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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote.

Because you claim he's attacking open source software, and you said that maybe he thinks MS is the standard bearer of his cause.

The (easy to find) facts are that he has committed a lot of code to open source and has been involved in freeBSD for many years. These are not small trivial bits of code used by a few people or for insignificant reasons. Crypt and varnish are bits of code getting billions of uses.

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If the author's open-source credentials are part of his argument, then he needs to make them part of the story he tells in his article. He shouldn't assume that people will connect the dots (he doesn't have the name recognition of a Torvalds or Stallman). Further, even with the context, I don't think the dots add up to enough of a picture to understand what he's arguing for/against.

To make a convincing argument, he should have made it clearer what he was arguing against ("the bazaar" is too nebulous and refers to many things, .com development refers to other things) and what he was arguing for (which was entirely missing, other than a reference to Brooks' book). If he doesn't have a clear vision of how development should work (or a "standard-bearer"), he should have at least provided some examples of things working the "right" way (or better).

He should probably also have left off a bunch of the insults and hyperbole: "clueless" / "hacks" / .com period a "disaster" for code quality. I'm frankly pretty surprised that ACM Queue would publish this.

> If the author's open-source credentials are part of his argument, then he needs to make them part of the story he tells in his article.

PHK is one of the most prolific contributors to Queue. Most regular ACM readers know who he is.

> I'm frankly pretty surprised that ACM Queue would publish this.

Again, see above.

In addition to what chrisaycock said, phks writings are typically very "lacking" and assumes a certain knowledge about whatever he has chosen to write about. He writes interesting stuff, a lot is implied and/or not very sufficiently explained.

Or maybe, just maybe I don't write for the lowest common denominator, but for people who can think for themselves.

I'm really grateful for you writing this. I don't know if I'd couch it in the Cathedral/Bazaar terminology, but I've had similar thoughts.

He's also a little bit fond of personal attacks.

A bizarre feature of some of the developer mailing lists and Usenet groups is the absolutely hateful vicious toxic nature of them.

OP's site bikeshed.org (http://bikeshed.org/) has some nice proposed features for software that posts to large audiences.

     +------------------------------------------------------------+
      | Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand |
      | people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading |
      | it before they can decide if it is interesting.  At least  |
      | two man-weeks will be spent reading your email.  Many of   |
      | the recipients will have to pay to download your email.    |
      |								   |
      | Are you absolutely sure that your email is of sufficient   |
      | importance to bother all these people ?                    |
      |								   |
      |                  [YES]  [REVISE]  [CANCEL]                 |
      +------------------------------------------------------------+

      +------------------------------------------------------------+
      |	Warning:  You have not read all emails in this thread yet. |
      |	Somebody else may already have said what you are about to  |
      |	say in your reply.  Please read the entire thread before   |
      |	replying to any email in it.                               |
      |								   |
      |			     [CANCEL]                              |
      +------------------------------------------------------------+

Perhaps any forum software needs these, as well as buttons saying [really post this?] [save this angry version locally, and give you time to write a calmer version] etc.

I remember that my newsreader back in the early 1990s did exactly this. I had trouble posting the first few times because I took the message to heart and didn't want to waste other people's time. But I quickly realized that other people didn't follow the same suggestion, which meant that I should ignore the message, and even interpret it as wrong.

Why is it wrong? For example, consider the second message. Suppose you haven't read all the messages in a thread because you've been on holiday for the previous few days. But a friend pointed you to a message in the thread which specifically mentions your name, asks "could you verify this for me?", and doesn't have any followups?

Why should your newsreader force you to read all of the thread in order to answer something which isn't in the rest of the thread? Yet the only option there is "cancel".

Furthermore, "at least 10 seconds" is completely wrong. People killthread, plonk people, and develop other ways to ignore discussions. Assuming 4 hours per day means people can handle at most 1440 messages. There are 276 comments already in this thread, but I expect most people sampled a few messages on each major branch, skimmed a bit, and perhaps did a text search to see if someone mentioned a key word. Most assuredly, the entire HN readership did not read this entire thread.

I think Munksgaard is supporting you, and that there are some problems with different languages.

Indeed, it was not meant as an attack, merely trying explain his style. I enjoy reading his blog posts, but I readily admit that I often have to seek out some sort of elaboration, as it's not always evident what his stance is, or even what he's talking about (I often wish he'd provide some more context).

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