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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Cray/HPE, presumably, has a contract to provide support to the customer with nuclear weapons. If this fix is necessary to that contract, Cray/HPE should set the bounty needed to get it done as part of the necessary cost of fulfilling their contract (if they didn't figure it in, and it's not a cost-plus contract, and it cuts into the profit margin, well, that's the risk you take with fixed-cost contracting.) Free Software may often tend to be free-as-in-beer as well as free-as-in-speech but, where it is, that is as is. If you have special, and especially time-sensitive, needs that aren't as is, you pay someone to do it. It's not a gratis support contract with response time guarantees. As Cray/HPE ought to be well aware, that kind of support is expensive, and doesn't happen if no one is paying.

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Very well written.

This feels like the log4j conversation all over again. Cray/HPE knows what the problem is, and they know the developers aren't being paid to fix the bug, the customer is hounding them, not the original developers. This is their problem to solve, they don't get to pretend that it's someone else's fault that they're too cheap to shell out the money for proper maintenance.

If this was a bug in Cray/HPE's own internal software, they would pay a developer to fix it. It's wild as a company to assume that because you're using someone else's stuff for free, your responsibility for maintenance is now their problem as well.

> Hi Bill, per our operational security procedure we can't talk about ieee_arithmetic, especially when we dont get paid.

Good on the developers for saying this. You support people, or you don't get to tell them what to do. And if you're a commercial company taking on a contract that involves nuclear weapons, maybe you devote some resources to making that contract and the software running well, because that's what the client is paying you to do.

So sick and tired of the backwards mentality that giving something away to the world for free means that you now have an additional obligation to fix everyone else's problems for free. The "as is" clauses in Open Source licenses are there for a reason.

Yup, and there's nothing saying Cray, or [customer w/nuclear weapons], or anyone else is required to use that OS package. Perhaps they would have been better off writing their own in this instance.

Or, better yet, they could write a fix and add it to the OS package (kind of the way it's supposed to work - the set of users maintain it so everyone benefits?).

> So sick and tired of the backwards mentality that giving something away to the world for free means that you now have an additional obligation to fix everyone else's problems for free. The "as is" clauses in Open Source licenses are there for a reason.

That's one of the differences between coders and engineers.

Coders just import libraries to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Engineers consider each import as a dependency they'll have to maintain, buy support for or replace. Log4j just highlighted this difference, with some knowing exactly what to patch and others franctically trying to determine if one of the thousands of dependencies they imported into their app actually used it.

But, and I’m not disagreeing with you, that puts the impetus squarely on the user of this library. Not on the creators/maintainers.

Agreed. The tone comes across as smug however.

Can the theatricality bill, nobody on the GCC bug tracker but you cares if the country that spent two trillion dollars to replace the Taliban in twenty years with the Taliban doesn't seem to have they acumen to fund something they're now critically dependent upon. They can barely get it in gear to fund their own budget each year without a partisan meltdown.

If they could do any of this themselves, you'd be on the golf course.

>> They can barely get it in gear to fund their own budget each year without a partisan meltdown.

When is the last time they stayed within budget?

The customer could easily be Russia, U.K., China, France, India, Pakistan, or some other country with nuclear weapons. Not North Korea, though, because Cray/HPE probably can't do business with North Korea.

I very highly doubt France would work with Cray/HPE, or any non-French contractor for that matter, on this. As far as I'm aware, they're working with Bull (now part of Atos).

> I very highly doubt France would work with Cray/HPE, or any non-French contractor for that matter, on this.

If the customer was the Government of France, the line “the customer has nuclear weapons” would be factually accurate irrespective of whether the particular work was on, or even remotely related to, nuclear weapons.

It might not be relevant, but then, even if the work is on a nuclear weapons program, “the customer has nuclear weapons” doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion. Really, short of the case where the customer prefers to motivate software developers with the threat of nuclear annihilation rather than feature bounties, it seems a complete non-sequitur no matter what the work is.

They’re not making a threat. They’re saying it’s important to an org that has thermonuclear weapons. Those people are a very unhumorous lot, and they would not grok why these little libs people would not understand that.

They are obviously not the masters of the domain they think they are, but that happens sometimes in bureaucracies.

I think the customer is NERSC (https://docs.nersc.gov/); the commands in the bug report match those described at (https://docs.nersc.gov/development/compilers/base/).

NERSC is part of DOE’s Office of Science. Nuclear weapon development is done by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which sponsors labs like Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. It definitely isn’t NERSC, NNSA has its own dedicated supercomputers for weapons work.

The black orgs behind the curtains think of the white orgs as their minions. And so it is.

According to Bill Long's linkedin page he has ~25 years Fortran experience and holds "principal member" status on a Fortran committee for much of those. Describes himself as a "master" engineer.

Someone with that level of experience and recognition should be capable of either implementing the function themselves, or at the very least have the professional network to know a number of people capable of doing so for HPE.

I would also expect significantly more tact and professionalism.

The email record screams "BOFH bench warmer."

Edit: the more I think about this, the more I think he probably sold himself to HPE as being able to give them what they want from FORTRAN due to his committee membership. Which turned out to not be true, thus placing his salary at risk.

He's even a co-author on a paper that specifically uses Fortran <-> C interop. Which is the kind of work he's asking for here.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3418084

I'm aware that sometimes you can get your name on the paper by riding the other author's coattails, but it's interesting.

This seems like a rather uncharitable take.

Cray has their own Fortran compiler, so it's quite possible that Bill is forbidden from contributing to other Fortran compilers due to IP issues.

And as you can see from the thread, he's caught in the middle, passing messages between a customer who wants this issue fixed and a team that doesn't want to fix it. That's not a fun place to be - you basically get yelled at by both sides.

Well, as a "master engineer" with 25 years of experience, maybe he should just fix it himself instead of expecting unpaid volunteers to jump for him just because he's doing work for the government.

True. Maybe he's just a slow coder and thinks it would go faster if someone familiar with the codebase tries to fix it.

The only reason "ip issues" exist is because an employer says so, and they can say otherwise at any time.

If the customer wants something, then you the vendor either give them what they want, or don't.

It's no one else's problem.

There are no "ip issues" preventing an employee from working on a competing product, only from doing so without permission which the employer is free to grant at any time.

This possible issue does not provide any tiniest bit of of excuse, and does not invalidate the critiques at all.

No one is "caught in the middle" in any way that anyone else has any obligation to care about, not even a merely "being a nice and considerate person" obligation.

If the customer wants something, the vendor can absolutely satisfy them any time they want by a number of different means. And certainly this employee is no voiceless intern, is both knowledgeable and empowered enough to inform his employer about those means. If they don't employ any of those means, it's no one else's fault and so no one else's problem.

Bill isn't stuck in the middle. Bill is providing a service.

Bill has no right or ability to compel third parties not involved in the transaction to help him provide that service.

If Bill can't get the job done, that's Bill's problem.

The buck stops with Bill.

As the bug thread mentions, Bill is paid to work on Cray Fortran. It looks like the issue is that cray is using gfortran (and others) as a regression test suite, and found a bug. Possibly one that surfaced after cray fixed their own similar bug?

But more to the point, the Feds don't hand out cash without a procurement order. In theory USDS can help unblock that, but I doubt they get engaged in clearance required projects.

It looks to be a feature request to support the newest version of Fortran (or at least one specific feature from the new version), not a bug.

Even if it is a fixed contract, they can shell out $10k for this. However, account managers and their bosses are bean counters.

Yeah, I thought Bill Long from Cray was joking at first. But his follow-up messages are plain passive aggressive

> Inquiry from the original site: "Does GCC provide a timeline for when they will conform to F2018?"

Choosing beggar mentality. I hate it.

Beggars can hardly afford stockpiles of nuclear weapons!

(Though when it comes to programming, they have armed themselves with a flint arrowhead.)

Begger is defined by begging not by what he has. Not all beggers are destitute.

Beggers are anyone begging, whether a true "poor person" or a rich person wanting a hand out when he can afford the free thing himself, probably without batting an eye.

I would respond with "F2018 conformance will be fixed sooner if you help."

This is extremely polite while still being direct, I really like things like this.

It makes clear that there is a way they can help, with enough attitude to make clear that the other person is dealing with individuals rather than some magic free subcontractor.

Ah, I disagree. Saying "F2018 conformance will be fixed" implies that the GCC acknowledges "F2018 conformance" is a thing that needs to worked be on and not just a ruse by Bill to get free work done.

The maintainers responded well: they ignored Bill's weird framing and countered his entitlement politely.

Can't really argue with that, I found the actual responses very polite as well. I absolutely criticize nothing.

I don't think "F2018 conformance will be fixed faster if..." implies that there is any actual timeline at all, especially to the presumed target audience. Maybe that's what I'm seeing, that phrasing to me means WONTFIX unless the other party takes some kind of action.

The reason I like it is because it actually specifies what the other party can do to take action without calling them out. Calling them out is still certainly entirely fine. But if the goal is to get a purchase order issued from a negotiation perspective I think it makes sense to basically say "sure, we're willing to work on this seriously if you contribute", which then turns obviously to "I don't code" or "here's your patch", which then obviously turns to them contributing one way or another.

Patience and personal morale justifies a lot though IMO, the maintainers are of course under no obligation to care about any of that one bit, Bill could always have just patched the code and not worried about upstream. Embarrassing.

I think it's just the sad state of the corporate structure at the moment. If a manager requested and got a budget to fix said bug to his superiors, it's his ass that's on the line if things don't work as planned. If same manager said "it's not our fault things don't work" nothing happens to him. Hopefully when the current generation of managers gets replaced they'll be replaced by those that actually understand FOSS and can incentivize fixing these issues. But as it stands everyone, including the shareholders of these big companies, suffer from poorly designed corporate incentives that let FOSS projects stay unmaintained.

Fully agree with you.

> If this fix is necessary to that contract

The fix can't be necessary because the original report included examples of it working using Intel Fortran and Cray Fortran. So there's an alternative. Also, if the contract specified GNU Fortran, then they would just do it and bill the customer.

My guess is that the customer here is asking because of a mandate to prefer open source solutions wherever possible.

> My guess is that the customer here is asking because of a mandate to prefer open source solutions wherever possible.

I don't think that HPC or the DoE have anything close to such a mandate. My guess is that the request comes from a a user who wants to try compiling their code with gfortran.

I was thinking of France, which IIRC had such a mandate.

Yeah I bet they are being paid well for that contract as well. Maybe they should have bought a commercial fortran if they didn't want the possibility that the developers would tell them to go pound sand (but in a nice way). I'm sure they have the resources to fix it and submit the patch back to gfortran.

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