Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

> You can't expect the community to welcome you when you blindly follow your ideas and you can't even produce anything in quality.

So you'd rather destroy a promising program just because you weren't asked about your opinion? Doesn't this effectively mean that we stopped caring about open source, the only thing that actually matters now is the perception of broad community support? It doesn't seem to be about users anymore either, it's all about the approval of gatekeepers now.

It used to be anyone, a guy in a garage, or even a huge company, could make something, share the source code, and we'd be happy for their contribution. Now that's apparently shifted to "don't start anything new, just fall in line with the existing stuff". What company or individual would want to publish anything new in this kind of environment?

View on HN

> So you'd rather destroy a promising program just because you weren't asked about your opinion?

Canonical made blunt claims about deficiencies in Wayland which did not exist, they even made claims that others like KDE would happily adopt Mir but those did not know about their luck and did not plan to do this. Oh and add some CLA requirement for contributions to the mix. This understandably provoked a very harsh response from the affected projects.

> What company or individual would want to publish anything new in this kind of environment?

Those who don't insult other people and their work I would say. Then everybody will either be happy about your contribution or at least don't care if your contribution is practically unusable because it's incompatible with everything.

People get paid to develop Mir. They're a limited resource in open source - paid developers are the ones who can drive projects, fix tricky bugs and take on big features. They also wind up being gatekeepers to contributions.

At the time Mir was announced what I heard and what a lot of others heard was "Ubuntu's paid developer resources with relevant expertise are being diverted from Wayland".

Replacing X is sorely needed in the Linux desktop space, and it's a huge project. So big that unless it's frightfully mismanaged then it's extremely dubious what a split in development effort is going to accomplish. And what did it accomplish? I have absolutely no idea what Mir actually shipped that was usable. I have no idea what they were doing substantially differently and why that was good (something about convergence by using bionic so it ran on Android too I think?) And I do remember Canonical at the time arguing they would beat Wayland to something usable... But here we are, I'm still using X, my video payback still tears, and I can't for the life of me think how the Linux desktop has benefited.

I suppose Cinnamon got created and I now run that on top of others vanilla Ubuntu?

Wayland is actually fairly usable at this point, though some programs are buggy. With aliases to run problematic programs in X, it'd probably work quite well.

Nobody is destroying anything. But people can refuse to adopt or support your project/program

> Nobody is destroying anything. But people can refuse to adopt or support your project/program

There is a difference between ignoring a piece of software you don't like and actively campaigning against it.

It's not like Mir wasn't campaigning actively against Wayland.

No project exist in a vacuum. I like it that way.

Thats what they said about systemd but careful application of product tying strategies rammed that thru.

The same way you can build anything you want on your own, I also can say it's crap and I don't want it. And that's fine, you don't need my permission and I don't need to be your public target.

But it's a bit odd that once you realize that you can't build your own vision without asking for my opinion, you start throwing a tantrum saying I'm a negativist and that I don't embrace the community spirit.

No one forced Mark to shut down the project, he made the decision on his own.

Also, community and open source is all about contributions and public discussions, not _just_ code dumps.

> Also, community and open source is all about contributions and public discussions, not _just_ code dumps.

Personally, I think software should be the central point, not populism. Ideally, an open source project would surround itself with a support community of people who actually use the software instead of wasting so much time fighting.

If I build something that 10 people like, I might not care that 3 billion people choose to ignore it. But I would probably care a great deal if 5 people spend a lot of effort and air time campaigning against it.

> No one forced Mark to shut down the project, he made the decision on his own.

I'm disappointed in that as well, in case that wasn't clear. But as a vocal critic you also don't get to wash your hands completely if something you hate goes down the drain.

> The same way you can build anything you want on your own, I also can say it's crap and I don't want it.

Sure, I just don't like how much enthusiastic assent you can get out of the implication that the main reason for your dislike is simply that I built something on my own.

There's a difference between "destroying" (active) and "not supporting" (passive). If you want to garner support, you need to be open, communicative, and, yes, elicit opinions.

You know, being "validated" opens access to a lot of opportunities and most underdogs want just that. Open source is a fancy way to refer to unpaid work nowadays, can't see any revolution here, all being marketable if optimised for production.

> Doesn't this effectively mean that we stopped caring about open source, the only thing that actually matters now is the perception of broad community support?

Oh it's been that for... I dunno, 15 years now? Maybe more to be honest. It's just got worse recently.

Not that the other side doesn't exist too of course, but acceptance is hard - even for better ideas - if the community doesn't buy in.

It's all about freedom.

As long as you do freedom the right way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com