4 ms·

How do you propose that people work for free at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work? Slave labor?

sph 4y ago
How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux And regular for profit companies aren't incompatible with Linux. Canonical, Red Hat, etc. make billions from open source. Let me stress this again: the only reason the Linux desktop sucks is organizational. Not monetary, not technological. Linux would be a niche project today if Linus had been replaced by a committee or other loose organization. The Linux kernel is successful because there is a person at the top saying "No." The Linux desktop has no such thing. None of the singular desktop environment have such a thing. GNOME has no BDFL, nor does KDE. So its endless bikeshedding and churning and going nowhere.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? Right confluence of factors to a large extent. GNU needed a kernel, and BSD was mired in legal trouble. Linux was there at the right time to provide a GNU-friendly kernel made from scratch. I think the GPL was also a fortunate choice. It ensured large companies couldn't easily have a closed in-house version and had incentives to contribute to the common good.
- account42 4y ago
  > The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux I think you mean https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
  - sph 4y ago
    Right, I stand corrected. Point is, it's Linus that merges what he wants in his tree. The kernel development isn't a democratic process, not everything has to be. Everybody can fork it and be the big boss themselves, the fact that nobody and no company has succeeded in doing so is worth thinking about.
    - initramfs 4y ago
      Yeah, and the thing about forking is, it's not that it shouldn't be done, but it should be done in an organized way- too much forking and you could have many people interested in a common alternative, but not enough coordination to pull it off. https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf "What the Fork: A Study of Inefficient and Efficient Forking Practices in Social Coding" 2019
- alxlaz 4y ago
  > How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.
  - sph 4y ago
    > You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. How does that invalidate my point? GP asked why people would contribute to leader-directed open source without coercion. I just pointed out no coercion is needed. Free or paid is irrelevant.
    - alxlaz 4y ago
      No, GP asked: > How do you propose that people work *for free* at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work? (Emphasis mine) No coercion is involved, but they don't work for free, either. Free vs. paid is extremely relevant. If you were to strip out the paid contributions from the driver tree, for example, you'd be left with a handful of drivers, virtually none of which cover non-trivial devices released in the last fifteen years or so with anything near full functionality.
  - hansvm 4y ago
    > You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. Is that a meaningful distinction? I don't think the point was that the people actually writing the code aren't paid, but rather it still holds when you consider that the people paying them choose to allocate those efforts to a dictatorial organization rather than addressing their goals in some other way.

sph 4y ago

How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux And regular for profit companies aren't incompatible with Linux. Canonical, Red Hat, etc. make billions from open source. Let me stress this again: the only reason the Linux desktop sucks is organizational. Not monetary, not technological. Linux would be a niche project today if Linus had been replaced by a committee or other loose organization. The Linux kernel is successful because there is a person at the top saying "No." The Linux desktop has no such thing. None of the singular desktop environment have such a thing. GNOME has no BDFL, nor does KDE. So its endless bikeshedding and churning and going nowhere.

dale_glass 4y ago
> How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? Right confluence of factors to a large extent. GNU needed a kernel, and BSD was mired in legal trouble. Linux was there at the right time to provide a GNU-friendly kernel made from scratch. I think the GPL was also a fortunate choice. It ensured large companies couldn't easily have a closed in-house version and had incentives to contribute to the common good.
account42 4y ago
> The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux I think you mean https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
- sph 4y ago
  Right, I stand corrected. Point is, it's Linus that merges what he wants in his tree. The kernel development isn't a democratic process, not everything has to be. Everybody can fork it and be the big boss themselves, the fact that nobody and no company has succeeded in doing so is worth thinking about.
  - initramfs 4y ago
    Yeah, and the thing about forking is, it's not that it shouldn't be done, but it should be done in an organized way- too much forking and you could have many people interested in a common alternative, but not enough coordination to pull it off. https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf "What the Fork: A Study of Inefficient and Efficient Forking Practices in Social Coding" 2019
alxlaz 4y ago
> How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.
- sph 4y ago
  > You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. How does that invalidate my point? GP asked why people would contribute to leader-directed open source without coercion. I just pointed out no coercion is needed. Free or paid is irrelevant.
  - alxlaz 4y ago
    No, GP asked: > How do you propose that people work *for free* at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work? (Emphasis mine) No coercion is involved, but they don't work for free, either. Free vs. paid is extremely relevant. If you were to strip out the paid contributions from the driver tree, for example, you'd be left with a handful of drivers, virtually none of which cover non-trivial devices released in the last fifteen years or so with anything near full functionality.
- hansvm 4y ago
  > You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. Is that a meaningful distinction? I don't think the point was that the people actually writing the code aren't paid, but rather it still holds when you consider that the people paying them choose to allocate those efforts to a dictatorial organization rather than addressing their goals in some other way.