Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Kip's a very long time and skilled BSD hacker. The landlord episode is completely irrelevant to this subject.

the guy sawed through critical beams of a building that people were living in in order to make it unsafe and induce collapse. Then, when his family put up their life savings in order to bail him out before trial, he ran away to Italy and screwed his parents out of retirement.

At a minimum, he's a criminal sociopath who would correctly flunk the background check at a minimum wage fast food restaurant. Maybe ethics and morality and character don't matter to you when you install software, but they sure do matter to me when I install init systems.

Exactly. Thank you. Trust is the most important part of the social contract. Burn that, and someone like that should be DK'ed until they can prove otherwise.

Others quick to defend by attacking the messenger damaging their precious worldview is cognitive dissonance at work, but they should get their facts straight and know whom they're protecting before jumping over the holes in the floor.

I agree that people should get a second chance, but only when they earn back trust, otherwise it says whatever they can get away with is okay, as long as we benefit from their other work. It's not okay.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me"

I care about ethics in software, too, but only insofar as they extend to technical and political issues played with the software specifically. I wouldn't care if Lennart Poettering was a rapist, because that is irrelevant to the workings of systemd. I do care about his architectural vision and how he promotes it.

So, as long as he gives you aomething you use for free, you will make no judgement. Cool. What if the victim is your relative? Will you care? What if it is you? Should we care? I mean, we might use his software, why ahould we care about you?

Do you see how this affects every member of a society. Having a member of our society traumatized for life is not acceptable.

Code by itself isn't often very useful, the community around it is often far more valuable. It's hard to know if someone who's committed antisocial acts didn't leave landmines in code or is hard to work with when it comes to support of issues or community discussions.

Hans Reiser (reiserfs) is a murderer, and I think it's hard to justify working with someone like that.

It's hard to know if someone who's committed antisocial acts didn't leave landmines in code or is hard to work with when it comes to support of issues or community discussions.

No, I don't see how that follows at all. It's hard to know these things in general. Your adding of the qualifier "committed antisocial acts" is poisoning the well.

Paul Reiser (reiserfs) is a murderer

Hans Reiser.

And his being a murderer has no relation to the technical quality of the file system. That said, ReiserFS is largely dead, and Hans Reiser is in prison anyway, so you can't work with him even if you wanted to.

Minor issue, corrected.

Yes, I'm well aware. The leader of the FLDS still runs his town from prison, so you're wrong. For all we know, Hans is still coding on pencil and paper or on a computer.

The bigger issue: Should violent felons whom happen to produce something others value be embraced with blind, warm, happy-clappy love and trust? I think not.

embraced with blind, warm, happy-clappy love and trust

You sure do have very low standards if you think anything going on here is equivalent to "happy-clappy love and trust".

>Should violent felons whom happen to produce something others value be embraced with blind, warm, happy-clappy love and trust?

The person is not the code. Working code can be used and valued regardless of who contributed to it.

don't let the door hit you on the way out

The page referenced, refers to Matt Macy and not Kip. If it is the same person, then I disagree. One can't tell whether he would undermine any project he is on because he does not care about other people. That landlord episode was not a crime of passion where one can chuck it up to emotions at the time. Looks like something that was thought about and planned for an extended period of time. The landlords cared very little about how they were effecting their tenants lives.

Nope, read the article again. Here's an excerpt:

Kip Macy, 39, and his wife, Nicole Macy, also 39, were deemed "landlords of hell" by authorities for menacing the tenants of their San Francisco apartment building.

There are plenty of links about Kip and Nicole's adventures:

http://sfgate.com/crime/article/Landlords-from-hell-deal-inc...

http://huffpost.com/us/entry/3468487

The combination of antisocial, stupidity and passive-aggressive actions results in someone whom comes off as the worst kind of liability.

I'll let you take Kip and/or Nicole in as roommates, see how long that lasts.

I read the article. My only question was where Matt on the nextbsd page and Kip are the same person. I guess I could have searched first. Anyway this article seems to help indicate Kip and Matt of the nextbsd article are probably the same person:

http://gawker.com/383763/freebsd-developer-kip-macy-arrested...

Definitely not somebody I would want to associated with, work with on any project or be around. Even though he has served his time and could be a changed person, one would always wonder.

Wikipedia could be wrong, but it currently says Kip Macy is involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextBSD

And, indeed, kmacy commits show up https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD/commits/NextBSD-CURRENT

Of course commit names are like the email From: field without using git's commit gpg signature features, but it seems to point in that direction.

Same person.

The weaker road is to circle the wagons, my friend. Because someone seems good at something excuses criminal behavior through systematic harassment, intimidation, threats and attempted endangerment the lives of others? I think not. We should forget because of the slap on the wrist in San Quentin? I doubt it. But you would let him off the hook and forget about it, it's unimportant. Riight. That sort of behavior bleeds over because it makes a person a liability, rendering them untrustworthy for anything significant. Jeremy Clarkson was handled appropriately, Macy was not. As further evidence, I know of at least five (5) startups whom passed on about a dozen seemingly technical badasses for being too arrogant... capable but unable to mesh with various ventures. In a word: hubris. If a community's leadership doesn't consistently defend boundaries of civility, it's not going to endure because teams are fragile and cofounder/early participant squabbles kill more ventures/projects than anything else. Someone like that must prove beyond measure that they have changed, especially when others think no one's watching... Or they're just playing society for fools, again.

(The five startups all found exceptionally smart and nice early employees, and four of them exited in 7-8 figure territory. One combined with amother startup and pivoted.)

> because of the slap on the wrist in San Quentin

It's that kind of thinking that gets people thrown in prison for 30 years for non-violent drug crimes.

He went to prison, he didn't just get a fine and community service. I don't think that's a "slap on the wrist."

Then you agree with the unfairness. If a black person did this, they would get 30 years. End the War on Drugs and let many more of the mandatory minimum folks out, not just because it's costly, but because it's unjust.

But that's a distraction away from the seriousness of the crimes committed and the lack of punishment in this case. So it is indeed, comparatively, a slap on the wrist, compared to people serving much longer sentences for far, far less.

Edit: Solitary confinement is one of the worst forms of passive torture imaginable and most state prison systems deliberately abuse it on a routine basis... This should also end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com