systemd discussion

[夜神 岩男]

Sorry, JB, I usually avoid posting (hence the trash email address), but
not today because this hit home.

On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 22:06 +0000, JB wrote:
> Clyde E. Kunkel <clydekunkel7734 <at> cox.net> writes:
> 
> > ...
> > All this said, I am beginning to believe Fedora is more and more an
> > experiment in social engineering.
> > ...
> 
> That's a well-chosen remark :-)
> "Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing
> actions...".

Sometimes this does seem the case, but on the other hand considering the
size of the open source community these days (as opposed to say, 1994,
before there was a real label for it) there is no way to make a decision
that everyone will agree with. There are too many people to please and
no possible way everyone can communicate everything to each other and
discuss prior to making a decision on something. Of course, these days
blogging has trained people to be more self-important *and* noisier than
ever. Another way of saying this is perhaps that the self-important used
to do more and say less, and by simply doing they were de facto in
charge. Argument from irrelevant people clogs lists more than it used to
-- or perhaps I am getting old and nostalgic.

Of course the "quietly doing" part above is, and forever will be, the
secret to having things your way in open source -- or actually in any
tech. Working implementations of ideas carry far more weight than any
argument in a mailing list.

> I am also surprised (have been for long time) by seeing Linux projects violating
> UNIX principles of software development.
> In this particular context, I am disappointed that they, apparently, lack
> oversight by management, starting with the design phase.

This does not surprise me in the least. As open source has become more
high profile it has attracted the attention of and absorbed the vanity
developers who used to write their pet apps in Pascal, QBASIC or Java on
Windows (or OS/2 if they were l33+), and now play with whatever vanity
language is popular this week from within the confines of whatever open
source project they think will make them famous(ish). This sort of
developer often can't tell you who Fred Brooks, Eric Raymond, Donald
Knuth, Ken Thompson, or anyone similar are and haven't read anything
they've written for our benefit about design or the Unixy way to solve
problems.

Chicken lipstick is in high demand, automated text processing through
intelligent use of shell scripts is down, overly complex solutions are
up, overweight software is up, the number of people who have ever
learned to configure their system starting with a minimal install (not
even touching the number of users who can't build their own system from
source) is way down, etc.

These are simply signs that the community has changed because the people
who remember what the Unixy way of doing things was has become a much
smaller percentage of the population as we've absorbed a million haX0r
d00dz from the Windows world. That expansion is not bad and the new guys
certainly mean well, but we've definitely not done enough to familiarize
newcomers with the history of Unix, who the original old guys were, what
they were thinking, and the depth of thought that went into a project
before the first line of code was written back in the day.

It doesn't help that C and Lisp are considered "too hard" to teach in
allegedly credible CS undergrad courses these days. Specific discussion
in class about what happens within a compiler and how processors
actually process things has been replaced with rather vague generalities
(those are "deep subjects that you don't need to worry about") and freed
the instructors to focus on teaching elementary problem solving in Java
and Python as if it is deep CS skill. In other words, elementary problem
solving logic and problem deconstruction theory is now masquerading as
deep computer science -- the technicals are scary so they are to be
avoided (what if my students aren't smart enough to pass?!? I might look
like a bad instructor -- best avoid pointer math and recursion this
go-around...).

Without achieving that critical mass of fundamental knowledge it is very
difficult for newcomers to the community to identify exactly why the
Unix way is better than the Windows way. Their choice to join the open
source community is therefore based largely on emotional and social
factors -- this is counter-cultural, it's against The Man/M$/Whoever, "I
think I have better security (but I don't know what that means on a deep
level)", its cheaper, etc. -- not on technical grounds. Any reason is
adequate in my view, but without a firmly set social more that guides
newcomers to familiarize themselves with the roots of Unix and do their
basic homework we cannot realistically expect Linux to remain Unixy
forever.

Just my $2.00.

-Iwao