Why do people call structured governance a bureaucracy? About a month ago there was a well received post on GTK's rotten foundations that boils down to several core points, one of them being: if you keep breaking stuff all the time, there's no point in investing in your API.
And here we are with initial OSS release of PS for *nixes. It's broken from the (valid) POV of its target audience and authors want to fix in an orderly fashion. But that's not enough. People at MS are "stupid or malicious", as some commenters put it, and it should be changed ASAP the way community wants, or else.
Or else what? How many of the people arguing for immediate change are an actual and/or potential consumers of PS? How many of people thinking it's a simple change (just do it) have actually maintained large piece of software deployed by thousands of users? I bet that with the exception of Daniel who opened the bug - none.
I don't envy folks maintaining PS. I used to share an apartment with dude who can't get over the US v MS to this day and anything even tangentially related to MS (or Gates) is definitely, without any doubt evil, devious and is some sort of extortion or at the very least embrace extend extinguish strategy. No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10. This attitude is pervasive and turbo-counterproductive in cases like this one.
People are surprisingly bad at asking questions, which is why the help desk should always first ask "What are you trying to do?"
So why does "bureaucracy" have such a negative connotation? Like a lot of powerful tools, it is very easy to abuse. Unless you are very careful in design, you are likely to create a amplification attack of work. Most managers aren't careful, so few people have a positive experience.
> No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10.
US v MS is an ongoing thing. It's never been over... So MS is releasing OSS stuff, but making it hard to run Linux alongside their OS on the same hardware. It's like a guy giving you a hug while stabbing you in the back.
Ah, so if a large corporation stabs me in the back for completely understandable reasons that are hard to avoid in the real world ... I'm still stabbed in the back.
I don't think the venom here is justified at all, but I also don't think it would be justified if it was one malicious person who did it.
But the problem and the poor decision needs a ruthless critique, the reasons it ended up this way are a side problem that most people shouldn't care about.
Decisions like the one I'm referring to are made at the very top level, so the "MS is a large organization, and can't be expected to act like its decisions are as simple as one person's" line does not hold water.
This isn't some obscure situation tucked into the back corners of some IRC chat. Open sourcing and reaching out to the community is, apparently, the companies direction going forward.
As such, they could/should prioritize these situations as a way of showing real commitment.
Dragging their heels is going to make it feel like nothing but marketing bullshit.
It might also signal to MS rank and file to cut their territorial bullshit (which MS has a storied history of).
Satya could get this fixed today if he said "This is the future. Get it done."
One of the reasons I haven't open sourced some stuff is because I don't want to deal with parts of the open source community, it's not even about having a thin skin (Which I don't) it's simply I'm not interested in dealing with them.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the EU. That's black and white criminal (and immoral) behavior.
The PS team seems like it's doing its best, but you lose some degree of presumption of goodwill when you work for a criminal entity.
Ultimately, I don't think either side is right, but I also don't think either side is wrong.
MS made a choice not to cultivate goodwill in the OS community for years, and they profited from it. It's reasonable for that community to make them earn it back, and this is what it looks like (unfortunately for the individuals on the PS group).
My point is simply that Microsoft has to convince the community of their goodwill, and it will take time.
I don't think the existence of other companies with (mabye even bigger) PR problems has any bearing. So what? You want to be equally critical of Uber? Ok. Let's make them prove their goodwill too.
Furthermore, Microsoft is unique in this regard, because at the time of their conviction, they were fighting the browser wars with two open communities: FF and chrome.
> How many of the people arguing for immediate change are an actual and/or potential consumers of PS?
Right. I would think the _author_ of curl should probably have a bit of a say if someone adds a curl command to shell but it doesn't work like curl.
He's going to be the one receive angry tweets and in issues in gh.
> Or else what?
People will see how ridiculous this practice of adding aliases-but-no-aliases to existing tools is, and perhaps decide not to use PS for *nixes. Is that bad? Good? I don't know. I am guessing humanity will still go on.
> No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10. This attitude is pervasive and turbo-counterproductive in cases like this one.
Yet decisions made at that point still have repercussions. Ship a stupid API -- reap pain for years to come. Don't think that's major news here.
This is not the first time. Microsoft did stuff like this before. Any web developers remember IE8 and its incompatibilities with everything else out there. WebRTC was discussing and working an API and Microsoft shows up at the last minute, and said "Yeah, we got a new completely different proposal". It's shit like that. Some people are more upset about stuff like than others.
And here we are with initial OSS release of PS for *nixes. It's broken from the (valid) POV of its target audience and authors want to fix in an orderly fashion. But that's not enough. People at MS are "stupid or malicious", as some commenters put it, and it should be changed ASAP the way community wants, or else.
Or else what? How many of the people arguing for immediate change are an actual and/or potential consumers of PS? How many of people thinking it's a simple change (just do it) have actually maintained large piece of software deployed by thousands of users? I bet that with the exception of Daniel who opened the bug - none.
I don't envy folks maintaining PS. I used to share an apartment with dude who can't get over the US v MS to this day and anything even tangentially related to MS (or Gates) is definitely, without any doubt evil, devious and is some sort of extortion or at the very least embrace extend extinguish strategy. No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10. This attitude is pervasive and turbo-counterproductive in cases like this one.