Re: [Gnu-arch-users] the way forward

[Robin Green]

Thanks for the long post, Tom. I'd first like to make a general point
and then respond to a few of the specific points you made. If you
read only a bit of this email, read the last part.

The general point: at _least_ two distro vendor startups - Canonical and
rpath - appear to be interested in supporting Gnu/linux users in the spirit
of Free Software, i.e. supporting and encouraging custom modifications.
As far as I understand it, anyway - don't quote me on that.
(At the moment, Canonical clearly has a better source control system
whereas - in my view - rpath has a better package management system.
That's by the by. I think however that if they support customers with
custom modifications, that will be a more important, fundamental
differentiator than second-order technical issues like the quality of
their package management or source control systems.)

They are doing this partly because there is a perceived gap in the market.
Want the security of a corporation maintaining your distro of choice like
with Red Hat, but with the freedom to make custom modifications? This is
one of the selling points of both companies. I wish them both the best of
luck.

So I think basically, we are _already_ starting to see bigger and better
alternatives to the kind of lock-in-happy distro vendors that you described
in your email, and the situation isn't as bleak as you make out. Those
damned capitalists are already _onto_ this idea - they're not stupid ( ;) ) -
so we need to support the enlightened companies in this route with our words
and our money, and criticise them if they start restricting freedom to tinker
- but not paint them as "evil" for _everything_ they do that's not 100%
perfect. (hint, hint.)

Also, many companies are perfectly happy to choose Microsoft's licensing model
over Linux's perceived immaturity (they value interop, and vendor bigness, over
freedom to tinker). This logically implies that Red Hat, by the same token,
could well be in business for some time to come - not because other distros
are necessarily inferior, but because some people just don't rate the freedom
to tinker. As you yourself rightly pointed out, proprietary software companies
like Microsoft are not the Great Satan. As long as people have a realistic
_choice_ to choose a distro and a support contract that allows freedom to
modify, the mere _existence_ of proprietary software and proprietary-style 
support
contracts is not such a big deal. (I know that lock-in is the point here, but,
there's an order of magnitude difference between the lock-in of the Microsoft
behemoth and the "lock-in" of certain Linux distro vendors, which is, frankly,
small potatoes. I'm far more worried about Microsoft's corporate lobbying and
ongoing monopolistic tactics than anything in your email.)

On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 06:41:00PM -0700, Thomas Lord wrote:
> The effort to lock-in customers permeates even the market for IT
> professionals.  For example, vendors such as Red Hat create credential-
> offering programs for IT professionals.   They have succeeded in
> substituting "Red Hat expert" for "unix expert"

To be fair, they're not the only ones to blame for that change. The Open
Group's boneheaded trademark licensing policy contrasts sharply with Linus'
libertarian trademark licensing policy, and POSIX never caught on as
a euphemism for Unix in the media (perhaps because Windows technically
has a "POSIX" layer, thus unfortunately rendering "POSIX OS" fairly useless
as a category).

In a very real sense, if Linux had been allowed to call itself a Unix,
the word Unix might not seem so "old hat" today. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

That's a minor issue, though. More to the point is the fact that the Unix
"platform" had been fragmented into several quite different branches long
before Linux's ascendancy. Solaris is much more different from Red Hat
that Red Hat is different from SuSE, in my opinion.

> One net effect here is that while, to ISVs, the GNU/Linux commercial
> distributions are a standards-based abstract platform, to enterprise
> customers, each GNU/Linux commercial distribution is a de facto
> proprietary platform

Not _all_ commercial distros, as I pointed out above.

> Volunteer Lock-in Objective: Market Dubious Standards

Occam's razor: the poorness of the standards might have more to do with
the fact that they need to roughly reflect existing implementations right now,
not be idealistic representations of perfect, unrealised systems.

Much can be cut away by the careful application of Occam's razor to your email,
I feel.

> Volunteer Lock-in Objective: Bloated Software Stacks and Intricate
> Dependencies

Intricate software dependencies and high SLOC count (compared to historical 
systems)
are characteristics of many large-scale systems these days, open source or not.

> Software which more or less works but needs
> frequent repair, software which thwarts migration away from the
> platform, and software for which maintenance work can not be broken down
> into independent efforts is the ideal.  In software engineering we know
> that the best way to achieve these aims is to produce systems comprised
> of many more lines of code than is actually needed, to sprinkle that
> code with platform-specific assumptions, to make each component depend
> on as many others as possible, and to make certain that the interfaces
> between components are poorly controlled and subject to frequent change.

So in other words, a bazaar-style, decentralised development model which
places high value on reuse of code, a high value on readability of code at
the expense of brevity, and a low value on backward compatibility?

Sounds good to me, for a highly under-development system - which is just
what Gnu/Linux is!

Users want backward compatibility of course and developers want to press on
ahead and refactor and improve bad interfaces - but that's why God invented
code branches and support contracts.

> The aims can be achieved by leading volunteer engineers into habits
> which are simply the negation of best software engineering practices.

So a cathedral-style, centralised development model which discourages too much
reuse of code, encourages brief, unreadable code, and is really anal about
bug-for-bug 100% backward compatibility - that is what constitutes
"best software engineering practices"?

In other words, more like the old Microsoft model?

Is this _really_ what you want to imply? Because that's the message I'm getting.

I'm playing devil's advocate here. I don't disagree that, say, OpenOffice is 
bloated.
(But I can understand the historical reasons for that particular case.)
But I do disagree that "locking down" the interfaces between components is 
always
and everywhere the right way to go. Remember, sometimes we are talking about 
version 
0.5 of a codebase being released and put into a distro. It's unrealistic to 
expect
interfaces to be just right in version 0.5 of something, or even in version 1.0.
If Red Hat had tried to get Mozilla.org to freeze their interfaces before they 
were
ready, the Mozilla people would have just laughed.

> Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Exclude Thoughtful Engineers from Executive
> Management

If you want notes like this to be read by VCs I think you'll need to make
them about 10 times shorter, and get to the meat that they'll be interested
in _immediately_. Unfortunately, that would probably preclude you from
getting your point across effectively. Catch 22.

My advice is, don't bother talking to them - lower your sights, and save your
advice for people with souls. (That's exactly the same thing as I thought
regarding your advice for governments in your previous email to the list.)

> An innovative extension of this strategy is to invest heavily in growing
> new popular maintainers "in house" by spending social and press capital
> on promoting them.   The employer receives the benefit of much volunteer
> labor as the new maintainer can muster.

Hmm, I wonder who you are thinking of. Miguel? Or more recently, Geir?

> An innovation on top of that innovation, currently being pursued by
> CollabNet, is to sell training to companies which promises to teach them
> how they, too, can can create new thought-leader maintainers.

Fascinating development. A new management consultancy fad - create willing
slaves who work for you for free, and enjoy it! Wow! ;)

I see where you're going with the "exploitation" theme, but
compared to poor labourers working in sweatshop-like conditions to produce
many of the food, clothes, furnishings and electronics we all consume, I
can't really get that worked up about it, personally. At least volunteers
have a choice - by definition.

Basically, capitalism treats people like shit whenever it can get away with it
(as we've just seen in New Orleans, with the smirking, bored-looking Bush
[corrupt capitalist par excellence] even attracting the ire of formely hard-core
supporters for his handling of the rescue operation).

So in order to _fundamentally_ change the depradations of capitalism you need
revolution, not liberal moral pleading. Liberal moral pleading can put band-aids
over some symptoms here and there (huge band aids on a human scale, sure), but
it doesn't address the disease, it merely (at best) calls our attention to it.
Sorry.

> Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Encourage Conflation of Vendor Prosperity
> with Community Success
> 
> It is helpful to promote a distorted (if not outright false) notion of a
> common enemy such as Microsoft.   As a vendor of proprietary software,
> Microsoft is no less or more offensive to the notion of software freedom
> than the GNU/Linux vendors themselves but they do stand out by virtue of
> history, size, and licensing practices.
> 
> Volunteers can be inspired to be uncritical of many GNU/Linux vendor
> practices by selling the message that the primary goal is to defeat
> Microsoft by any means necessary.

Occam's razor again:
To be fair, I think this is more driven by the simplistic good-vs-evil
message of the media when describing Linux, and the Slashdot editors choice
of stories, than vendors like Red Hat. Red Hat explicitly disclaimed wanting
to target the desktop a year or so ago (which is starkly at odds with your
hypothesis), and you regularly see comments on Slashdot making the point that
people have different goals in promoting Linux (freedom, beating MS, technical
quality) and we _don't_ all need to care about the same goals.
In fact it would be a strange world if we did.

> Volunteer Lock-in Strategy: Trash and Take Over Threatening Projects
> 
> At certain times, projects that arise outside of the business activities
> of GNU/Linux vendors may achieve a momentum and trajectory of their own
> which undermines the interests of those vendors (GCC under Kenner vs.
> Cygnus;  GNU Arch vs. Canonical).   With only moderate spending on
> falsely-friendly "forks", such projects can be reliably taken over and
> their maintainers discredited and pushed to the sidelines.

I think your personal interest here is clouding your judgement. I think
that sadly, the fork had more to do with your pig-headedness, your erratic
(to say the least) behaviour and the serious deficiencies of the tla 1.x
design than any malevolent desire from Canonical to "trash and take over".
Any one of those factors on its own could have been worked around - but
together, they would have been a deal-breaker, I'm sure.

So, their behaviour was entirely rational and in no way "evil", AFAICS.
Tom, if you want to play well with others in the software industry,
I think you'll have to learn some lessons from this. First among them:
don't vilify others for exercising the first fucking freedom that the
GPL gives you, and which you claim to be in favour of: the freedom to fork.

-- 
Robin

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