LWN: Comments on "Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system"

https://v5.chriskrycho.com/essays/jj-init/

marcH — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 01:34:25 +0000

As often, I find 5 minutes later that this introduction (and others) was already referenced at

https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/blob/main/README.md#rela...

This after reading about JJ for hours...

https://v5.chriskrycho.com/essays/jj-init/

marcH — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 01:31:06 +0000

In case anyone is reading this comments section 6 months (or more) later, here's an excellent Jujutsu introduction I found by chance:

https://v5.chriskrycho.com/essays/jj-init/

(hosted on https://github.com/chriskrycho/v5.chriskrycho.com)

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

marcH — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 22:17:15 +0000

> It's one thing to say that you wouldn't contribute to Jujutsu till CLA would be removed. It's weird that few clicks on the web site are that awful that you would refuse to contribute because of them, but whatever. There are legal consequences and you may want to avoid them

> It's entirely different thing to demand that Google should stop using CLA or else you wouldn't even use that product.

No, for many people it is not "an entirely different thing". For many people, using free software and sending patches upstream is the same thing. Dropping that boundary is basically the main point of free software.

Even if they don't happen to actually send patches upstream (because the software is good enough for them), they want to make sure anyone else can easily for obvious "good maintenance" reasons.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

mathstuf — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:32:37 +0000

I think it's that Magit can display them differently, but under the hood Magit tries to paper over the difference (internally) by making actual commits for the stage behind the scenes.

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

geert — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:09:04 +0000

> (Also note: the earliest version of KDE's HTML rendering engine was part of kfm (KDE File Manager). I'm not sure what its exact release date was… maybe July 1998 (KDE 1.0) or March 1999 (KDE 1.1)?

Probably the former, as it was present in the first version of KDE I tried, which must have been just before or at the 1.0 release.
Typing a full URL in the file manager's path dialog box and seeing the rendered web page was very cool, and impressed quite a few of my friends!

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

gioele — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 15:02:24 +0000

> > All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years
>
> Wow. Where may I find your study? How have you picked the projects, where is the list, what was the outcomes you recorded?

There are some numbers in:

Jonas Gamalielsson and Björn Lundell. 2017. On licensing and other conditions for contributing to widely used open source projects: an exploratory analysis. In Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym '17). ACM.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3125433.3125456

Table 8 seems to hint at the fact that projects with CLAs and similar contributor agreements tend to be more successful (according to BlackDuck's metric =~ being used) than projects without CLA. Correlation is not causation. This success could be due to having an entity (business, foundation) paying the programmers in charge of the project, rather than due to the CLA itself.

That study did not investigate the effect of CLAs on the number and variety of contributors to a project. So perhaps projects with CLAs are widely used, but not frequently contributed to (and the minute the sponsor goes away the project is dead, regardless of its widespread usage). But asserting that would require another study.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

khim — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 20:32:58 +0000

> All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years

Wow. Where may I find your study? How have you picked the projects, where is the list, what was the outcomes you recorded?

> I'd say that there is a high enough correlation between failure and the presence of a corporate CLA for me to assume that any new project encumbered by such a thing is not even worth looking at

So you are not using C or C++, docker or kubernetes, don't use smartphones and so on?

I suspect that you apply your avoidance of CLAs very selectively to reach that conclusion.

> I am however disappointed that nobody at Google seems to have noticed that CLAs are the kiss of death.

Because from Google side it's most definitely not “kiss of death” at all. Many projects that require CLAs are leaders in the appropriate areas and even if you count some projects which currently don't require CLAs (like gcc or LibreOffice) they asked for CLAs for years.

All Google-initiated projects require CLAs (be it Angular, Go or TensorFlow, whatever) and the same is true for the projects initiated in most other corporations, too. And they lose that requirement (if that ever happens) only when corporations involved ditch them or fork is happening.

It would be interesting to see truly unbiased study which picks projects without looking on CLA and then looks on their fate over the years, but since both you and Google are looking for vindication of their stance (Google would definitely consider CLAs of Android an important part of its success while you would probably show us how Upstart was replaced with SystemD)… and given the fact that there are so very few which failed or succeeded because of CLA… extending your conclusions on the whole set of software available is just silly.

Especially because “correlation does not imply causation”: you may say that Angular is no longer the most popular framework because CLA, but then why is it replaced with CLA-encumbered React, instead?

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

Wol — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 08:59:31 +0000

I sort of had one of those (it's very rare) last night.

"Something has messed up in our team, and tomorrow will break if we don't put it right".

Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to work, and there is a STRONG management recognition that our practices are broken. As far as I can tell, this particular incident was a bugfix that seemed to work, but then made matters worse. So we just reverted it.

But when a large amount of your work is "we just need tomorrow to happen!", then the odd thing like this does come along :-) I'm desperately trying to reduce technical debt, but when we have a huge database implemented in Excel VBA, there are limits ...

Chers,
Wol

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

kleptog — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 23:09:21 +0000

Just a small addition to your comprehensive response.

The real deal about the Employee participation in Germany is the workers council, which has a lot more power (They have co-decision or veto rights on things like including, but not limited to: work time, measues controlling workers, worker protection, (Paid) time off rates, firing of employees...)

They're actually called Works Councils in english and exist in many European countries, though they are the strongest in Germany. There's even a Works Council Directive. CxOs in English speaking countries have a hard time distinguishing them from unions but they have distinct roles. The Works Council represents the workers in the business and the goal is to improve the running of the business whereas unions are more focussed on the workers. From personal experience being on a Works Council having to decide whether to approve the firing of a significant number of colleagues to save the business is no fun at all. And that's just in the Netherlands where they're not as strong.

99% of the benefit of a Works Council is the mere fact that management actually has to motivate their decisions and it's surprising how many CxO-level decisions have no more motivation and analysis behind them than fits on a back of a postage stamp. Getting more than a slide-deck the first time round is rare. Once management can actually articulate what they want, the proposal is almost always a good idea.

As an aside, people seem to confuse the terms liability and responsibility with respect to the CRA. When it comes to fixing bugs in Apache, of course the Apache Core Team is responsible. No else has commit rights, so no-one else can fix them in the Apache source. That's different from the responsibility of a manufacturer to deploy any fixes. And completely different from liability which arises from the breaking of specific promises. The CRA is not about that your product in 100%-bug free. That's not possible, just like 100% error free hardware products don't exist. What matters is the process behind it: preventing, finding, reporting, fixing (security) bugs and deploying those fixes. All of which have had well known "best practices" for years, we just don't do them.

work turns into a never-ending barrage of "oops, it's 5:30 PM, but this problem we discovered at the last minute, and you must fix it TONIGHT, and stay up all night long working on it if necessary" demands from bosses!

I'm so glad I've never worked in a place like that. I can't be held to deadlines that I did not agree to. If I gave a deadline and got it wrong, that's on me. But more often it's: that sound you're hearing? That's the sound of your deadline flying past. I honestly don't understand what motivates managers to give deadlines without asking the people who have to do the work if they're even feasible.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

madscientist — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:44:15 +0000

This is probably too off-topic to continue much further.

I don't know what keys/commands you are using to get the behavior you see, but I'm using bog-standard Magit with all the basic settings and very little customization. The key I use to unstage a hunk is "u". If the cursor is on a hunk that's been staged, then the hunk is moved back to "unstaged changes" by pressing that key. If the cursor is on a hunk in a commit (I view the hunks in the commits by selecting a commit in my "Recent Commits" list then pressing ENTER to see its changes) then I get the behavior I described previously.

Perhaps you are entering some other "commit editing mode" in Magit, that I'm not using. It sounds cool! But in any case there is a clear difference in the UI behavior between staged hunks and hunks in commits.

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

rqosa — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:00:22 +0000

> when RMS wrote his essay

(Note: that link goes to Eric Raymond's 'Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source"' essay from 1998, not to anything that RMS wrote. Did you mean to write "ESR" there instead of "RMS"?)

> That happened later when free software zealots rejected the peace offering.

As of right now, there are very few people anymore who still believe that "separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”" ever existed.

The hard-binary distinction to which you're referring was more-or-less an illusion, not a real state of affairs. And from 1999 onwards, there have been an ever-increasing amount of hobbyist developers posting their work on forge sites, and this trend accelerated rapidly in the next decade when GitHub and Gitorious appeared on the scene. Collectively, these hobbyist developers definitely do not fall into separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”, and that's the way it's been ever since SourceForge debuted.

Now I'll pose this question: what, exactly, motivates those hobbyist developers to post their work on forge sites? Here's one major reason why they do that (which I already mentioned once): in order to publicly showcase their own programming work, so that people from their own potential future employer(s) can read & evaluate said programming work as part of the job-application process.

If regulators were to regulate these forge sites (Codeberg, SourceHut, invent.kde.org, etc.) out of existence, then that would have the effect of economically harming tech workers, by making it next to impossible for tech workers to showcase any fully-functioning software they've written themselves on their CVs, and thereby benefitting the employers at the expense of the workers.

> most browsers these days tack their ancestry not to Netscape source release, but to work of KDE guys who were, very much, an open source group

The historical background of KDE isn't very important in the context of the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act. Here's what really matters currently: KDE e.V. and Codeberg e.V. are both nonprofit orgs, neither of which have anywhere near as much financial resources as a giant corporation like Google. If the CRA were to cause KDE or Codeberg (or individual developers hosting their own software there) to be fined the same large amount of money for a security vulnerability in some software hosted on their GitLab/ForgeJo instances (invent.kde.org and codeberg.org, respectively) as Google would be fined for shipping a security vulnerability on tens of millions of Google Pixel handsets, that likely would ultimately cause this to happen: no hobbyist-developed software will be allowed to be hosted anywhere on the Web anymore, because all of the "forge" sites would have either been fined/sued into oblivion.

And if the CRA (or other similar legislation) is being lobbied for by Google thmselves or other similar giant companies, then that's a textbook example of regulatory capture! (However, I don't believe that's actually what's going on now w.r.t. the CRA itself — more details about this below…)

Alternately: regulation might instead cause forge sites to end up being "locked down" to the point where they host nothing but Git repos belonging to big corporations rather than hobbyists, along with requiring the companies hosting their software on the forge sites to sign contracts in which the company agrees to accept all legal liability for bugs in their own software so that the forge site itself isn't held liable for any bugs on software hosted there. That would have the same effect, though, of forcing hobbyist-developed software off of forge sites.

As for the historical background of KDE, though: your own timeline of events contradicts the statement that they "were, very much, an open source group". KDE Beta 1 was released in October 1997. That was before the point in time when (according to what you said) "free software zealots rejected the peace offering" (note: RMS wrote that essay in 1998, according to the copyright notice at the end of that webpage), and consequently before the point in time when (again, according to what you said) "separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”" sprung into existence.

(Also note: the earliest version of KDE's HTML rendering engine was part of kfm (KDE File Manager). I'm not sure what its exact release date was… maybe July 1998 (KDE 1.0) or March 1999 (KDE 1.1)? Though, as far as I'm concerned, that makes no difference as to which one of your so-called "camps" was the one to which the original group of "KDE guys" belonged… because, once again, any such hard-binary distinction between "camps" was really just an illusion.)

> as evidenced by the fact that free software zealots rejected their work and started an alternate project instead

Now you're calling Miguel de Icaza a "free software zealot"? If you really believe he was a "zealot", then here's a little something about the GNOME's early-ish days that you might have overlooked:

In the early 2000s, Nicholas Petreley occasionally wrote about Miguel de Icaza in his weekly editorials in Infoworld (an influential IT trade-press magazine, where Petreley was basically "the Linux and Java advocate guy" on their editorial board), and had nothing nice to say about him. Why? Because de Icaza is a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft fan who made his own clean-room reimplementation of .NET and C# — that is, the Mono project — who also wanted Mono to become the main platform API for GNOME app developers to target, despite the fact that other people (including Nicholas Petreley, plus some developers of GNOME itself, plus some GNOME app developers) raised concerns that Microsoft might sabotage Mono — and, by extension, also sabotage GNOME and Linux as a whole — by using their patent portfolio to sue users of Mono or of any other clean-room reimplementation of .NET.

(Those worries about Microsoft and their patents are probably among the various causes that led to the creation of Vala.)

According to his Wikipedia article: de Icaza would later go on to work for Microsoft, even winning a Microsoft MVP award in 2010. (It also says that he had a job interview at Microsoft as long ago as 1997, but they couldn't hire him at that time due to legal restrictions.) That sure doesn't sound like someone who, even if we're only considering the 1997-through-2001 timeframe (note: 2001 was when Mono began), qualified as being a "Free Software zealot".

(Side note: if it weren't for Nicholas Petreley's weekly editorials, along with his XOOPS-powered (and at other times WordPress-powered) news/forum website — VarLinux.org, which, sadly, no longer exists — I might not have ever found my way to LWN.net in the first place.)

Also, keep in mind the fact that GTK+ and GNOME's core API libraries were LGPL-ed from the very beginning. By contrast, the zero-cost/gratis variant of Qt went through a series of license-changes throughout the years: at first it was under the "Free Qt license" (non-FOSS), then the "QPL" (FOSS but GPL-incompatible), then the plain GPL, until at long last, in 2009 (version 4.5) changing to the LGPL. For that reason, prior to 2009, developers of proprietary-commercial Qt needed to pay Trolltech (or their successors-in-interest) fees for commercial Qt licenses. What's more: the native Windows variant of Qt wasn't for available for zero-cost at all until 2005 (version 4.0), and (similarly) the native Mac OS X variant of Qt wasn't available for zero-cost at all until 2003 (version 3.2). I suspect that the higher-ups at Red Hat took note of all those things, and decided to favor GTK+ and GNOME (over Qt and KDE) and even fund the development of GTK+/GNOME, so that 3rd-party proprietary app developers wouldn't be required to pay licensing fees to Trolltech.

So, no, I don't believe it's correct to characterize GNOME devs as being anti-corporate "Free Software zealots" in contrast to KDE devs who (supposedly) are a pro-corporate "open source group". That's not the way things were back in 1997/1998, and it's still not the way things are.

> And no, IT industry is not reverting to how it was run in the mi-'90s.

I said "a few years before" the mid-'90s, i.e. the era when Novell NetWare and (later) Windows NT ruled the roost in corporate America's datacenters (and in U.S. local/state-level governments's datacenters, too). To pick a specific point in time for this, I'll say 1990, i.e. the year when Windows 3.0 was released. Or, for a larger timespan, let's say approximately 1986 (when NetWare version 2 was released) up until 1995 (when Red Hat Linux version 1 was released).

> Government control would be much more strict […]

If the government in question were to put Codeberg — and/or programming work by individual developers being showcased there — equally strictly as it's going to treat the current "Big Five" tech companies, then that kind of government control would in practice amount to regulatory capture by the "Big Five"!

However, judging by LWN's recent article about the Cyber Resilience Act and especially the comments posted there by people who (judging purely by what they wrote in those comments) live in Europe/UK and consequently understand how current Euro/British vendor-liability law works, I'm not worried that the CRA is going to do any serious harm to hobbyist-oriented forge sites (like Codeberg) or to hobbyist-developed Git repos hosted on them. That's because the intended primary target of the CRA appears to be consumer-electronics manufacturers/vendors, particularly smartphone makers, and also IoT / home-automation gadget makers.

> […] and chances of anarchy developments taking over would be slim.

Well, since you mentioned "anarchy", I'll pose a question: out of either the U.S. (which is all of the current "Big Five" are headquartered) or Germany, which one of those two countries do you believe is the one that's closer to anarchy? With that question in mind, I'll re-post here a YouTube comment (originally posted on this video) that was written by someone who lives in Germany:

On the "German Model": In Germany, we in fact have 3 "levels" of Board participation: The one mentioned above, for most companies between 500 and 2000 employees, one for Heavy industries and some other cases with parity between employer and employee representatives, and one for Companies over 2000 employees with parity of employer and employee representation, with the President of the Board having double votes in case of a stalemate.

The companies that are exempt from employees on the board are those with under 500 Employees.

The real deal about the Employee participation in Germany is the workers council, which has a lot more power (They have co-decision or veto rights on things like including, but not limited to: work time, measues controlling workers, worker protection, (Paid) time off rates, firing of employees...)

As far as I'm concerned, this famous 1975 movie's depiction of an "anarcho-syndicalist commune" is a lot closer to the aforementioned "German system" of corporate governance than it is to the U.S. system of corporate governance (which is the way that all of the "Big Five" tech corporations are governed); that's because, in the U.S. system, major shareholders are the only people who choose people to serve as directors on the board. That "German system" of corporate governance has been the law of the land in (West) Germany since 1976, so as of now it appears to be a tested-in-practice system that's successful.

For that reason, I'm guessing that the EU regulators will act to reduce, not increase, the amount of political power held by those "Big Five" U.S. corporations… and probably also act to improve the negotiating position that European tech-workers hold relative to their bosses (e.g. by ensuring that those tech-workers are able to showcase their work to other potential employers).

(Side note: two of the Democratic Party's candidates running for U.S. President made Co-determination a.k.a. Workplace Democracy part of their campaigns in the 2020 primary election cycle. And if a political-activist organization such as Citizens Trade Campaign were to successfully get that kind of public policy enacted into law — via international trade treaties — throughout the entire USMCA trading bloc, and the entire EU, and all of the BRICS countries, then imagine what human society as a whole might end up being like from that point onwards. It'd be a damn sight better than what we've got right now, that's for sure! For example, if the Philippines had that kind of public policy in place, it might do away with the CONTENT-MODERATION SWEATSHOPS that Facebook et al. are using right now, thus preventing content moderation at scale from being even remotely feasible and forcing a return to pre-2005-style small-scale web forums like phpBB or its modern equivalents like public-inbox and Discourse, and likewise forcing Discord users to abandon it in favor of Matrix, and so on.)

> That's what happened to every other industry, after all.

Those kinds of grandiose sweeping statements about history tend to be massive oversimplifications of what really happened, and the people who make such statements often are motivated do so as a means of advancing their own present-day political agendas, or sometimes religious agendas, or other times financially-motivated agendas.

(Remember back in 2016 when you predicted that "Android for the desktop" or something similar would replace all current desktop Linux distros Real Soon Now™, or maybe only replace the ones made by nonprofit orgs like Debian, in the same way that Tim O'Reilly predicted Mac OS X would replace desktop Linux back in the early 2000s? That still hasn't happened… though, now, it's looking like the Steam Deck is making some inroads in that direction…)

Yes, things happened the way you described them in the three examples other industries that you gave: the car industry (which had a bunch of regulations put on it due to collision-unsafety in the '50s/'60s and Ralph Nader's exposé, and more recently had more regulations put on it due to ecological/air-quality concerns… though even in that industry the regulations were enacted surprisingly recently in Europe relative to the U.S., because Europe's transit system is less car-dependent than the U.S. one is), the food industry (again due to risks to human health), and bridge builders (ditto). One more industry regulated about as heavily as those three is terrestrial & satellite radio/TV broadcasting (due to inherent limitations of the EM spectrum & the laws of physics themselves — despite that, though, Wi-Fi hasn't been regulated out of existence by the FCC or anyone else).

But every other industry… really? What about the paper industry, or the textile industry, or the clothing industry, or the furniture industry, or the home-audio-equipment industry, or the professional-grade A/V equipment industry, etc etc…

There are certain smaller industries (which, generally speaking, are currently not regulated as much as the car industry is) — in particular, hobbyist-oriented SBC makers such as Raspberry Pi and their competitors… note, by now they have lots of competitors (if in doubt then just take a look as Christopher Barnatt's "Explaining Computers" YouTube channel), because RPis tend to be out of stock most places for the last few years (because there's so much demand for RPis from businesses, who want to use the RPis in scenarios such as electronic signage, that there aren't any RPis left over for hobbyists to buy) and so a bunch of RPi competitors have sprung up to sell to the hobbyist customer base the RPi Foundation has partially abandoned — which apparently qualify (by your standards) as being mere "cottage industries" that are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. And yet, when taken as a whole, those industries collectively make up a not-insignificant portion of the world economy. So, I'm not convinced that European regulators will disregard the economic impact that the CRA will have on those industries (or consider it to be unimportant), like you seem to believe they will… nor am I convinced that they'll disregard the impact those regulations will have on tech workers' negotiating position (relative to their bosses / managers / HR departments) in the labor market.

(Remember also that there's a historical throughline from a state-funded "Computer Literacy Project" (that was its official name) in the UK to Eben Upton and the RPi Foundation. This goes to show that the Thatcher-era British state considered it important for general-purpose computers to be available for use — including programming-education use — to the public at large. And if today's British & European governmental bodies see things the same way — note, in 2013, the European Commission did see things that way — then they might take action to resist American BigCorp-led efforts like this recent one on the basis that it's important for societal reasons that a non-negligible portion of the general public must be able to use and program general-purpose computers.)

Here's something else from recent history that goes to show just how unpredictable lobbyists & legislators can be — look at what happened in the U.S. as compared to Japan in the '80s/'90s with regard to the packaged-media rental industry:

Home video (VHS/LD/DVD) rentals: legal in both the U.S. and Japan
Music album (LP/CD/cassette) rentals: illegal in the U.S., legal in Japan
PC software (on floppy diskettes or any other physical media) rentals: illegal in both the U.S. and Japan
Console video game (cartridges / CDs or other optical discs) rentals: legal in the U.S., illegal in Japan

So, apparently, lobbyists from the Japanese equivalents of the RIAA and the MPAA failed in their attempts to get rental shops outlawed… whereas in the U.S., the RIAA's lobbyists prevailed over the rental shops (e.g. Blockbuster Video) but the MPAA's lobbyists lost their struggle against the rental shops. Just how predictable was the outcome of that lobbying battle?

(And here are two more examples of how difficult it is to make accurate long-term predictions about the IT industry and human society more generally: in France back in the 1980s, X.25 and Minitel looked set to become what TCP/IP + the Web + SMTP email would go on to become in the mid-1990s; and didn't Andrew Tanenbaum once say that "microkernels have won", citing Windows NT as an example of a microkernel OS, but later had to take back that statement in part because NT turned out to not really be a microkernel OS after all?)

> I guess some governments would fail to apply a tight leash and these government would fail… but that wouldn't lead to free software nirvana but to the proliferation of failed states where development of the software (free or otherwise) just wouldn't happen.

Regulatory capture is the American way of doing things, to a greater extent than it is in Germany, and right now the U.S. is already dangerously close to being a failed state (to a far greater extent than Germany is)! Or at least that's how things in the present-day U.S. seem to be going as seen by most "Joe Average"-type Americans, who (unlike ultrawealthy people such as Marc Andreessen or Jack Welch) neither have nor ever will earn a living by working in upper-management and/or enterpreneurship and/or professional investment.

Next, here's a personal story:

I've watched in despair as lots of my own coworkers in the private sector (note, working conditions for public-sector employees are a lot better than what I'm about to describe here, due to labor unions such as SEIU) have spent only somewhere around 4 to 6 years working in any given engineering/technical job role (as opposed to a managerial role) before leaving that role in one of these 4 ways: being promoted upwards into management, or moving "sideways" within the org chart (i.e. moving from one internal "team" to another), or moving to a separate project within the same company, or leaving the company altogether. Why do they do that? Because climbing the corporate ladder is a major life goal for them, isn't that why?!

And for those employees who care more about long-term maintainability of a codebase than (so-called) "career advancement", guess what happens: work turns into a never-ending barrage of "oops, it's 5:30 PM, but this problem we discovered at the last minute, and you must fix it TONIGHT, and stay up all night long working on it if necessary" demands from bosses!

Consequently, the developers with the most working knowledge of the codebase suffer from severe burnout, and long-term maintainability of codebases falls by the wayside. In other words: when the turnover rate of employees is that high, the company's institutional knowledge deteriorates, causing code rot to set in, until finally the entire codebase is so messy/incomprehensible that it must be thrown away in its entirety. Lack of long-term maintainability is what led to the downfall of dBASE, and also to the original Netscape Navigator codebase (that is, Navigator's codebase as it was before the changeover "from the old layout engine to the new layout engine (Gecko/Raptor) [which] constituted an almost-total rewrite of the browser").

That is how software development is actually done in the milieu of big business today. And if new government regulations were to strangle all hobbyist-oriented forge sites (like Codeberg and invent.kde.org) with red tape, then that would likely prevent any new software project that values long-term maintainability like this one:

No manager of a [Linux] kernel developper can say "I know it's half baked but merge it now beacuse marketing wants it" and Linux largely maintains the "it'll ship when it's ready" and "longterm maintability is important" mindsets that are missing in most commercial projects.

…from ever being created in the future. You've said that you want government regulations to "bring control and responsibility into the IT industry", but kicking all hobbyist-developed software off of forge sites, or fining all of the forge sites (or the individual hobbyists hosting their work there) into bankruptcy, will just have the effect of putting big business in charge of most or all software development, where they do everything not in a controlled-and-responsible way, and instead do everything this way: "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead; we don't care if it's buggy, just get this thing done RIGHT NOW!"

> If you seriously think that I have this level of influence then you need to have your head examined.

Maybe books such as the aforementioned "Chokepoint Capitalism" (and its authors), along with activist organizations such as the FSFE (which, I'd say, is much more effective in getting their message out to the general public than the American FSF has been for a long time by now), might influence the actions of regulators/legislators in European countries that reject the U.S. style of so-called "laissez-faire capitalism" (especially Germany).

And, aside from that, it sure looks like you have a tendency towards pro-"mass market consumer electronics" / anti-"old-fashioned desktop Linux" partisanship, ever since that time in 2011 when you said (to someone who, apparently, was one of the HP webOS developers) "The standard phrase applies: you [referring to corbet] don't exist", and also when you said that "most users value "pretty pixels" way, way, WAY above network transparency".

(That's similar to the "user-friendliness to Joe Average User must be priority #1" kind of rhetoric that Apple fans were known for in the '80s and '90s, and despite that, the Macintosh got soundly trounced in the marketplace by the more bricoleur-friendly option — that being Wintel PCs — that gave rise to Linux during that same era… which in turn recently led to the Steam Deck, which for now at least appears to be a commercial success story.)

Having read those and also this, it gives an impression of motivated reasoning like this: "you can't make a business out of [supporting niche use-cases*] since there are no money in it**". When viewed in that light, a lot of your comments could plausibly be read as FUD and/or Stop Energy directed towards hobbyist-developed FOSS projects.

(*: in that instance, the use-case in question was reading email on a smartphone from a self-hosted IMAP server with a self-signed TLS certificate.)

(**: although, to be fair, you did acknowledge that "certain niche markets appeared where GPLv3 is not considered large enough liability to try such software" that time.)

> And you know it, or else you wouldn't have been so angry.

No, I don't know that the CRA will be bad for forge sites, and neither do you. And neither do several other LWNers who've posted comments about the CRA… but at least they seem to have first-hand knowledge of how European laws (about liability for selling defective products) work, so I suspect that they are correct about how the CRA will play out in practice, and that the Apache Software Foundation is incorrect.

(And as for the angry tone: I meant that to be directed toward the "Big Five" companies and big businesses in general, not towards EU legislators.)

> If that's true then it just means that there would be a different law later, which would bring control and responsibility into the IT industry.

"[Bringing] control and responsibility into the IT industry" shouldn't involve "making it possible for forge sites to be sued into oblivion", as far as I'm concerned… whereas it should involve cutting the Big Five down to size.

> Wow. So much cope.

If you're implying that I'm worried about the CRA in Europe, then you're mistaken (as I explained above).

OTOH, it does look like someone at Google is worried that FOSS might pose a threat to their business model, and if that worry spreads to the board-of-directors, then they might start lobbying the notoriously big-business-friendly U.S. federal government to allow them to (as jwz said) "rule the world forever"… but on the other other hand, some U.S. legislators want a 2020s-era version of this to be imposed on the "Big Five" tech corpos, and no one knows which side will get to have things their way…

> No, there are no such danger.

That contradicts your earlier claim that "there would be a different law later". It also contradicts this ("if you are creating a GitHub page and write README there then now you are marketing something [and therefore you will be held legally liable for bugs under the Cyber Resilience Act]") and this ("That, by necessity implies that large open source “forges”, if, maybe, not individual contributors, would have to deal with liabilities.").

> Or maybe there is, but that part is pretty much minor and insignificant. We have just arrived at the time where products made by hobbyists would stop being used by non-hobbyists.

That's (conditionally) OK with me, as long as it remains possible for these 2 kinds of events to continue happening in the future:

A large (though maybe not exactly huge) company like Valve can put on the market a consumer-electronics product whose pre-installed software includes a Linux distro derived from one that's written by hobbyists with a desktop environment that's also written by hobbyists; and,
someone like this developer can develop a FOSS-licensed microblog web-app that (6 years out from its initial release) gains enough users to make it famous enough for The Guardian to publish news stories about it & for its original developer to found a gGmbH non-profit organization dedicated to continuing its development… and then someone like this hobbyist developer can come along later and develop a forum/link-aggregator web app that's interoperable with the aforementioned microblogging app and which eventually has a bunch of non-profit orgs like this old one which began as a dialup BBS all the way back in 1987 running instances of it.

In conclusion, here's one more quotation from ESR, this time taken from the front page of his personal website:

I will not tolerate having general-purpose computing hardware, which should be an instrument of liberation and creativity, reduced to a locked-down delivery pipe for "content". By trying to cripple my tools, the big-media machine has made me its enemy. DRM delenda est!

You keep saying that, since 1998 up through the present, there exist "separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”", and (at least implicitly) that the "open source camp" is pro-corporate whereas the "free software camp" is anti-corporate. But that ESR quotation goes to show that the original "Open Source camp" was never 100% pro-corporate, and that their general ethos, sensibilities, and worldview are much different from the (in jwz's terminology) "captains of industry" who are in charge of Google, Facebook, etc.

It's a shame, though, that ESR is a capital-L Libertarian, because that minor U.S. political party's economic policy preference (i.e. "laissez-faire" capitalism) is basically the main reason why both "the big-media machine" and the current Big Five U.S. tech companies were able to gain so much political power in the first place. Anyone who wants to have a hobbyist-friendly national economy ought to look to the parts of the world from which Linux and KDE (which might qualify as being the "top two" most famous hobbyist-developed FOSS projects) as the model to follow, and push for this kind of corporate governance to be mandated by law worldwide.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

philh — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 22:11:41 +0000

> They automatically assume jujutsu would fail just because of CLA and there would be some king of successor, for crying out loud!

> Sure, jujutsu may still easily fail, but that wouldn't happen because of CLA, that's for sure.

All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years, I'd say that there is a high enough correlation between failure and the presence of a corporate CLA for me to assume that any new project encumbered by such a thing is not even worth looking at, because it'll very likely be superseded, and any time I spend on getting familiar with it will have been wasted.

That's without taking into account the real problem with corporate-backed CLAs, which is that I don't have a pet lawyer who will explain for free to me what the implications of signing it might be, whereas the other party did use expensive lawyers to ensure that their interests are protected. That being the case, I'm not going to sign one of those.

That means that I'm looking at a thing that is labeled Open Source, Free Software, or whatever name doesn't make you foam at the mouth, but really isn't in any practical sense, because only people that are careless of their own interests are going to contribute to it, so it might as well be labeled "Look but don't touch!"

I'm not demanding that they change that.

I am however disappointed that nobody at Google seems to have noticed that CLAs are the kiss of death.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Wol — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:12:57 +0000

> This had nothing to do with any antitrust action, and everything to do with actual market forces.

Mess-up or not, I'm pretty certain it was rather more than market forces. The EU is keeping a close eye on Microsoft, and I'm pretty certain it got pushed through as "If MS is allowed to do that, then it's a pretty safe bet that consumer hardware will ONLY be able to run Windows". Hence the requirement that buyers MUST be able to disable Secure Boot, if they so wish.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

pizza — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:34:21 +0000

The UEFI disableable-secure-boot thing was driven by the fact that Windows 7 had major issues with UEFI booting, and large PC makers (and their customers) wanted to keep using Windows 7 on new hardware at least until the initial teething problems with Win8 were handled.

As it turned out, Win8 was so bad that most folks downgraded it to Win 7 (via an officially-sanctioned-by-Microsoft mechanism), and the status quo didn't really change until Win 10.

This had nothing to do with any antitrust action, and everything to do with actual market forces.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

wtarreau — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 07:29:18 +0000

I agree that the index is probably the most difficult to grasp specificity of Git, yet one of its most powerful feature when you finally understand how it works. When I develop, I usually spot bugs in areas I visit, that are unrelated to what I'm doing and I'm quite happy to fix all of that at once, sometimes making a temporary commit for certain changes that I'll rechange later, sometimes deciding to do that manually at the end. I, too, use interactive add a lot, I even edit the patches on the fly to commit certain changes in multiple steps, since git's patch parser is extremely permissive. That's convenient for example to insert a preliminary change that only reindents an enum in preparation for larger names before adding the new feature, all of this done at once via the index, without ever having to have written a version of the temporary step. It's super convenient and even a little bit addictive, given how efficient it is. For this reason alone, I sometimes feel very sorry for some people developing in bloated IDEs or web interfaces (e.g. github) without all these facilities. In fact the result is visible in their commits, tons of unrelated stuff merged at once, they tend to use commits just as points in time like a snapshot system...

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

rqosa — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 01:58:37 +0000

> Things would certainly be much much worse now if MS had been left completely unchecked.

Case in point: this

> Every new PC sold with Windows 8 will be locked up tight with Microsoft's UEFI ... secure boot on

Not that I don't agree that there's a potentially dangerous precedent here, but this is omitting a key detail. For x86 computers, MS's certification requires that users can disable secure boot. (emphasis mine) Of course, this is not true for ARM computers, hence the dangerous precedent.

I don't remember the exact details, but for some reason I'd been under the impression that the final settlement with the DOJ in that 2001 antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. had the effect of imposing that requirement that PC owners must be allowed to disable Secure Boot. (Or if not specifically that one, then maybe the 2004-2007 antitrust action in Europe is the one that forced MS to not prohibit end-users from disabling Secure Boot instead?)

(see also this Q/A on superuser.com for some more technical details that might be relevant here)

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

rqosa — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:17:23 +0000

> The issue that led to the antitrust case in the USA was the web browser, […]

The real reason I posted that comment was to dispute spacefrogg's statement that "it is bad for society if companies are allowed to give stuff away for free, because this creates a situation where people easily get dependent on the free stuff", on the basis that a monopolistic company (e.g. Microsoft circa 2001) should not be considered equal to a smaller & less-powerful company (e.g. Netscape circa 2001), let alone to a non-wealthy individual person (e.g. some random hobbyist programmer who has some Git repos hosted on Codeberg today).

Antitrust law (both in the US and in the EU) certainly doesn't treat monopolists the same as non-monopolists, by design. And for good reason, IMO.

> […] and MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to bundle IE for free into Windows

Exactly my point: MS's Windows monopoly was a necessary condition which needed to be met in order for the government to sue MS (for violating antitrust law).

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Wol — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:36:15 +0000

> Who is arguing for banning giving things away? You've invented an argument that spacefrogg hasn't made!

To quote spacefrog himself ...

> Companies are not people! Companies cannot be gracious or nice or happy or caring. Like, you really think that? Companies should not allowed to give anything substantial away for free

If that's not spacefrog arguing for banning giving things away, I don't understand English !!!

Okay, and I admitted it, I've gone a bit over the top and taken his argument to an extreme. But it was his argument first. And as soon as you start getting into "where do you draw the line" you're going to end up in a war between the anarchists and the dictators. I'm firmly on the side of "(VOLUNTARILY!) giving things away is a good thing". If it's done with malicious intent, then you target the malice, not the gift.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:02:32 +0000

Oops, I managed to put my reply to you in another subthread. See: https://lwn.net/Articles/959326/

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:01:36 +0000

My memory is MS actually had to provide a version of OEM Windows with IE unbundled/removed to vendors who wanted it. The library might still have been there, but there wasn't an IE app.

One of the reasons for the suit being that Netscape had had deals with PC makers to ship PCs with Netscape installed, which then became awkward / suboptimal when MS bundled IE and made it hard to set other browsers as default (fully). The ruling provided some relief on that. I don't know if many vendors went for that unbundled OEM version though - 1 did I thought, but that's my vague recollection. Part of how they got away with so little punishment was the Clinton admin got replaced by Bush.

Did it address all the issues, did it right all wrongs MS did with anti-competitive behaviours? No. But it did damage their reputation, it did put some kind of check on them, and it was the catalyst for further competition law investigations and restrictions put on them. E.g., the EU required them to open up protocol specs, and stop stymying projects such as Samba. They also got a massive fine and had to unbundle WMP cause of EU actions.

Things would certainly be much much worse now if MS had been left completely unchecked.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

pizza — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 14:30:17 +0000

> They lost the ruling, so they lost for sure.

They lost _on paper_ but by that point they long since accomplished what they set out to do, and are _still_ reaping the benefits. The fines they faced were a pittance, and the "default browser ballot" BS was per formative nonsense, because by that point IE was intimately tied into the entire MS business software ecosystem and _completely_ owned the corporate desktop + backend.

(What eventually broke that wasn't the browser ballot, but the rise of the modern smartphone)

> They had to unbundle IE too and give other browser equal opportunity to be the default browser.

Um, IE _never_ ceased to be bundled with MS Windows. It is a core component of Windows. [1] At best, the only thing "removed" was the icon that launched the "browser wrapper" around that built-in component. (Sure, it's now called "Edge" and is built on the Chrome engine instead of Triton, but it's still just as proprietary and intrinsicly bundled as ever!)

[1] An embedded browser engine is a core component of every OS, commercial or otherwise. released since Windows 98, and it's _not_ replacable.

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts

kleptog — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 14:28:37 +0000

> Whichever corporation you might have believed was your ally (against Microsoft, or against AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy et al.) during any of the past 3 decades is probably your enemy right now.

Businesses do not have feelings. They have always acted in what they think are their best interests. I think all open-source developers develop because they think it's in their best interests in some way. Open-source is where it is because sufficiently many people and businesses think it's better than the alternatives.

If FAANG are contributing to open-source, it's because they believe its the best thing for their bottom line.

> Consequently, right now there's a danger that some people with deep pockets might try to lobby national governments into strangling those hobbyist-led FOSS projects with red tape!

Hobbyist developers are basically on the same level as hobby model train builders, or you paying the neighbours kid to clear your gutters: in theory it would be great if they followed regulations, but there's no public policy reason to spend any effort on it. And no legal avenue to enforce it either.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 13:44:48 +0000

The issue that led to the antitrust case in the USA was the web browser, and MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to bundle IE for free into Windows, destroying the market for Netscape and making it technically difficult for other browsers such as Netscape to fully work as default browser on Windows.

Are other cases, inc. ones that spacefrogg may be worried out, different in their details? Sure. Still potential anti-competitive behaviour if some large corporate uses free products undermine the market for other actors (inc. those supplying labour).

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 13:40:56 +0000

Who is arguing for banning giving things away? You've invented an argument that spacefrogg hasn't made!

AFAICT, spacefrogg was arguing against anti-competitive behaviours by corporates, including where the labour market is the victim of the anti-competitive behaviour. You are obviously aware of competition law. Not sure why you're arguing against positions no one here seems to have taken.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Wol — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 12:54:38 +0000

> It can also be all the corporate players in a market behaving in a certain way, which then undermines the competitiveness and interests of the programmers supplying the labour

But that's called a Cartel, which is just as illegal as anti-competitive dumping. You don't make giving things away illegal. If giving things away is part of wider misbehaviour, you tackle the misbehaviour, not the giving away.

And while I'm not going to say the company I'm talking about was a one-man-band (I really don't know), it was pretty much a one-pony show, even if there was a supporting cast.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

khim — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 12:34:25 +0000

To shift the liability.

The important part that CLA includes (and which Apache License doesn't include) is your signature and assertion that you have the right to pass that code to Google.

If you also have agreement with your employer that prevents that then you couldn't just turn around and say that what you did was a mistake: you employer would have to sue you then get court decision and only then said license may be annulled.

You may say that it's unfair that trillion-dollar corporation shifts the responsibility on poor small guy, but Google may also say that your two-line contribution is not worth taking that responsibility either.

If your contribution is large and valuable, on the other hand, then you may always fork the project and then CLA, of course, doesn't apply.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

adobriyan — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:52:17 +0000

> Google doesn't need CLA for that, Apache License permits them to do that without any copyright assignment.

Why are they asking for CLA then?

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts

khim — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:27:57 +0000

It's true that when RMS wrote his essay there was no separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”. That happened later when free software zealots rejected the peace offering.

And yes, we have to admit that free software zealots even managed to convince some people to release some software for free (Netscape, StarOffice). Credit where credit i due.

It's absolutely not clear how much that helped, long term (most browsers these days tack their ancestry not to Netscape source release, but to work of KDE guys who were, very much, an open source group (as evidenced by the fact that free software zealots rejected their work and started an alternate project instead, which very much split the community and in general probably caused more harm than good (although it's very hard to say for sure because we couldn't just look on the alternate history where GNOME never happened).

And what code these people have created recently?

Before the introduction of Open Source software two worlds were intermixed and it wasn't as obvious. Especially because some of most active “free software” proponents were also prolific coders (starting from RMS himself, but also Tridgell and some others). But after “grand separation” (which, again, happened because the free software camp insisted on it) number of people who were producing anything notable in the “free software” camp was dwindling and today it includes almost entirely people who try to force other people to act against their wishes and don't themselves create much new code.

…I get a strong impression that what you actually WANT to happen sometime soon is for the IT industry to revert to being run in a very similar way to how it was a few years before those two sea-changes took place in the mid-'90s!

It's not about about what I want, but about what may happen and what may not happen. And no, IT industry is not reverting to how it was run in the mi-'90s. Government control would be much more strict and chances of anarchy developments taking over would be slim.

That's what happened to every other industry, after all.

I guess some governments would fail to apply a tight leash and these government would fail… but that wouldn't lead to free software nirvana but to the proliferation of failed states where development of the software (free or otherwise) just wouldn't happen.

So then, in order to accomplish that goal, you've called for national governments to hold every last bricoleur/hobbyist programmer to the same level of legal liability that smartphone hardware companies

If you seriously think that I have this level of influence then you need to have your head examined. That's not what I want governments to do, that's what they will do, whether I like that or not.

If a law like that were ever to be enacted

When, not if. The question is only how many steps would it take to reach there. The end position is more-or-less clear.

Do you really want that to happen?

If you are sitting on the bottom of the mountain and notice that avalanche danger is increasing… do you want your lawn to be destroyed or not? If not then you don't scream at the mountains and don't threaten them, but rather prepare for the time when avalanche would actually happen. Sometimes it's even prudent to trigger avalanche early to reduce it's power. But crying about the fact that winter have come is just simply stupid.

IT industry wasn't regulated for too long and have grown too big and too influential to be left alone. That means governments would react harshly and would enact laws that would be more damaging than if industry would have guided them.

But free software zealots are still in denial and still believe they may stop that process if they would yell loud enough. Not gonna happen. And you know it, or else you wouldn't have been so angry.

And I strongly suspect that those two commentors are correct in what they said there.

They may be correct in describing the law as it's drafted today. If that's true then it just means that there would be a different law later, which would bring control and responsibility into the IT industry.

Consequently, right now there's a danger that some people with deep pockets might try to lobby national governments into strangling those hobbyist-led FOSS projects with red tape!

Wow. So much cope.

No, there are no such danger. Or maybe there is, but that part is pretty much minor and insignificant. We have just arrived at the time where products made by hobbyists would stop being used by non-hobbyists.

Like people are no longer using cars designed and made by hobbyists or radios designed and made by hobbyists. Except if they are hobbyists, of course, and even then they have to pass strict checks to be allowed to drive on regular roads or use their radios (except in certain niches dictated by governments).

That's the tectonic shift that IT industry would pass soon. Like every major industry passed before.

And if you want to say that this wouldn't happen then you should explain what differs IT industry from any other industry where that have happened already. Not try to write long screaming texts.

I, for one, couldn't see why IT industry should be different from dozens of other industries that have passed that path before.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:38:04 +0000

Well yes, it is the anti-competitive behaviour that is unlawful.

Anti-competitive behaviour can be 1 large monopoly player abusing that position. It can also be all the corporate players in a market behaving in a certain way, which then undermines the competitiveness and interests of the programmers supplying the labour - which was spacefrogg's point.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:33:26 +0000

They lost the ruling, so they lost for sure. They had to unbundle IE too and give other browser equal opportunity to be the default browser.

If not for that, Internet history could be quite different.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

marcH — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:33:34 +0000

> It's why detached HEAD is scary for most people

Obviously.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

rqosa — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 07:10:16 +0000

> MS bought a browser, bundled it for free into Windows

Bundling an application into an OS is not exactly the same thing as giving that application away for free, especially at a time when…

> MS eventually faced anti-trust actions, and lost.

…the OS in question held a de-facto monopoly position in the market for desktop-PC operating systems. (MS having that de-facto monopoly was the main reason why they were hit with an antitrust lawsuit, after all.)

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts

rqosa — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 01:25:49 +0000

Contrary to what you seem to be implying with all of this pro-"Open Source" / anti-"Free Software" us-versus-them rhetoric that you've been posting here recently: pretty much every so-called "Free Software zealot" who's risen to prominence in recent years (such as Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, maybe) are much more similar in terms of their general ethos, sensibilities, and worldview to both the original "Open-source software" advocate from 1998 and the main person to whom Firefox & Thunderbird users owe their gratitude for the fact that those two apps exist in the first place — neither of whom have ever been pro-FSF partisans or (in your preferred terminology) "Free Software zealots" — than they are to pro-FAANG partisans who want the general public to believe that the upper management at those megacorporations are good guys who usually act in the best interests of "Joe Average" (i.e. the general public), I'd say.

> I know how the world is run, that's the issue. Free Software zealots don't know that (or, more precisely, refuse to accept that knowledge).

From reading your comment above while keeping in mind the fact that, at roughly the point in time that ESR mentioned in this part of his book from 2003, a sea change took place in the way that "the world" (or, more precisely, the IT industry) was run:

By late 1993, […] the long-awaited dream of a cheap Unix system for everybody had snuck up on them from an unexpected direction. It didn't come from AT&T or Sun or any of the traditional vendors. Nor did it rise out of an organized effort in academia. It was a bricolage that bubbled up out of the Internet by what seemed like spontaneous generation, appropriating and recombining elements of the Unix tradition in surprising ways. (emphasis mine)

…and also keeping in mind what jwz wrote (in his anti-Instagram polemic from 2016) about another sea change in the IT industry that also occurred in the mid-1990s (and was at least partially caused by the exact same event that ESR referred to above):

All of the "social media" services want to lock you in. That's been the case for a while. They love their "walled gardens" and they think that so long as they tightly control their users and make it hard for them to escape, they will rule the world forever.

This was the business model of Compuserve. And AOL. And then a little thing called The Internet got popular for a minute in the mid 1990s, and that plan suddenly didn't work out so well for those captains of industry. (emphasis mine)

So then, in order to accomplish that goal, you've called for national governments to hold every last bricoleur/hobbyist programmer to the same level of legal liability that smartphone hardware companies (like Motorola/Lenovo, Asus, or even Google themselves with their Pixel product line) will be held to in the near future, thereby ensuring that never again will any such hobbyists be allowed to develop software that poses a threat to any present-day equivalent of the "traditional vendors" that ESR referred to there (such as SaaS vendors in general, and/or any of the current "Big Five" tech companies), as happened throughout the 1990s.

At least twice recently, you've almost explicitly said that you want EU legislators to enact laws that would have that effect on to hobbyist developers, for example here:

> if you are creating a GitHub page and write README there then now you are marketing something

…and also here:

> And you may bet pretty large sum on the desire of EU legislators to keep these small guys around. [with "these small guys" being some hypothetical hardware company "that produces DVR based in MythTV"]

> That, by necessity implies that large open source “forges”, if, maybe, not individual contributors, would have to deal with liabilities.

If a law like that were ever to be enacted, it would likely end up preventing any new bricolage (meaning a hobbyist-led project, like KDE) from bubbling up out of the Internet to eventually reach KDE's level of fame & popularity ever again! Do you really want that to happen?

(Remember: back in KDE's early years, approximately 100% of its developers — including Lars Knoll, David Faure, and Matthias Ettrich, among many others — fit the aforementioned "hobbyist programmer" description while at the same time not being pro-FSF partisans. Even today, most of the commits/contributions to Git repos hosted on invent.kde.org come from hobbyists, IIUC.)

But, fortunately for anyone who fits any of these descriptions:

someone who runs Plasma on their own "daily driver" desktop PC;
or, someone who is a currently-active KDE contributor;
or, someone who has any Git repos with README.md files hosted on invent.kde.org or anywhere else on the Web;
or, most importantly of all: someone who has (or wants to have) a publically-readable portfolio/showcase of their own programming work available on the Web, so that the HR departments of their own potential future employer(s) can take a look at it

…it looks like several other LWN commentors disagree with khim on the topic of what kind of law the EU legislators really want to enact, e.g. bluca here:

> A readme, or a website, are not equivalent to marketing a product.

…and also Wol here:

> The crucial words here are "and markets them". If you look up the definition of marketing, it does not include "making available for J Random Passerby to help themself".

And I strongly suspect that those two commentors are correct in what they said there.

In conclusion, here's the TL;DR version (written for a target audience of any LWN readers who've ever used their own self-written open source software as a showcase for their programming abilities while searching for a job):

Whichever corporation you might have believed was your ally (against Microsoft, or against AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy et al.) during any of the past 3 decades is probably your enemy right now. That's because there are various big-money interests out there who see hobbyist-developed FLOSS projects — along with the hobbyist-oriented forge sites that host them (such as invent.kde.org, SourceHut, Codeberg, etc.) — as things which in the future might become existential threats to their own business model(s). This even applies to some corporations which on the surface appear to be FOSS-friendly (case in point: this).

Consequently, right now there's a danger that some people with deep pockets might try to lobby national governments into strangling those hobbyist-led FOSS projects with red tape!

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Wol — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 22:47:01 +0000

> I don't think they were arguing to abolish Free Software or barn-raising.

The problem is "where do you draw the line?" I know I was being hyperbolic, intentionally, but seriously, do we want to ban giving things away?

And if giving stuff away is anti-competitive, then we should make anti-competitive behaviour illegal, not make giving stuff away illegal.

In this particular case, there are (or rather were) a couple of big contenders. There's Pick Systems (aka Raining Data, aka Tiger Logic, aka maybe a few other names too). Then there's INFORMATION, UniVerse, and Unidata, who merged into Ardent, aka Informix, aka IBM.

Then there were the minnows, jBase, QM, Reality, and Cache/MV. Ladybridge, aka a guy called Martin Phillips, was persuaded to release QM as the GPL OpenQM. (Incidentally, I didn't know that the "Open" has nothing to do with Open Source and everything to do with Open Systems aka commercial Unix! An earlier product, PI/Open, used the term Open in the same way, hence the inspiration for "QM on Linux" to be called OpenQM.)

Unfortunately, a company called Rocket has bought out pretty much all the commercial players, and the only real competitors left are Scarlet, Reality, and another minnow called OpenInsight. For example, I think the price of OpenQM has quadrupled since it was absorbed into Rocket a few years ago. UniData / UniVerse were always on the expensive side, but Rocket has raised the price of everything else to the same level.

I think that's why some of us want Scarlet as a viable competitor, but there's no way I want to leave potential Scarlet users up a gum tree if anything goes wrong, and given my experience trying to get Scarlet into my employer, I actually see the existence of a commercial version as a plus. I hope they come to see the existence of the Open Source version as a plus, too.

Cheers,
Wol

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

kleptog — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 22:31:11 +0000

> Let me repeat, it is bad for society if companies are allowed to give stuff away for free, because this creates a situation where people easily get dependent on the free stuff. At some point it is (wonders of the capitalism) not free anymore, but people still depend on it.

I don't think that argument works here. Google is not delivering a product, they're delivering source under an open-source license. Publishing it doesn't make people dependant and if Google goes away you still have everything had before, so there's no downside. You can do anything with this source that you like, including selling it. If Google decided to start charging, you could just fork it and start a competing community without any loss of functionality.

The CLA isn't giving Google any special powers, since anything you grant to Google is also granted to everyone they distribute the source to which is basically everyone. It's mostly just making explicit which would otherwise be implied (ie. if you make a contribution, then Google may presume you have the rights to do so. In the normal course of business this is the default position, but having it spelt out explicitly is not a bad thing when dealing with international contributors.)

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

khim — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 18:41:02 +0000

They were important to make Chrome viable, although I'm not sure whether this should be considered success or not.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

pizza — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 18:05:28 +0000

> MS eventually faced anti-trust actions, and lost.

... did they really lose?

After all, the legal penalties they were eventually saddled with were even less than a slap on the wrist compared to the direct and indirect profits they made.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

farnz — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 17:22:01 +0000

Usually, there are regulations against selling products under value. It is just that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, these laws never seem to be applied to software.

The usual regulations apply to selling products below the marginal cost of production - if mining 1 gram of unobtanium and shipping it to me costs you $1,500, then you cannot sell unobtainium to me for less than $1,500 per gram; if the mining is $500 of machine time, and shipping is $1,000, that sets your lower bound. However, the cost of finding unobtanium deposits, and of designing and building the mining machine, are ignored for this analysis; it may cost you billions of dollars in analysis to find each gram of unobtanium, or trillions of dollars to design and build a mining machine that works long enough to mine 10 grams before needing replacement, but that's ignored by the rules.

So, for example, you can't sell DRAM chips at less than the cost of making a DRAM chip; you can sell them cheaply, but it must be possible for someone who owns a semiconductor fabrication plant to make DRAM chips at or above the price you sell them for. Note, though, that semiconductor fabs are expensive, but that cost is not taken into account here; it's assumed that you already own one for the purposes of determining if you're selling DRAM chips at a loss, and so what's accounted for is the cost of silicon wafers, dopants, chemicals and electricity (over and above that consumed if the plant is idling waiting for an order) to run the plant for the duration of a batch of DRAM chips, etc.

Software escapes from this because virtually all the cost of software is in the analysis and design phases, which are outside the rules; the marginal cost of one more copy of a piece of software that already exists is tiny (what's the total cost of transferring 1 GiB from my server to yours, given that the cost of the server and the Internet connection are already paid, and it's only the additional electricity over and above idle that counts?), and the rules say that it's only those marginal costs that matter.

Also, importantly, this has only become a significant issue now that electronic distribution is cheap; in the days when software came on physical media (tapes, disks, CDs, DVDs etc), your bound on the price was set by the cost of the medium you were using; if getting a DVD pressed costs you $500 per thousand disks, your lower bound on price is $0.50. With Internet distribution of software (or music or video for that matter), your lower bound is some tiny fraction of a cent, and accounting rules let you write it off because it's so small; for example, if you use (chosen at random) Backblaze to store software for distribution, then your marginal cost is at most $0.01/GB plus $0.0000004 per copy. For a piece of software that's 10 MB in size, that's close enough to zero to be a permissible write-off.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

paulj — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:57:21 +0000

I don't think they were arguing to abolish Free Software or barn-raising.

I think they were arguing against large companies releasing free (as in beer) software as loss-leaders, to destroy value in markets and hurt any competition, and try gain (or hold) some monopoly position for themselves. Typically, where a company can succeed in this - i.e. the company with the deepest pockets, and the most ability to subsidise the loss-leader from revenue from other markets - it will later use that to gouge consumers in some way, be it by prices on the product directly or using control over the free product to force consumers into other paid products. Once monopoly has been created, investment tends to decrease, people working on it tend to become complacent - quality of the product also tends to suffer and/or innovation declines.

As an example, remember Microsoft and Netscape? MS bought a browser, bundled it for free into Windows - all paid for by their Windows and Office licensing revenue - and thus destroyed Netscape's ability to earn revenue.

MS eventually faced anti-trust actions, and lost.

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Wol — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:41:41 +0000

Do me a favour! DON'T tell other people what to do!!!

> Companies are not people!

Who says? I know the guy pretty well (well, as well as you can know someone over the internet).

> Let me repeat, it is bad for society if companies are allowed to give stuff away for free,

Okay. Let's ban free stuff. Let's ban all Open Source software, let's ban all Free Software, let's ban Barn Raising, let's ban what we call American Suppers, let's make caring for your neighbour a criminal offence!

Scarlet is Free Software. And if I choose to express my gratitude to the PERSON who released it under the GPL, that's down to ME, not you.

And if I choose to protect my users by giving them the CHOICE to go back to him, if they so want, as their upstream then that's down to ME, not you. Are you REALLY saying it's for the best to expose my users to a bus factor of one, so if anything happens they're up shit creek without a paddle?

Free Software is all about CHOICE, and this is MY choice, not yours!

Cheers,
Wol