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If we recognize that the US government is corrupt, which I believe is a pretty universal sentiment among Americans, why aren't there any substantial anti-corrup

by r14c 3y ago

If we recognize that the US government is corrupt, which I believe is a pretty universal sentiment among Americans, why aren't there any substantial anti-corruption movements?

chrisknyfe 3y ago
The anti-corruption movements on the right get co-opted by fascists. The anti-corruption movements on the left get bombed by the police and sniped by the FBI.
mike_hearn 3y ago
There is, that's libertarianism. People don't think of it as an anti-corruption movement because their solution to corruption is to have less government rather than have more government employees fighting corruption, but it's the same end goal. The problem here though isn't lack of money. Linux has lots of money. Adding more money from governments won't change anything. The article says there are hundreds of people paid to hack on the kernel. The problem is that the kernel development culture (sorry, it has to be said) is still a 90s hacker culture, and the people who get employed to work on it are hackers. Hackers like writing code, and dislike writing documentation or unit tests or fiddling with CI systems. The fact the kernel is written in C doesn't help (makes common testing techniques like dependency injection more painful). The idea that it's companies to blame for lack of docs is rooted in this culture. The people who understand what the docs should say are the ones writing the code to begin with. How will these technical writers know what to write, exactly? Usually in a company they'll do that by interviewing the people with the knowledge, who are mandated to attend the interviews by their managers. In the open source context you can't do that so this boils down to "please hire reverse engineers at vast expense to work out things I already know but can't be bothered communicating" which is a terrible proposition. Who exactly are these unicorn reverse engineers who are skilled enough to work out kernel code but who want to spend all day writing docs? Where will you find them? Likewise the lack of testing infrastructure. The idea that those terrible freeloading corporations just aren't helping is wrong - they have tried repeatedly and the kernel community has ignored them. https://kselftest.wiki.kernel.org/ https://kselftest.wiki.kernel.org/ "Kselftest is run everyday on several Linux kernel trees on the 0-Day and Linaro Test Farm and other Linux kernel integration test rings." https://foundation.kernelci.org/blog/ https://foundation.kernelci.org/blog/ "The first KernelCI test development and coverage hackfest took place from 27th May to 4th June 2021. For a total of seven days, developers from the KernelCI team, Google, and Collabora worked to improve many different aspects of KernelCI testing capabilities." If Linus and his subsystem maintainers decided to stop merging patches until they collectively had a good CI setup, money and staff would appear immediately. They have before, even when there was no commitment to do that. But in the early 90s people didn't really write unit tests or run CI systems, and so nor does the kernel today.
rndmize 3y ago
Perhaps the sentiment is just that, built out over decades of anti-government media, and doesn't accurately reflect reality.
- r14c 3y ago
  There is ample evidence for corruption in American politics.
WalterBright 3y ago
Corruption is only part of it. The rest is misaligned incentives. There's no incentive to allocate the money efficiently or effectively.
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
Because the government, by and large, isn't corrupt. There are many corrupt individuals in government, but that's not the same thing. When it's common practice to slip the town clerk a $50 to get your deck permit pulled in less than a month, then we can start to conclude that maybe government's corrupt.
- pdonis 3y ago
  Your definition of corruption is too narrow. The government is systemically corrupt because it is not doing what we the people authorized it to do. It is not protecting everyone's basic rights equally. It is favoring particular special interests (which include politicians themselves--Congress has single digit approval ratings but incumbent reelection rates in the nineties). This kind of corruption does not involve obvious violations of the letter of the law like overt bribery. But it's still corruption--and indeed it's worse than simple violations like bribery because it involves the entire system, using a process that was intended to do one thing to actually do other things that go against that one thing.

by r14c 3y ago

If we recognize that the US government is corrupt, which I believe is a pretty universal sentiment among Americans, why aren't there any substantial anti-corruption movements?

chrisknyfe 3y ago

The anti-corruption movements on the right get co-opted by fascists. The anti-corruption movements on the left get bombed by the police and sniped by the FBI.

mike_hearn 3y ago

There is, that's libertarianism. People don't think of it as an anti-corruption movement because their solution to corruption is to have less government rather than have more government employees fighting corruption, but it's the same end goal. The problem here though isn't lack of money. Linux has lots of money. Adding more money from governments won't change anything. The article says there are hundreds of people paid to hack on the kernel. The problem is that the kernel development culture (sorry, it has to be said) is still a 90s hacker culture, and the people who get employed to work on it are hackers. Hackers like writing code, and dislike writing documentation or unit tests or fiddling with CI systems. The fact the kernel is written in C doesn't help (makes common testing techniques like dependency injection more painful). The idea that it's companies to blame for lack of docs is rooted in this culture. The people who understand what the docs should say are the ones writing the code to begin with. How will these technical writers know what to write, exactly? Usually in a company they'll do that by interviewing the people with the knowledge, who are mandated to attend the interviews by their managers. In the open source context you can't do that so this boils down to "please hire reverse engineers at vast expense to work out things I already know but can't be bothered communicating" which is a terrible proposition. Who exactly are these unicorn reverse engineers who are skilled enough to work out kernel code but who want to spend all day writing docs? Where will you find them? Likewise the lack of testing infrastructure. The idea that those terrible freeloading corporations just aren't helping is wrong - they have tried repeatedly and the kernel community has ignored them. https://kselftest.wiki.kernel.org/ https://kselftest.wiki.kernel.org/ "Kselftest is run everyday on several Linux kernel trees on the 0-Day and Linaro Test Farm and other Linux kernel integration test rings." https://foundation.kernelci.org/blog/ https://foundation.kernelci.org/blog/ "The first KernelCI test development and coverage hackfest took place from 27th May to 4th June 2021. For a total of seven days, developers from the KernelCI team, Google, and Collabora worked to improve many different aspects of KernelCI testing capabilities." If Linus and his subsystem maintainers decided to stop merging patches until they collectively had a good CI setup, money and staff would appear immediately. They have before, even when there was no commitment to do that. But in the early 90s people didn't really write unit tests or run CI systems, and so nor does the kernel today.

rndmize 3y ago

Perhaps the sentiment is just that, built out over decades of anti-government media, and doesn't accurately reflect reality.

r14c 3y ago
There is ample evidence for corruption in American politics.

WalterBright 3y ago

Corruption is only part of it. The rest is misaligned incentives. There's no incentive to allocate the money efficiently or effectively.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago

Because the government, by and large, isn't corrupt. There are many corrupt individuals in government, but that's not the same thing. When it's common practice to slip the town clerk a $50 to get your deck permit pulled in less than a month, then we can start to conclude that maybe government's corrupt.

pdonis 3y ago
Your definition of corruption is too narrow. The government is systemically corrupt because it is not doing what we the people authorized it to do. It is not protecting everyone's basic rights equally. It is favoring particular special interests (which include politicians themselves--Congress has single digit approval ratings but incumbent reelection rates in the nineties). This kind of corruption does not involve obvious violations of the letter of the law like overt bribery. But it's still corruption--and indeed it's worse than simple violations like bribery because it involves the entire system, using a process that was intended to do one thing to actually do other things that go against that one thing.