Lucio, man, you are a comic genius. > On 18. Aug 2021, at 6.55, Lucio De Re <lucio.d...@gmail.com> wrote: > > You bought the "exceptionalism" Kool-Aid, lock, stock and barrel, > haven't you? It's a question of size: a small code base should remain > small, then it is not weaponisable or monetisable. So we raise the bar > higher and higher and shake off whatever can't stick hard enough. A > human natural instinct (more!, gimme more! features! bugs! anything so > I can have bigger, faster!) bent to the interest of elites (here in > Africa we know it as the Big Man Syndrome).
No. Instead, I argue (being involved in OSS and communities for nearly 25 years at this point), diversity builds strength. New tools are always good, especially when well made and optional. Drop in replacements to standard ones are amazing and push toward innovation. Overhauls of core functionality or extending even the kernel [although tricky at times] can lead to massive leaps in the usefulness of the system. How is Plan 9 different, now that it is open source and developed entirely by volunteers? Linux is easy to point to for examples… Having mulitiple configuration/boot managers (init, systemd, uselessd, etc.) allows individual distributions (as well as users) make choices about ease vs. cleanliness, kitchen sink vs. sharp tool. It also puts accountability for the bigger one [systemd] not be as much of a bloated mess as it was a few years back, since more users = more distros = more people demanding it not to be an inefficient Rube Goldberg machine. And tools die or are replaced over time. 8 1⁄2 was the standard in Plan 9, but due to it’s limitations and quirks, a new one was written from scratch. Now we, 30 years later, are arguing that every line of code handed down from our honoured and sainted forebears is gospel truth? Really? Even if we are looking at minimalism, we can have evolution, variety and change over time. Even beyond suckless.org <http://suckless.org/> “suckless” tools there are quite a few derivatives that operate on similar principals. There is a dmenu replacement (rofi) that is a little fatter than the base compile, but is actually a cleaner, tighter implementation if you typically run various patches and adding to dmenu. Is it better? Maybe. Its is less minimalist? Not if you frequently add other search patches to dmenu. Is it a choice? Sure. Will over time one win out over the other? Who knows. I think what you are confusing is that since I (and many others, whether on the 9front side or no) want to see Plan 9 evolve and grow, that somehow that will ruin *your* Plan 9. That is the same argument political conservatives make about all sorts of things about society. They fear change and fear that any growth, modification, or democratisation of these things will lead to corruption or degeneration [often seen as “degeneracy” in political/societal contexts]. Instead, I argue that you keep 9legacy or 9miller or whatever you *personally* feel is “pure” and godly enough and let people build this. Even in the thread you seem to articulate a tension between liking Demetrius’ cool work [or insistence on other people porting patches for 9legacy for you^H^H^Hthe community in the past] and wanting a definitive body for absolute blessing of features/code changes/etc. If Demetrius releases the Oath tool in it’s finished form in the near feature and it is awesome, need it being included in the default install of any Plan 9? Could be it a standalone package or patch for some and built into others? Also, what would it *mean* to have an approving body for One Plan 9. Does that mean that people like cinap, ori, or sigrid [who frequently contribute to 9front as well as releasing independent tools and software] are beholden to some committee decision? Do you understand how Open Source works? Accusations of “exceptionalism” are completely unfounded, since I like the idea of people having preferences and different workflows. acme exists, so should we delete sam? No, cos sam is better for some things and for some people. Should someone rework sam to not have the annoying double snarf buffer thing [because, as I recall, Rob Pike wanted to hack around potential lag between the term and a remote sam instance and never went back to it]? I think probably. The only bias I have is toward newer code, to be honest. Not new features, but new takes. New fixes. New implementations that allow for flexibility of use that were most likely never conceived of initially. The Plan 9 team at Bell Labs (or Lucient) never had a problem monkeying with the guts of the OS [still sticking to their guns regarding minimalist design sensibilities], but now, for whatever reason, that needs to be tamped down or highly controlled? Hell, there are cool things I wish were 9front [unless they were snuck in], like some of sigrid's keyboard system tweaks and theming hacks. Or mycroftiv’s extra namespace aliasing stuff from ANTS. > Do you have incontrovertible evidence? In my caffeine-deprived state, > I feel you're just following the sheep gospel, no offence intended. In > my opinion, the trap is always there, ready to be deployed. And the > masses are always ready to fall into it. Occasionally a Christ figure > comes along to warn us, but only the elite can understand the message > and of course they then distort it in the direction that suits them > best. And the masses are none the wiser, not this time, not the next > time, not any other time, because the elite can be swapped out > entirely and the new elite becomes them, ad nauseam. Sheep gospel? As opposed to the goats being flung into Hell? Likely this phrase is more endemic to your lexical community, but as a native English speaker, it’s not clear, so I will first extrapolate what I *think* you mean by “sheep gospel” and refute. It seems what you are critiquing [taking into consideration the prior paragraph you wrote] is that you are critical of my position because you feel that me (or others), in some sort of cargo cult mentality, are imposing some sort of outside hegemony of values [bigger, better, more corporate, more “user-friendly”, more commoditatizable]. This is opposed to the small purity of message of the insular community that exists for this clearly not mainstream, commodity OS. Ok. Weird. But then the idea is that I or others are putting ourselves as some elite? What? Not that you know or care, butI’m an anarcho-syndicalist, man. If me saying I want everyone to having their own power and everyone to have a voice and that divergent software is “voted upon” by use (rather than mandate by a person or a single committee) is somehow elitist and crypotfascist, well, I don’t know what to say. > Sure, and an infinite variety of vehicles with wheels at the four > corners and seats that just occupy space and consume carbon-based > fuels. Even EVs where each wheel could be both motor and power > generator have retained that ridiculous formula. But they look > different (sort of, there's greater difference in time than there in > style). Oh, let's not ignore that autos also sit idle (my estimate) > 95% of their life: is that what they are designed for? And the AI in > my phone, is that also sitting idle? I had a couple of instances > recently where in the middle of the night my password locked Samsung > J5 decided to continue reading me the SF short story collection I > turned off before going to sleep. I am clearly lost here. Yes. There are cars. Not sure what your point is, Lucio, but I will use this as a teaching opportunity. Cars basically have to just replace horse-drawn wagons. Move people. Move stuff. Ride on roads. Over the years [excepting for government imposing certain health or safety regulations], the adaptations of the cars have been mostly to optimise performance, although a fair bit has also gone to luxury. Standardization between brands have been by convention/convenience/etc. not by a committee deciding things. Since it is a physical good, there are certain constraints less applicable than software and since they are commodity items, made for profit, they are other pressures. But in the end, it was not in the interest of anyone to have one standard. And standards that exist [fuel types, belt sizes, oil weights, ranges of tire sizes, etc.] are more like rough agreements to optimise variety with manufacturing costs. Too few options would railroad designs and applications, too many it would not be viable to manufacture. Even when standards are set, but everyone is open to manufacture, use dictates success. Take the A cell battery. Or the B cell. You can probably source specialised ones somewhere, but AA and AAA were more useful for smaller devices and C & D for larger handheld devices that didn’t need high output [like a lantern battery]. Funny enough, cars *are* optimised for being idle. It takes a long time for a battery to go flat from being idle. The outside paint, trim, etc. is designed to last relatively well in a variety of climates so that they don’t always need to be garaged or in a car port. Defrosters/defoggers are there because it is understood the damn thing may be cold with a breathing person in it or be frozen over. It kicks on the AC as well, to pull moisture out of the air, even if it is warmed immediately after. > But Android is Open Source, isn't it? I can look under the bonned, can't I? Open Source and Android is debatable. Also Open Source depends on license. Android’s OS license is not a free license. Even Lucient’s license was pretty damn free and now it is MIT for Plan 9. We are at this point comparing apples to oranges. > Well, the P9F is what it is. It will also become what it is naturally > attracted to unless some boundaries - Trump's fence? - are put in > place. I argue that from their charter and description, they are there to promote the technology rather than impose a roadmap or gatekeep. If more people discover Plan 9 and find X and Y distributions more useful than Z, then cool. I think part of that mission would be promoting diversity of multiple “Plan 9” OSes and derivatives. > I'm going to leave this here, with a comment to the effect that I > totally disagree with the sentiments. There is room, need is not a > strong enough word for what I'm thinking, for creativity, but software > is not a primordial soup out of which complex organisms will rise to > take over the Universe and consume it out of existence, its and > theirs. Yeah, it pretty much is, except you have humans with cool ideas directing it. And with that you promote the humans to do cool stuff with it as they please. Plan 9 has always been a playground for creating new things and questioning how we can do computing in better ways. > More likely, we'll teach - by example, not intentionally, no - our AI > products to weaponise the tools we are no longer sufficiently > naturally intelligent to understand and control (tell me there's a > difference) and turn us into slaves because, like the human elite, > they will measure their worth in what they can accumulate (human > slaves sounds like a neat currency to me, I could use some, it's > worked in all of human history - ask Epstein), just like their > creators did. What?! How did you get here?! Epstein? Human slaves? > Nothing to do with Plan 9, of course, because it really is just a drop > of accidental sanity in an ocean of greed and competition. But, to > complete the imagery, I'd rather be plankton in a drop of Plan 9 than > a shark in the Linux Ocean. And I am, to the extent that I support and > most of all appreciate what makes my ecosystem continue to tick. > Including any contributions by like-minded or antagonistically natured > geniuses. I instead see Plan 9 as something that can grow to be a mainline development platform for more users. Not for the masse, per se. It does have some promise for modern grid/distributed computing. Hell, much of what is in the Linux space in that regard was modelled after it [although implemented more hamfistedly]. I’m not some dumb kid. I am in my 40s and have been in software dev my entire adult life [and admittedly before that as well]. Even though Plan 9 as a legacy artefact handed down from Bell and Lucent is outdated, it has so much value [albeit it may be in limited scope compared to Linux, for example] that can be recovered. I think may of the people who are excited about it see the same thing. And for me, and may other peers here, railroading into a singular “official” manifestation will do more to stifle growth, experimentation and creativity than to enrich it. Cheers, -pixelheresy > Lucio. > > PS: I have a lot of time to think and unfortunately not the means to > study beyond a rather narrow subject matter. So my opinions are much > more the result of introspection than of universal knowledge. Take it > for what it is. > > PPS: There is always an elite, its job is to defeat by all means > available a middle class whose "elite nouveau" continually attempts to > replace it, by any means available to it. Everything revolves around > who owns the masses. That's Western Civilisation in a nutshell. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T6899bf3f0654295d-M916eb14bfc08b38e33e93158 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
