Jörg Schilling is gone
Jörg Schilling is gone
Posted Oct 13, 2021 10:55 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973)Parent article: Jörg Schilling is gone
I always wondered why he didn't just switch back to the GPL, instead of insisting that he didn't need to, and that everyone else in the world was wrong. He never managed to convince anyone, and in effect completely sabotaged his own project. Just the tiniest bit of flex on his part, and distros would have happily included his software again.
From what he himself said (in the comments on the earlier linked LWN article), the switch to the CDDL was because someone was criticizing him in a way he didn't like. For all practical purposes, he destroyed his entire project because of spite about one person. He was happy to release under GPL before that, but suddenly it was CDDL only, and he would not come down off that hill, ever, no matter what.
I used cdrecord a lot back in the 2000s, and I'd have been happy to keep using it. But he actively made sure I couldn't, just so he didn't have to change his mind or his position in any way whatsoever.
I guess I mostly feel sad about it. He shut himself away from the entire community, when just the slightest bit of self-awareness on his part would have allowed his skill and participation to be meaningful.
I'm sorry he's gone. I wish I'd remembered that whole kerfuffle and tried to talk to him about it. I doubt it would have helped, but I wish I'd made the effort.
Posted Oct 14, 2021 10:22 UTC (Thu)
by pgeorgi (guest, #74838)
[Link] (3 responses)
That might be because the CDDL only started to exist in 2005. Once something is available that you consider strictly superior, why go back?
> just the slightest bit of self-awareness on his part would have allowed his skill and participation to be meaningful
Meaningful to you, who wanted to use Jörg's software in a pre-packaged way. His software wasn't any less available to him, or to anybody who bothered to download a tarballs and compile themselves.
The GPL/CDDL thing is a distraction and merely served as catalyst: people had been unhappy with cdrecord's UI for a while at that point and moving from SCSI-style addressing to /dev/* style address was about the first thing wodim did. At that point the rift was unsurmountable, no matter the license.
Posted Oct 14, 2021 20:06 UTC (Thu)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link] (2 responses)
Because the rest of the community you supposedly want to be a part of doesn't agree that it's better, and definitely agrees that it's incompatible with their chosen license? Because adopting that license means that you're forever shut out of every distro, which you then complain about for the rest of your life? He obviously wanted to be a part of the community, or he wouldn't have been complaining, but wasn't willing to take even the tiniest step to actually make that happen, instead resorting to vague legal threats.
>Meaningful to you, who wanted to use Jörg's software in a pre-packaged way. His software wasn't any less available to him, or to anybody who bothered to download a tarballs and compile themselves.
And I'm sure he and his tens of users were very happy. But obviously not happy enough, or he wouldn't have been bitching to all and sundry about his software not being included in distros anymore.
>At that point the rift was unsurmountable, no matter the license.
Only for an entirely ridiculous person that was unable to appreciate the validity of the viewpoints of other people. The SCSI syntax he insisted on wasn't even relevant anymore. It offered no actual benefit, and just made things hard.
SCSI CDROMs were already very rare, even when he was arguing about it, and they certainly don't exist in any meaningful way now. Yet, he still insisted on a labeling model based on SCSI chains. It was ridiculous on its face, and you're being ridiculous to support it now and even pretend that it was any actual barrier to inclusion.
Posted Oct 14, 2021 20:14 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link] (1 responses)
I wonder how many people complain about Jorg while praising rms for the same mindset.
Posted Oct 14, 2021 21:05 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
RMS and FSF has a long history of resolving licensing issues like GPL violations in private and in good faith. I am not seeing the same mindset at play here.
Posted Oct 16, 2021 14:10 UTC (Sat)
by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
[Link] (1 responses)
We has lost a skilled hacker.
Posted Oct 16, 2021 15:01 UTC (Sat)
by malor (guest, #2973)
[Link]
Downstream versions might suppress some of his verbosity about what he thought were bad choices, but I don't remember hearing about them changing the code itself. I believe he was pissed off about all those "warning" messages being removed, the ones telling the user that the Linux kernel was making bad choices. Criticizing people's systems is not what utility programs are supposed to be doing. Why should anyone have to sit through a screed telling them that Linux sucked every time they burned a CD? It's the same approximate behavior as RMS always interjecting himself into conversations whenever he saw people use the word "Linux" in a way he didn't like. Both behaviors were extremely impolite.
Instead, by switching to the CDDL, he "fixed" the problem by making sure nobody else distributed his code at all. If expressing his opinion was that important to him, well, he hit on a solution that stopped people suppressing those weird messages, but it was pretty clear that he was unhappy with the overall outcome.
>We has lost a skilled hacker.
I'm not sure he was really a part of 'we', in more than the general sense of being a human being who was skilled at computer programming. From what I can see, he shut himself out of the GPL community pretty much completely. So we in the sense of "all of humanity" are poorer for his loss, but we in the sense of "the GPL community" aren't really impacted, because AFAICT he wasn't a member anymore.
It was more important to him to say, over and over and over again, to hundreds of thousands of users, that Linux sucked.
Jörg Schilling is gone
>Once something is available that you consider strictly superior, why go back?
Jörg Schilling is gone
Jörg Schilling is gone
Jörg Schilling is gone
Jörg Schilling is gone
He was far from being alone, the whole perl license (Artistic) was written for a similar purpose, albeit more diplomatically.
He was also not the only one to find Linux amateurish compared to Solaris circa 2005.
Jörg Schilling is gone