Once there was a plan that the Linux Kernel Maintainers' Summit be held in October in Vancouver, Canada - but then Linus Torvalds (mistakenly?) booked a holiday with his family at exactly the same time in Edinburgh, Scotland. And now the Summit seems to be moving to Edinburgh, too. This has caused an interesting discussion started by James Bottomley: Linux replied: ... and in a later post: It's gripping to watch what will come out of this. I don't think that the palace coup will indeed happen right now. But who knows? IF it happens I think that Greg Kroah-Hartman (GKH) will be the most obvious choice as Linus' successor. I doubt if something like a triumvirate would be a practical alternative.
Greg? Not in your life.... That guy is a Lennart fanboy who ridiculed Gentoo folks when they forked udev to eudev and got rid of the systemd in the process (thank god!). If anyone is to be the next benevolent dictator in the Linux then it should be Alan Cox, long time contributor to kernel in the 2.x version days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox
Ah - systemd I must confess that I like it. The first time I used it was on Arch Linux and since then on Fedora. It has always been reliable for me, and I like its sandboxing. But besides that, I think GKH is one of the guys with the best overview of Linux development. I'm not sure if Alan Cox is still up-to-date enough. But I don't think that the palace coup will happen in the near future. And if it happens I don't think that "the whole thing will go down faster than the United States of Belgium". There are too many people involved, too much money invested from many companies and too many things in the world that depend on Linux.
Good for you. You have been lucky. Me, I haven't been so lucky. For example, It has crached more than once for me when trying to shutdown Raspian. The stupid thing just waits and waits and waits for some process to shut itself down even when I have given the freaking "shutdown -h now" command! More than once I have tried to teach the damn thing by hacking it's horrible unit files that: "No, I want service X run after service Y, dammit!" How is hacking systemd unit files supposed to be easier than playing games with old System V style scripts? Horrible bugs (like the hacking your box remotely or denial-of-service attack), bloated and worst of all completely nondeterministic code.... all that running in PID 1 In a short: sysadmin nightmare! Some of their stories: https://twitter.com/systemdsucks But at least Lennart got p0wnie award https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/28/black_hat_pwnie_awards/
No to worry, we will have choice. I'm sure it will just be forked if an agreement can't be made - and surely they already have a plan in place for such a situation. Linux won't die, its everywhere and relied on by so many people...our whole world would collapse without it...there's just no way.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/17/linus_torvalds_apology/ As expected, GKH will temporarily take over maintainership.
This is a bad thing for many many reasons. First, the nonsense expectation for some sort of passive-aggressive "nice" language. There's no point polishing a **** Second, this is the beginning of the end of Linux. Mrk
No, I'm convinced that this won't happen. 1. Linus does not step down but takes a break. He had done that in 2005 already because of a burn-out - and yet Linux is still well and alive. 2. Even if it comes out that he steps down this will not be the end. There are too many companies involved, too much money invested and too much critical infrastructure depending on Linux to let that happen. Yes, someone is needed to canalize the input from the many developers. But I think that GKH is respected enough and has the authority to accomplish that. Besides, the new Code of Conduct might even attract new developers who shied away from the sometimes rude behaviour in the past.
Sad day.... Whether abusive behavior has been properly dealt with or not is a separate topic. The Code of Conflict covers that and provides a mechanism for redress. There’s no need to radically change its philosophy. Although the new Code of Conduct doesn't explicitly include in its adaptation of the Contributor Covenant that covenant's opposition to meritocracy, the new Code of Conduct's nose counting and other general reliances on that covenant, tacitly accepts it.
Linus Torvalds and Linux Code of Conduct: 7 myths debunked No, protesting programmers are not removing code from Linux; there are no purges of politically incorrect Linux kernel developers. And Linus Torvalds is coming back. September 25, 2018 https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-and-linux-code-of-conduct-myths/
I don't get his new lowly attitude. Do they have something on him? Possible. Was he threatened with a horse's head? hum... Is he being coy and has a secret plan? I hope that is it
Ah, I missed this, until the repost. As I posted there, HN had a good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060201 Here's my shot at a tl;dr. Some have been pushing for software-developer communities to adopt Codes of Conduct (CoC) to increase diversity. And to mitigate what they consider to be abuse, discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, and so on. Some members of such communities have responded insightfully. Linus being a noteworthy example. Others have responded defensively. They've characterized CoC advocates as pursuing an extreme and unjust agenda, and demanding self-censorship. And they've raised the specter that developers who were excluded through CoC could revoke licenses for code that they had contributed. As I understand it, much of the Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2. And some have argued that claims for copyright infringement might be viable in some jurisdictions, such as the US. However, there's not much precedent for such claims. Also, pursuing them would be expensive. Such claims are explicitly excluded under GPLv3, for what it's worth. But notwithstanding, there's the fact that excluded developers would likely stop contributing. Or at least, their contributions might not be welcome. I mean, will Linus be contributing during his "sabbatical"? And that itself could slow bug fixes and vulnerability mitigation. It's sad that it's come to this
Really looking forward to seeing what will happen if the developers withdraw their licenses to use their code. Quite fascinating that Linux never bothered upgrading to GPLv3 to prevent this from happening.
They'd need to do more than "withdraw their licenses". There are notice requirements and so on. Also, license withdrawal alone would likely accomplish nothing. They'd need to sue for infringement. Which would cost serious money, given how many former licensees there would be.
This is all just FUD, nothing to worry about. As Stallman has said they have no legal grounds to do so although in saying that even if they did find some loop hole, because it's open source they'll just fork the code and put it back in and these developers would have to prove in some form that it was damaging to their business and to open a legal case, it's all hypothetical - the chances are so remotely insignificant, nothings going to happen. Interesting to take note that the original post was done by a single anonymous user. Heck, you or I could post something like that if we wanted to.. there's no grounds to it. I'm with Joxx on here, this is just a lowly attitude to just bring things down fruitlessly. The wheels will keep on turning and we have so many things to look forward to and especially with all of the news of Proton and DXVK!.
Linus Torvalds is back in charge of Linux October 22, 2018 https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-is-back-in-charge-of-linux/
All geniuses seem a little quirky one way or another with linus being no exception lol. Every now and then we need time to focus on ourselves. Thanks for the update Mood!
