Dhcpcd Will Need a New Maintainer
roy.marples.name
roy.marples.name
Cheers to all of the silent (and sometimes not so silent) people that continue to give of themselves to make this world a more wonderful place in their own little way. You all are awesome and we literally couldn't go on with our way of life without you.
But, my favorite Internet history book of all time is "IPng: Internet Protocol Next Generation" edited by Scott O. Bradner and Allison Mankin. It's about the development of what would become IPv6, and each chapter is written by a different engineer who was involved in the process. Some chapters were written for the book, and some chapters were publications/reports from the process.
Postel picked up the role of number coordinator because it needed to be done.
"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -Teller
Using his work as-is from upstream is just the path of least resistance. If nobody picks up dhcpd maintenance companies will have no problem carrying forks and more than likely the open source community will quickly converge around a future implementation.
This isn’t comparable to some sole manufacturer or anything like that. It’s similar instead to someone publishing blueprints for basic things and everyone using them because of time saved because redoing them from scratch is tedious and wouldn’t have much of a point.
Yes, they could change. But that would be something that had to be chosen, it's not automatic. I'm reminded of openssl: while it wasn't even unmaintained, it was "undermaintained" to the extent of critical security holes, and both the effort to fork it and simplify and the effort to replace with modern from-scratch versions have been a bit fraught.
(Perhaps the real rule as to who the "maintainer" of something like this is "who has to panic when a security hole is reported")
Sure all the big companies that relied on dhcpcd will rewrite it. But still the loss of one opensource project has a major impact on the economy. You mention the part of time saved by the company. Sure, but that goes longer than that.
For instance, in Android, since Android 6, they stopped using dhcpcd and decided to use their own DHCP client. 5 releases later, Android's DHCP client still don't support storing leases (or any feature that has less than 20% usage really). Sure that's just one packet, but the most user-deployed OS in the world has an additional RTT when connecting to WiFi, because of using internal DHCP client rather than a FLOSS-driven one.
Let's do back of the napkin computation: This adds like 0.5s when connecting. I'd say that personnally I'm connecting manually to WiFi (and thus wait for WiFi to connect) maybe once a week. K, worldwide I'd say once a month. There are 3B active Android devices. I'd say mean salary in those 3B is 1USD/h. If my computation is correct ( ((3*1000*1000*1000)*0.5*12)/3600 ), that makes a society cost of Android NOT using dhcpcd of 5M$ per year.
Now, let's go to the mirror successful part of dhcpcd, still at Google. Chromebooks are using dhcpcd as their DHCP client. Considering what happened on Android, I'll assume that if Chromebooks weren't using dhcpcd, they wouldn't use leases either. There are maybe 100M Chromebooks worldwide, but they are mostly centered in the US where salary is higher, but Chromebooks are mostly for students, so let's make it 5USD/h. But on a Chromebook you connect "manually" to WiFi every day (every time you open your laptop pretty much). That means that the existence of dhcpcd is a gain for society of 25M$ per year ( ( ((100*1000*1000)*0.5*365)/3600)*5 ).
So, yes, if nobody picks up dhcpcd maintenance, companies will have no problem carrying on. It doesn't mean that we, as a society wouldn't have lost a lot.
PS: I'm definitely not trying to put a price on Roy Marple's life. But if someone would try, it would be incredibly high.
> Sure all the big companies that relied on dhcpcd will rewrite it.
Unlikely. dhclient works just fine and carrying a fork of dhcpd will work just fine.
You’re missing my point. When you work on open source and end up with millions to billions of users, everything you do ends up having a huge monetary impact (guess how much Roy’s bugs have cost the economy in lost time). However, that’s just a side effect of software, not you being some unsung hero.
Tons of people need software that does X. Once one or two people have an open source solution to X, people can just use that and move on. That’s a good thing but it doesn’t mean that those one or two people are critical to anything. If they quit, fail, whatever, downstream dependencies will just swap and move on.
If not, are there other pieces you'd recommend?
[1]: https://a16z.com/2020/08/01/working-in-public-communities-op... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578675862/
How can we build a world where an infinite procession specialists like Roy can get the care they need and also find and train successors in their important work? Not just because we will all die, but also because we might all want to retire or go on long vacations or, even if we are good at it, change careers.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/CREDITS
(e.g. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/054c4610bd05)
Definitely worth the full scroll.
https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/10/announcing-latest-...
I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people.
I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time.
It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much better. At least capitalism filters out many of the people who shouldn't be helping others.
Helping those in need isn't something everyone should be doing. Not every needy person should be helped and helping others in desperate need incurs a mental cost that's not easy to carry.
But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. Just the way natural selection programmed us. "All basic needs are met <- conserve energy".
I can imagine a educational system where we prepare our children from childhood for UBI and it will work.
But given how rudimentary most education still is I don't see that happen anytime soon. Maybe in 100 years.
This is exactly the opposite of how people actually work people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Adversity especially insofar as fear of basic needs being met isn't inspiring it's stunting.
Anything else is a basic dysfunction in understanding people fed by survivorship bias. Imagine if you met someone who was sure that plant growth was maximized by periodically holding a lighter to one or another of the leaves because all the surviving plants had gone through that. Your understanding is every bit as ridiculous.
We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
Some people do. Many don't, they'll take that support and rest on it. Plenty of European Countries have UBI for all intents and purposes (free health care, housing, utilities, enough cash money for everything else including entertainment and communication). People don't excel, and plenty don't bother to contribute, because it's not necessary.
> We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
The kind of person who doesn't bother to contribute is probably the kind of person who would be contributing by making fries or checking you out at walmart. These contributions can be replaced by automation and nothing of value will be lost meanwhile some portion of the people will use their time that would have been thrown away at walmart to actually contribute.
If 90% of the team at walmart was replaced by robots and 10% found more meaningful ways to contribute it would be a net gain.
> You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
If you offered most people a poverty wage of 2k monthly and netflix and the opportunity to earn 2k + whatever they could earn in addition doing something with their life 90% would chose the latter given the option especially if free education were available to get from A to B. Most people want to feel their life is meaningful. If you don't understand that then you don't understand people in the slightest.
This is a false pursuit, and in a sense a vacuous statement.
You are never independent of society around you. You are in constant need of others doing that invisible and visible labor - in production and in services - to maintain your way of life.
It's only with Capitalism being the way it is that you need to "work your ass off" to not be financially dependent on your parents, or at the risk of a crisis and collapse upon losing your job etc.
The USA was still a capitalist society when the American dream was alive and well with a thriving middle class. Meanwhile nations with planned economies, abolished land ownership and worker owned means of production were starving and seeing general iniquity.
Now those protections that gave us a thriving middle class and general economic prosperity have been largely gutted and our government generally subverted.
My point is, the ills of a country are likely the cause of governmental failings and destabilization exploited by the ruling class of the system to entrench themselves and expand their interests at the expense of the general public, regardless of what that that system is. It can happen to any system of governance paired with any economic system.
I think we should be cleaning our government up and taking that power back, but that by putting the blame squarely on capitalism you're missing the forest for the trees. The problem is allowing whatever naturally formed ruling class in an economic and or political ecosystem from concentrating too much power, and potentially resources [1], in the first place.
[1] Though I'm skeptical of this but in so much as resources equate to power maybe it's necessary.
"Financial independence" != "independence from the society". No one claims to be independent of the society. One just does not have to earn money anymore.
I agree that money are worthless without places to spend them and someone producing stuff to buy. This does not make financial independence less useful though.
It isn't just a matter of “working hard”. Say you're a brilliantly capable developer for three months out of every year, have around four months of chronic pain and bad mental health unpredictably breaking up the remaining time. Unless you're wealthy, capitalism doesn't let you get to a situation where your bad mental health doesn't disrupt that five month stretch where you could be doing worthwhile things – even if you would make enough money in those three months to support yourself, when most of it's going into paying off the debt you got into because you lost your job and had to eat, it's difficult to do so.
Think this is a bit much? Okay, how about this: you're in jail on suspicion of committing some crime or other. This lasts 1½ weeks, before they realise that no, actually, you weren't guilty. But in the meantime, you've lost your job, and without the savings you'd usually gather prior to job-hopping… what then?
You might've worked really, really hard to get where you are. For many, working really, really hard simply isn't enough.
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¹: “Capitalism” here is shorthand for “society being structured under the assumption that capitalism is a fully-general ideal solution for allocating all resources, and there are only a handful of narrow examples where it makes sense to do something else”. There's nothing inherent to capitalism that causes these things, any more than a chainsaw is responsible for felled trees. But this is pedantry, so I kept it out of the first sentence.
It makes no sense that, with all the excess industrial supply that we have today, that we refuse to provide a basic minimum standard of living for all human beings.
Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet.
So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any public money on because the interventions are so expensive compared to success rates? It's really not a simple set of decisions to make, and those decisions do need to be made (or more to the point: agreed upon).
What an improvement.
Plenty of countries have both a public and private insurance options.
61% couldn't shell out $1000 if their life depended on it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/just-39percent-of-americans-...
If little johnny needs a 150k operation and the insurance says no he's going to die and they can't all pay into each others go fund me. The economics just don't work out.
Also virtually nobody has suggested outlawing cash payments for services. That idea is much outside of the mainstream as believing that the earth is flat. Pretending that is what socialized medicine is, is a straw man.
They are 2 ways to cost pool neither suggests or requires the elimination of cash payment.
If we perfected artificial hearts, for example, and they cost some nominal amount (less than a typical car, for example), we still wouldn't implant them in 102 year-olds. I'd argue against that implant for my parents, myself, and in the unlikely event I'm around then, for my kids.
I don't live under NHS, but the calculations they do, while often the subject of finger-wagging, seem entirely sensible to me.
In countries like Australia, where drug companies have to negotiate a fair price with a single government agency, the cost of treatment is an order of magnitude lower.
MRI machines are not expensive because of "patents". They are expensive because they are expensive devices that utilize superconducting magnets which need a constant supply of liquid helium.
Various drugs are expensive because (regardless of patents) there aren't enough patients to justify mass-production, so the price stays high. Sometimes even with mass production drugs are hard enough to make that the price still stays high.
Doctors are not cheap to train, so their services will always be expensive until we replace them with robots.
There are a plethora of reasons why medicine and healthcare is expensive beyond "patents" – remove patents from the equation and you can still easily spend millions per patient for various diseases.
Of course, if these treatments are more common at the same price, the social costs might be too high and we'd have to let people live or die depending on their financial situation or ability to fundraise.
There are some drugs that require the doctor to make a case for it - but thats a fairy routine matter. You do hear of people flying overseas for a special treatment (mainly experimental) thats not yet here, that isn't covered.
Edit: an example - I had a checkup last year, got a bunch of tests done - total out of pocket for me was $30 or so, all the blood tests are free. The $30 was for the doctor, if I wanted to shop around there are free doctors that just charge the schedule price. I had to get an MRI about 7 years ago, now I could have waited, or got it in the hospital, but I chose to get it at a clinic, cause I wanted to get out of the hospital (which was free) - out of pocket was $800 for that.
There is a government advisory committee called PBAC which advises the government on whether to pay for certain drugs. There have been cases where PBAC refuses to fund a new drug because it doesn't see the benefit as worth the cost. For example, suppose there is a new cancer drug which costs $100,000 a patient, and on average extends the patient's life by 3 months. PBAC will likely say it isn't worth it for taxpayers to pay $100,000 to extend a person's life only by 3 months.
To give another example, in the public health system, there are a certain number of ECMO machines available. Given the limited number, they can't just leave patients on ECMO indefinitely. Sometimes they will take a patient off because the probability of survival is low and there is another patient needing one with a higher probability of survival. But, if you look at patients with low survival probability, most of them will die even with treatment, but a small minority may have nonetheless survived yet now that you are withdrawing treatment they won't. However, we cannot know who will be in that small minority, and society isn't willing to spend unlimited resources on trying to save people's lives against the odds.
The most expensive drugs are rarely needed by many people. The big one recently is a drug to treat Hep C, at about A$22000 a patient (but possibly saving years of dialysis) and a macular degeneration treatment (what price do you put in vision?).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-12-01/australias-mos...
From someone on the PBSAC: https://www.nps.org.au/australian-prescriber/articles/the-ch...
It isn't so much the cost, but whether they actually work, or are any better than other treatments.
Prices being high or things being expensive (both subjective terms that are hardly useful in this context) aren't a universal truth. Generally, a nation-organised and at least partially managed medial healthcare system costs less and delivers better results than a free-for-all corporations-decide system.
"Cheaper" =/= "cheap".
The "private prescription price" is the un-subsidised cost that people not covered by Medicare (e.g. foreign residents) pay. The discounted PBS price is what regular residents pay, the concession price is for people on low incomes or pensions.
Even un-subsidised, you're typically looking at a price 80% lower than what people in the US pay. With subsidies, it's closer to 90-95% less. This has nothing to do with manufacturing costs - manufacturing in Australia is more expensive. It's entirely because our government doesn't allow pharmaceutical companies to profiteer from their IP to the obscene extent that the US government does, and we've had a right-leaning government for 19 out of the last 25 years.
My training as an anaesthesiologist has cost the taxpayer roughly 2 million AUD from medical school to specialist qualification. The direct cost to me? About $75,000 AUD.
Some treatments are expensive and futile. We aren’t compelled to offer them. We do have to prioritise treatments and triage patients, resources are not unlimited. By the same token, no-one is denied care on the basis of age or ability.
Many patients suffer from too much medical intervention, and I am extremely grateful that I almost never feel compelled to perform treatments that don’t benefit patients.
So yes you have a point in that especially in the US the dollar amounts attached to treatments aren't necessarily indicative of the effort involved. Treating their argument charitably though, as a species we have finite capacity, and "spend millions per patient" is a linguistic shorthand for "we don't have enough resources to evenly distribute this level of care to everyone."
That argument isn't infallible (e.g., it's pretty easy to get a majority to agree on upper and lower bounds for such an idea, so picking a number in between might still be reasonable), but it's much more interesting to pick apart the thing they're trying to say rather than the exact words they used.
I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make.
My Mum in Australia had a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer, discovered at stage four.
She had almost three years of radiation, chemo, all the associated drugs, scans, treatments and even two different trial drugs.
She never paid a cent, all of it on Australia's standard "heathcare for all".
If Australia and many other countries can manage it, then more countries can too.
Anything less is just an excuse.
The decision is simple for you, because it's your mom. The decision is not a simple one for a society.
We do not yet live in a post-scarcity world. Spending on one thing by necessity means less spending on something else.
Edit: if you don't like it you can always pay for private education - it to is partially government funded.
Your argument is only sound in the hypothetical case.
This is objectively true. There is nothing hypothetical about it.
Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost structure is an immutable condition as opposed to being the result of a system designed by the worlds dumbest,greediest,least worthy democracy to ever exist.
To clarify what I'm trying to say is that because of the nature of physics warmth which is to say energy is a scarce quantity and will always be so but in the context of making sure everyone is warm its almost always very simple there actually IS enough to go around despite it being scarce. The same thing is true of food.
We cannot afford infinite degrees of effort per patient but what we can afford is more than what most would consider sufficient.
Why don't we? Because of so many people who point out the unfairness of someone who's not working at all getting housing for free from the government, when so many working people are struggling to house themselves.
So there's perhaps other unfairness at work there that people are unwilling to look at how solve (why is housing so expensive, relative to wages? why do we expect people to work 2-3 jobs and have no leisure time, no time to relax, just to satisfy the basic needs of survival?), and that alone seems to have boxed people into a system where we're jailing people and leaving them out in the elements, even though it costs us all more in the long run.
Where health care is concerned, what bothers me most is how outrageously expensive US care is for its outcomes, compared to every other western nation. That doesn't seem right, and doesn't seem like a good use of our society's money or human effort, expending so much money on systems that could easily be made unnecessary -- like medical billing and the mass of health care insurers.
(And then I had an ex whose father is a doctor, a GP, who lived a very nice life, and insisted that he deserved that...when I asked him what he thought about how doctors in other countries aren't so richly compensated, he only responded, "hey I went to med school, I deserve this," and he too couldn't conceive of a different ordering of things, because...I'm guessing here...his mind went to the couple of new cars in the driveway of his massive house in a tony suburb of an expensive east coast city, and how, had he had less, he might have just one new car instead of two...but that's a speculation on my part. I wasn't inside his head.)
[0] https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/05/san-francisc...
I'd love to see your math on this.
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland
You see the narrative today being that whites don’t deserve what they have. Whites don’t deserve their hard work because it was built on empire building and slavery and privilege. To me, this is being set up to cripple capitalism, pretending that the hard work capitalism encourages is somehow false or fake.
Yes, UBI would solve your problem in the short term. However, I think proponents of UBI are deviously attempting to downplay capitalism’s benefits and entirely hiding UBI’s drawbacks when society is no longer as well off (e.g. during wars)
I challenge you to find one post (with positive score) on HN with such a narrative. And besides, it's incredibly strange how you shoehorn race into this discussion.
> entirely hiding UBI’s drawbacks when society is no longer as well off (e.g. during wars)
So we should not have UBI during good times because if the nation collapses it would not work? I can come up with plenty of things that don't work when society is no longer well off, but it's unclear what bearing that has on whether they are solving problems in the present day...
Would it be better than what we have now? Possibly! I’m fairly confident a real social safety net would be better. Or tight regulations around all that liquidity in the market, presumably pulled from elsewhere in the public coffers. At the end of the day it still sounds like wealth redistribution away from properly funded public works.
I mean, it should be less guilt-y of course (I'm not in marketing) and somehow capture it's _society_ finally paying for the things generated by free/underpaid labor, not individual citizens, and not imply that people have been selfish etc.
I like the spin on seeing this from a new marketing angle, new framing.
That’s the entire federal tax revenue consumed by UBI. So you need to double everyone’s income tax to get back to even.
Of course there is evidence giving people free stuff improves their lives. The problem is that’s an insane amount of money that has to come from somewhere.
To put that in context, the top 1% have an aggregate wealth in the US of about 34 trillion. So we could take all of the net worth from doctors, lawyers, business owners, CEOs, FAANG employees, etc and pay for this for about 10 years. Then we’re left with consuming the middle class and then we’ll just be out of wealth period.
There is just no reasonable explanation for how this will be paid for. Even wealthy countries favorable to socialist policies (e.g. Norway) have nothing like UBI.
Let me turn the question to you. What makes you think UBI is sustainable? You have to have some pretty damn good evidence when you’re betting the entire federal government budget on it.
“Redistribute from workers” is a cutesy way to make it sound like it’s just coming from some excess cache reserve. No such reserve exists. For the numbers to work out, this needs to come from the middle class’s income as well as the rich. There isn’t enough wealth, let alone income, at the 1% level to even scratch the surface on these proposals.
No, actually I mentioned it because I thought you skipped out on the fact that money isn't a static amount which we drain out with UBI in this quote:
>To put that in context, the top 1% have an aggregate wealth in the US of about 34 trillion. So we could take all of the net worth from doctors, lawyers, business owners, CEOs, FAANG employees, etc and pay for this for about 10 years.
So I wanted to have a different measurement which took how much we produce into account.
But thanks for assuming I'm arguing in bad faith, lol.
You can’t print your way to GDP. If you’re suggesting the government just issue the extra money without funding it, you’re just diluting everyone’s existing money because you haven’t increased the production of the economy. Constant issuance of amounts this big needs to be funded or the massive amount of demand for the same fixed amount of goods and services will just cause hyper inflation.
And if you’re arguing that giving people UBI will make them work more and not less (enough to account for the GDP loss), that’s a pretty extraordinary claim that hasn’t been backed up by any ongoing UBI experiments.
> But thanks for assuming I'm arguing in bad faith, lol.
I’m not. I’m pointing out the incredible road block for UBI and you’re refusing to address it. It would fundamentally alter the economy to become the highest taxed of any first world countries and we would have the largest monetary entitlements per capita ever. Nothing like this has ever worked, none of the communist/socialist states (even at their peaks) gave out this much in income.
People who are against UBI are concerned with that. It has nothing to do with lack of empathy.
The problem with UBI is that it’s not solving a particular problem so there are no efficiencies to be gained. Like if we wanted to solve housing, we could have the Army go out and build houses at scale and the per house costs could be quite low. No such economies of scale come into play with UBI.
You’ll find more support for federal government built housing and federal government provide food than you will for UBI when the reality sinks in of what you’re asking the middle class to sacrifice.
BTW, people in the 1% don’t hoard money, that’s a... financially stupid thing to do. They buy shares in companies and other assets. So there is a lot less money supply trapped up in wealthy peoples’ banks than you would think.
UBI would likely replace most welfare programs, so that'd just be moving budget around. I'm finding a bunch of numbers for US welfare spending, some of them not really consistent with others, but welfare spending is easily over $1T per year.
I would absolutely be in favor of adding more (higher) marginal tax brackets to help with any further shortfall. That 1%er $34T cash hoard you mention is built through income, which can be taxed more. I'd also be in favor of a wealth tax. Top 1% is probably too wide for something like that, but a sub-5% wealth tax (perhaps taxed progressively, as with income) even on the top 0.1% or 0.01% would likely net a big chunk of change that could be put to useful work, vs. sitting around in some management fund for someone's great-great-great-great-great grandchildren to spend, assuming we haven't collapsed our financial system by then.
Rather than phased out the idea is usually that everyone gets exactly the same UBI (thus removing overhead and friction associated with existing welfare schemes) but it is cancelled out for the wealthy by an additional/increased regressive income tax.
Frankly, this view is the major divide between conservative and liberal. And, it'll directly affect all practical implementations such as giving everyone free money. It's also profoundly philosophical in questioning the essence of the soul, so most people like to get unphilosophically political (which is like trying to make software without knowing a language).
The difference then is in motivations. Are you motivated to make UBI work or aren't you? Those that are believe that fundamentally, our society must be able to bear it. We know we have the total wealth generated to support it, sot he rest is an implementation detail. If you prioritize it as a key aspect of a successful human-orientated society, it is achievable.
The people that are against UBI are not psychopaths. But they ultimately do not believe in the idea and use costs and other such concerns to justify not moving towards that direction. The reasons why they don't support it can be diverse, but mostly it comes down to a lack of empathy for others. They truly feel that others do not deserve help or support, and base the rest of their beliefs around it.
I think if you reread your post closely, you would see the circular reasoning. You've assumed that UBI is a policy with positive outcomes, as part of your argument for why folks should support UBI. That's "begging the question" (the classical meaning of it).
I have a lot of empathy for others. Enough so that I'm unwilling to back polocies that I expect will cause more overall suffering in the long term.
Framing it as “finally paying for something you’ve been getting for free” is an amazing way to kill it because you’re paying to support drunks, spouse abusers, racists, etc. That will immediately lead to discussions about criteria to receive it and it will no longer be UBI.
I don't have any well formed opinions about UBI and I believe myself to be open-minded about it.
I do, however, think that GSE/WSB is going to push it back outside the overton window.
Nobody in power - across the broad political spectrum, from Feinstein to McConnell and everyone in between - is going to sign us up for more of that.
If I was super rich or in power I could gather and pay a group of average people to make dhcpcd financially driven, but I can’t see that working.
> I have been dealing with cancer for some time and sadly the treatment has not worked. My life expectancy is now fairly short.
I'm not sure what to say in response, since I don't know Roy. Though the prognosis is bad, nothing is certain. I hope he and his family gets as much time as possible.
Very sad to hear, even though (especially because?) I have never heard of Roy before now but have used dhcpcd for many years. I hope he gets as much time as possible, and enjoys what he has left.
I hope he gets as much time as possible. Immunotherapies are improving all the time.
Generic cancer treatment in the US, with a few exceptions, was already a horrifying, barbaric affair: unless you have a cancer treatable with newer genetic or immune methods, it's still approached with cut, burn, and poison, like it's been for many decades, with varying results.
Add to that a constant battle at every step with insurance for pre-authorization pitting your doctor against a corporation, then fight against oppressive rules for pain management, all possibly while a family struggles to care for the sick person and worry about going to work to pay for it all.
I can't imagine adding covid into the horror. Best of luck to anyone facing this.
Same here... I lost my dad to cancer at the height of the first lockdown, and it was really painful to overhear the oncologists that were treating him holding passionate conversations about covid and nothing else. The nurses were obviously overworked and did nothing else than provide morphine. Cannot complain about the professionalism of the care he received, given the circumstances. But I feel that I could have spend a few weeks more with him if he had fallen ill at a different time.
I read that post too, going from a tiny undetectable bump under the skin that only his partner noticed, to unbearable pain pressing against his spine making him unable to sleep and think clearly.
It seems like 4 months were wasted just getting appointments.
If you're an american, remember that FMLA only lasts a quarter, so if you can go back to work after the surgery but before the chemo i strongly suggest you do that if there's any concern about insurance or whatever, since you're probably going to want to sleep for the first few weeks worth of chemo dosing. Good luck to 1/2 of the american population, because that's the rate of cancer in the US.
That's the NHS "free" healthcare at play.
Remember, you get what you pay for!
Does it, though? Is there anything that suggests the mental state of the patient is a factor in the efficacy of treatment?
Pieter Hintjens has written a bit against the "fight" model.
This was simply about the user experience itself. A dramatic way of saying that people grasp for hope, not that "beating cancer" requires glimmers of hope, only that the "user experience of cancer" involves the patient/host/victim grasping for them. I'm surprised you read it any other way, but I can see how, yeah this definitely wasn't one of those unquantifiable "beat cancer because they're a strong fighter [and everyone else that didn't was a useless weak wimp that gave up]" voodoo posts. His blog post was one of those glimmers of hope. It is predictable that people do that because they have nothing else. No more, no less.
The point is that deep down he still knew the odds and that his mortality was still in question.
Its "the last good day", a trope in cancer, where things seem normalizing and improving, but you don't know its the last good day.
Unfortunately the UK health system is struggling with the huge COVID overload. It's one of the additional tragedies in countries with high infection rates: the acute care for COVID patients also decreases the care for all other illnesses.
Immunotherapy came from left field as a cancer therapy - and for stage 4 cancers, the 4/5-year survival rate is much better than control groups - about 50%.
Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel prize in medicine for their work in cancer immunotherapy.
There's an interesting documentary on Jim Allison's work - see https://www.breakthroughdoc.com/ (for USA PBS viewers: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/jim-allison-breakt..., for TVOntario viewers: https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/jim-allison-breakthr...)
Even though I'll never meet Josh from Spamgourmet his work continues to make my life a little bit easier on an almost daily basis. I hope Roy's legacy is able to continue in the same way and that he gets some comfort from that.
Despite having only months to live, Josh was working on a plan to shut the site down in an orderly fashion as long as he was still able to notify all users, but then his son stepped in and took over part of the operation.
My heart goes to maintainer & family.
Everybody in this forum needs to do a bit.
Request everybody to donate generously via paypal mentioned in the link.
'Dhcpd will need a new maintainer' - doesn't tell the real story.
https://opensource.org/node/840 https://www.beavandenberk.com/ip/computer-internet/developin...
As someone else commented in this thread, would be surprised if anyone could find a higher quality alternative. This one is free, open-source, written by a volunteer, not by a company nor by any organization that accepts money derived from online ad sales.
It is unfortunate you are dealing with this. I am so sorry and hope for the best. The Handshake founders had an airdrop pre allocated for you in the Handshake Blockchain [1] so there is about $64,000.00 in there that you can claim under marples.name as of writing.
It seems to be mostly automated/algorithmic.
It's a stupid cryptocurrency, sure, but insinuating bad motives is probably incorrect here. He just seems to like the crypto.
It is entirely ethical to use free software, even to generate massive profits, without paying anyone anything. That's literally the whole point of software freedom: you're free.
Definition of ethical
1 : of or relating to ethics
// ethical theories
2 : involving or expressing moral approval or disapproval
// ethical judgments
3 : conforming to accepted standards of conduct
// ethical behavior
Definition of moral (Entry 1 of 2)
1a : of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior : ETHICAL
// moral judgments
b : expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior
// a moral poem
c : conforming to a standard of right behavior
// took a moral position on the issue though it cost him the nominationI think that we can all agree that blowing people up with bombs is dickish behavior, and yet the software that has been released with otherwise-free licenses that prohibit its use in such bombing systems has been rejected by the free software community as nonfree.
The idea behind free software is that no other party gets to tell you what you can or can't do with it, such as "make money without donating anything upstream", "bomb children", or any other such thing.
Developers impose the license. If they don’t want it used by corporations freely it’s trivial for them to say so. You’re implying that the developers are encouraging dickish behavior by doing what they want with their software.
I write open source software. I don’t want my users means tested by the moral brigade to determine they should have coughed up money. I put it out there to literally prevent people from wasting humanity re-inventing the wheel.
It’s right in the damn license. If you want to create an obligation, stay the fuck out of the open source community.
The "fucking point of open source" was, in part, that "free software" didn't send the right message and that we needed a new term that didn't imply "free as in beer".
Open collaboration and the freedoms to fix/modify/distribute the software you own doesn't conflict with the idea that maybe megacorps benefiting from it should chip in a little towards the maintenance of the thing they're making megabucks off.
> I did not accept this. I have young kids to watch grow up and a loving wife to grow old with. Life and time are the two most precious commodoties we will ever have.
As sorry as I am that his hopes were futile, time and again the universe shows us how little it cares for these sentiments.
Regardless of what resources one might have to protest, we are all slowly ground to dust.
Compilers change, system libraries change, operating systems change, build systems change, language standards change and so on - and you, who just wanted to write, say, a DHCP server you or your organization needed at some point in life, tear yourself away from your day job, your family, your current pursuits and interests - which have likely not included fiddling with that old piece of code you wrote all those years ago - and bringing it in line what the current state of things.
Sisyphic work, which is usually rewarded mostly with complaints about why the thing is not up to date. "But they only just broke it! Do you expect me to spend my time also anticipating what infernal subtle ways the rug is going to get pulled from under me?" ... but you never tell people that.
You dutifully write your fix and re-publish (which can also be a bunch more work, since the platforms for publishing your FOSS project also change).
I salute you, Roy Marples!
(and I donated.)
I don’t know Roy but feel so sorry for him and his family.
I really hope he doesn't have trouble withdrawing the funds. Paypal is known for freezing funds, sometimes for years.
From their email:
> On March 16, 2021, you sent a payment (xxxxxxxxxx ) for the amount of $xxxxx for "DHCP and DHCPd were significant in my early career. Best wishes." Please provide the following information: > > • An explanation of the reference to "DHCP ." > • The purpose of this payment, including a complete and detailed explanation of what is intended to be paid for.
Such a sad message.
Roy talked about the cancer in January: https://roy.marples.name/blog/posts/cancer/
That being said, NHS sqhing they can't do anything for him doesn't mean nothing at all can be done! What happened to personalized medicine? What about the mRNA approach which seems promising?
I know, personalized medicine is expensive, but I bet some here on HN could easily finance such an approach and help this man out.
But do we have a new maintainer? Also donate if you can — cancer is expensive.
I’ll try web
I've been using his software for decades, and I'd really like to thank him and support his family. I remember how much better of an experience it was to use dhcpcd rather than pump. He made my life better without realizing it.
Why is regular chemotherapy not tried? Immunotherapy is very specific, it might not work.
Donation sent.
Thanks.