Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 20, 2023 22:34 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Merging bcachefs by Wol
Parent article: Merging bcachefs

> If you use but don't hack, you are an END USER.

Yes, and I'm acting like end user, too.

> You personally, do you work on all the software you use?

No, but all the software that I'm just using is a black box to me. Modern software is just too complex to try to change it.

In theory I can get source for gcc or rust compiler or rust analyzer and change something there. In practice it's just too time consuming to contemplate.

In an era where most software was simple and had lots of bugs changing something into it made sense.

But then… “Worse Is Better” won.

As Tony Hoare once wrote: There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.

And today's software have no obvious bugs in it and as a result it's so incredibly complex that fixing remaining non-obvious bugs quickly becomes full-time job.

> They have the RIGHT to fix it, they have the SOURCE to fix it, and they have the TOOLS to fix it.

And all that doesn't matter because they don't want to fix it. Including me, for aforementioned reasons. That's why GPL is much less valuable for me today… even if I can understand people who are using it.

> Americans seem to have difficulty grasping the fact that other people value different freedoms than they do. Even Sun engineers prefering BSD! and refusing to allow other people to choose GPL!

Yup. That's the country where congressman say, literally, the following: If China behaves as aggressively as Russia, then we will deprive them of their main trading partner in the face of the EU. Europe will impose crushing sanctions. Note that no one plans to deprive US of anything and they plan to make someone else to do the work for them.

How is that any different from Sun engineer's position?