3 ms·

> they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation I've been dreading the day OSS projects became as s

by flukus 9y ago

> they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation I've been dreading the day OSS projects became as soulless and boring as corporate ones. If we can't have jokes in technical documentation then it seems that day has come. Next the FOSS HR department will be asking them to rename the abort function.

sitepodmatt 9y ago
The day went and passed a few years ago. SJW asswipes campaigned to have the phrased blacklist removed from projects and changed to allow list, also 'slave database' too because it could offend some dead ancestor that was a slave? These little cry babies are ruining tech, another example MS just had a tech conference with a cuddle farm, they imported animals so people could feed and cuddle them in the event any of the talks accidentally included trigger words. Don't forget crockfordgate - the javascript legend (the good parts book) who described brackets as dogballs and was mercilyless hunted by SJWs including being removed from jsconf. Sad times.
geofft 9y ago
There's certainly something lost here, I won't deny that. But glibc, and huge other parts of the FOSS ecosystem, has been a corporate project for years. Maintenance comes from stodgy companies like Red Hat who install glibc on the sort of extremely stodgy companies who are Red Hat customers. And for those of us whose day jobs involve using glibc and reading its documentation, we deserve the benefits of free software as much as everyone else. If it is an ethical imperative (as RMS says!) for all software to be free and for proprietary software to die, it follows that the primary battleground is the servers of soulless, boring corporations. Your hobbyist laptop is important, too, because everyone deserves free software. But if free software weren't around, you would have installed a pirated copy of Windows with a keygen with some hentai as its background image and enjoyed the non-HR-compliance of the process, and Microsoft would have been quite okay with it because you would be locked into their proprietary software. If free software is an ethical imperative - or even if it's not, but even if open source is simply a better way to develop software - then everyone who wants a job in software engineering and is qualified for it should be able to have a job in writing and maintaining FOSS. Human society has determined that if we want everyone to participate in an activity, things work better if everyone agrees to uphold a few norms. They don't have to be the same norms as boring corporations uphold (and you can quite easily argue that the norms of boring corporations aren't that good, actually, at making sure everyone is welcome to participate on equal terms). But the fact that we open our shared infrastructural work to accountability and public judgment is sort of how civilization works. Hobbyist projects are still as possible as ever. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get inappropriate jokes in the technical documentation for Solaris libc, or into MSDN, or whatever, but you could work on some upstart free software project with your friends and do whatever you want. You can still do that. If you want to be the young, upstart libc with some off-color political jokes that's being an alternative to the boring corporate libc, more power to you. Not everyone will participate, but that's what you want. Meanwhile, the libc whose goal in life was to displace the corporate libcs has won - and needs to step into its role.
__s 9y ago
You see it too in people going around telling people to stop saying master/slave for clusters https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185 https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185
keiyakins 9y ago
I think you're looking at the wrong axis. This isn't an order-vs-chaos question, it's one of constructive vs destructive. This particular joke makes the manual worse, not better, at being a manual. Cut it and move on, and always keep an eye out for places it could be improved, whether that be through better descriptive prose or a good, understanding-building joke.

by flukus 9y ago

sitepodmatt 9y ago

The day went and passed a few years ago. SJW asswipes campaigned to have the phrased blacklist removed from projects and changed to allow list, also 'slave database' too because it could offend some dead ancestor that was a slave? These little cry babies are ruining tech, another example MS just had a tech conference with a cuddle farm, they imported animals so people could feed and cuddle them in the event any of the talks accidentally included trigger words. Don't forget crockfordgate - the javascript legend (the good parts book) who described brackets as dogballs and was mercilyless hunted by SJWs including being removed from jsconf. Sad times.

geofft 9y ago

There's certainly something lost here, I won't deny that. But glibc, and huge other parts of the FOSS ecosystem, has been a corporate project for years. Maintenance comes from stodgy companies like Red Hat who install glibc on the sort of extremely stodgy companies who are Red Hat customers. And for those of us whose day jobs involve using glibc and reading its documentation, we deserve the benefits of free software as much as everyone else. If it is an ethical imperative (as RMS says!) for all software to be free and for proprietary software to die, it follows that the primary battleground is the servers of soulless, boring corporations. Your hobbyist laptop is important, too, because everyone deserves free software. But if free software weren't around, you would have installed a pirated copy of Windows with a keygen with some hentai as its background image and enjoyed the non-HR-compliance of the process, and Microsoft would have been quite okay with it because you would be locked into their proprietary software. If free software is an ethical imperative - or even if it's not, but even if open source is simply a better way to develop software - then everyone who wants a job in software engineering and is qualified for it should be able to have a job in writing and maintaining FOSS. Human society has determined that if we want everyone to participate in an activity, things work better if everyone agrees to uphold a few norms. They don't have to be the same norms as boring corporations uphold (and you can quite easily argue that the norms of boring corporations aren't that good, actually, at making sure everyone is welcome to participate on equal terms). But the fact that we open our shared infrastructural work to accountability and public judgment is sort of how civilization works. Hobbyist projects are still as possible as ever. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get inappropriate jokes in the technical documentation for Solaris libc, or into MSDN, or whatever, but you could work on some upstart free software project with your friends and do whatever you want. You can still do that. If you want to be the young, upstart libc with some off-color political jokes that's being an alternative to the boring corporate libc, more power to you. Not everyone will participate, but that's what you want. Meanwhile, the libc whose goal in life was to displace the corporate libcs has won - and needs to step into its role.

__s 9y ago

You see it too in people going around telling people to stop saying master/slave for clusters https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185 https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

keiyakins 9y ago

I think you're looking at the wrong axis. This isn't an order-vs-chaos question, it's one of constructive vs destructive. This particular joke makes the manual worse, not better, at being a manual. Cut it and move on, and always keep an eye out for places it could be improved, whether that be through better descriptive prose or a good, understanding-building joke.