Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

This graph is the one I'm most excited about: the lifetime of security flaws in Linux is finally starting to get shorter (and the number of fixed flaws continues to rise).

— Kees Cook

If your community is a developer of 1 and nobody wants you around, it doesn't matter how good of a coder you are. You have failed at one of the core tenants of your job. In the real world, with real stakes, real bosses, real accountability, you would be fired. And that would be the correct outcome.
The power of OSS is the fact that it's many developers working on a thing. We all witness the power of this every day, but still cling to this fantasy that it's one smart asshole that keeps the whole thing together.
We are all replaceable in OSS. That's the beauty of it. It will outlast every once of us.

— Josef Bacik

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"Core Tenants"

Posted Jul 3, 2025 6:31 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

"Core tenants of your job", huh? I didn't know even people rented jobs. Perhaps "tenets" was intended. (Snark finished.)

The power of OSS is many developers working on many things, not one thing. The power of OSS comes from _NOT_ needing to work within a structured organization. If I want to do something, I can just do it. I don't need anyone's permission; I don't need to file a TPS report; and, I don't need to write stylized testcases unless I find they actually help me debug the code. I can go _SO_ much faster when pointless red tape isn't in my way.

Now, of course, if I'm working within an existing project, with multiple people, then there's red tape, because, (1), some people think coding needs red tape and, (2), the red tape is part of the adhesive that lets multiple people understand and work in the same code base.

But that's okay, because, (1), it's always up to me whether I want to just put my fork on GitHub and not bother trying to upstream my changes -- and that is often exactly what I choose to do -- and, (2), I can always just choose to create new projects from scratch and work on them instead of trying to join someone else's band. There's more than a lifetime's worth of useful one-developer programs out there that no one has coded yet.

None of what I'm saying means people should be rude, of course. There's never any reason for that. But the Overstreet versus Torvalds drama wasn't about rudeness. Debian versus Devuan wasn't about rudeness. It's usually not about rudeness.

"Core Tenants"

Posted Jul 3, 2025 8:46 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

I think fundamentally what people often forget is that there does not have to be someone who is right and someone who is wrong in a disagreement.

Often it is people pursuing different goals or even the same goals but weighing their priorities differently that disagree the most vehemently and might need to work in separate projects. Unfortunately corporate environments are often "one size fits all" when it comes to processes and priorities so it is a good thing that people can work independently on their own projects.