussion (which only the clueless would mistake the LKML for) can very aptly be likened to corporate dick-sucking.
"The way we have come up with to get around this is to .. get the binary signed by Microsoft." ref
This has to be the second most dumbest idea a kernel developers ever came up with. And forking the kernel has to be the most dumbest idea a kernel developers ever came up with.
This seems like a dig at Sarah Sharp, implying that she hasn't contributed anything, and further implying that one's argument is wrong or unworthy if you haven't contributed work. This is basically ad hominem. Whether someone has contributed work is irrelevant to whether their argument is sound or not.
Please help metamoderate.
I've seen references to "don't get your panties in a bunch", Mr Garrett called "girly" in a negative tone, and a "pussy", in a negative tone. And people wonder why some form the opinion of developers as sexist?
And we all talk about OpenSource as choice, yet when someone chooses to leave a project because of non-technical issues such as language choice from managers, we deride them. So, choice is good, as long as you choose to follow what I tell you...
anyways, carry on.
I love how he at the end puts f*cking.. after a full number of f-bombs. haha.
Too bad. After "Matthew Garrett forks the Linux kernel", I thought the next sentence would be "and merged it into systemd". That'd make systemd complete, finally :-)
Well said!
I especially like the macro idea. Kind of a "safe-space faker" for those that cannot deal with reality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Matthew Garrett likes Sarah Sharp!
FYI, *patches* will be moderated by someone other than me. As this is my *kernel*, not a government entity, I have the right to replace any *patch* I feel like with “fart fart fart fart”.
Matthew will soon add this to his new Management Style document.
Unlike the 'filthy, violent' old one:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Doc...
I for one welcome kernel forks started by these social justice outcasts, and can't wait to install tumblrinix.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Uh, just because the BSD developers put some effort into clean interface design and avoiding unnecessary hoops to jump through doesn't mean it's any less flexible. Quite the opposite. But hey, enjoy your upmods from people who haven't used anything else than Linux at all.
I post to Slashdot maybe one every few years... and it still can't convert line breaks to <br>'s?
if
I
remember
correctly
It does if your posting mode is "plain old text", and as far as I remember it has always been this way, even before you created your account.
You must have something else selected as your default posting mode, try clicking the Options button and see what mode you are using.
Enigma
Great. You run code by a nice wrong guy. I'll run mine from right asshole. Moron.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"He is a recipient of the Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel". Ah! All the bits that I *don't* want in the kernel.
It's sort of hard to boot on modern hardware without UEFI support, and hard to boot on Secure Boot systems without support for that too. Theoretically there's nothing wrong with Secure Boot as a concept, as long as you pick motherboard vendors that let you add your own signing keys.
The context is that he didn't like Linus using the term, not that he desired to use it himself.
"If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's *your* issue. That has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain." --Linus
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/228
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/225
Read this whole chain. Linus goes whole messages in this discussion without saying anything constructive. He throws "stupid" and "moronic" and "dick-sucking" and "idiotic" in with gusto, but only makes the most vague references to any technical issue. I had heard that Linus was firm but fair until I actually read the relevant part of the mailing list, and now I'm wondering how they get so much done if the maintainer talks like this.
Best of luck to him, please take Poettering and crew along with...
And at the receiving end is a senior developer violating one of the cardinal rules of Linux development, "we do not break user space".
Watch how in the quoted text he changes how a API behaves, and then goes on to blame the breakage on Pulseaudio (the project may be crap, but in this case the breakage originated with a change in the kernel source).
And so Torvalds unloads the big guns, in particular as said developer stands his ground even after being more gently reminded of what he is doing beforehand.
Reboot to change configuration? Now, where have I heard that before?
Oh year... Windows has detected ... has changed. Reboot to complete configuration.
Linux is trademarked by Linus Torvalds, is it not? So will this be Garnix? Garrux? GNU/GNU, for Gnu's Not Unix, and Garrett's New Unix?
PoliteOS? LinusFree Linux? SYGIGHX, (pronounced SIGH-gigs, short for "ScrewYouGuysI'mGoingHome... ix")?
Or will it be MGFolfPTOLS? (MatthewGarrett'sForkOfLinuxForPeopleTiredOfLinus'Shit?)
Just a few suggestions.
when you introduce new software like this, the time is never right for some people so you just have to do it. this probably applies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I would be happy to finally have an honest manager, instead of corporate mess of being placed in a separate room with the guy who shows up late and goes home early, getting no information, whether work-related or simply that a colleague (or even the boss) bought cake, not being included when people get new stuff, having another colleague who was also placed in this separate room fired, even though he was the only one with knowledge about several important subjects, being refused to switch places with a guy in the main room who wanted to switch because he hoped there would be less noise in the separate room, and then when I was considering quitting instead of waiting for them to fire me, I got the largest raise ever.
I would prefer to know what I do right and wrong, rather than this vague feeling that they are unhappy about something.
TdR, for example,LOATHES WITH A VENGEANCE the GPL. He doesn't CARE where the code gets used, as long as it isn't GPL.
And many many BSDers insist that it doesn't matter what the code is hidden and improved in, because the original is always available, so you've "lost nothing", but DO care if you can see it but aren't allowed to use it because it's GPL.
It wasn't that he supported the law with a financial contribution, it was that he supported the law with a financial contribution large enough to require reporting it.
As I remember it (correct me if I'm wrong!) he put 10k towards advertising to help push the anti-gay marriage laws, an amount that due to disclosure laws required his contributions to be reported to the public. This means much like a gay in a pride parade he's just outed his affiliations, and for better or worse, those affiliations can come back to haunt him in his public or private life as a matter of record.
I do not feel sorry for Eich as a result. If he wasn't willing to deal with those consequences, especially at a non-profit known for it's SJW trumpets, he should've donated just below the contribution limits, and if he was unaware of the reporting requirements when he made that donation, perhaps he wasn't qualified to be a CEO or president (whichever his position was) since he apparently lacks either proper research skills himself, or proper delegation to qualified experts. Either of which would disqualify him as a competent figurehead for a large company such as Mozilla regardless of his other political or religious beliefs.
The other is filed under 'TPM' 'Secure Boot Extensions' and 'Security Keyring'.
Combined together with an OEM signed bootloader and you're just as fucked as if you were on Windows! :)
Where 'we didn't need two scsi subsystems.' and the replacement ended up having less support than the original. I can't remember if it finally got a new maintainer or if the original re-replaced it, but there have been a couple failures under Linus' leadership that made userspace a hassle for different groups of people. (MAKEDEV to devfs(2.2 to 2.4) to udev(dropping devfs) at 2.6.9, vga=ask removal for those of us booting old text only systems, etc.) There was also the threading mess between 2.0 and 2.4 (2.6?) and the mess of glibc versions surrounding it (2.0 to 2.6 or so), which was like the libc4 to libc5 to libc6 mess all over again.
I'm sure there have been others, but anyone claiming there haven't been large messes under Linus' watch haven't really paid attention.
SELinux was a *SUMMER INTERN*'s project. As I remember it, it was based on a thesis he'd written in college about system security, and linux happened to be the best target for it at the time. So while it was funded and had continued support from the NSA it wasn't originally written by a bunch of spooks looking to jack a bunch of systems. It was written by an intern who was interested in security for the security arm of the NSA as a public service.
While I do agree with scrutinizing the NSA, and I do agree with scrutinizing SELinux (doubly so now that Google is utilizing it in their new Android releases, now with an indefinite amount more evil.), it does have at least the same level of credibility as OpenBSD for out of the box security. Sure it might be exploitable, but given the possiblities for kernel mode vulnerabilities compiled with hardware level attacks, do they really need to compromise the MAC subsystem in order to get everything they want? And moreover wouldn't it be an excellent strategy to divert attention from their REAL vectors of attack by making people waste excessive amounts of time scrutinizing their visibly donated code (which will obviously be suspect) while actually implementing their backdoors in entirely different code under innoculous submitter ids?
it works great the actual way. good luck
'Intel developer Sarah Sharp's challenge to Linux creator Linus Torvalds on the kernel mailing list, asking him to stop abusing and cursing at developers, appears to have been carefully planned' itwire.com