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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

It's all open-source. If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

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I don’t get all of what’s going on but from the outside it seems like the xLibre guys got a lot of negative attention for doing that.

If you don't know what's going on, why comment?

A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

He then announced that the problem wasn't his code that didn't compile but DEI so based the entire forking around being a political conservative.

Everything I've seen written by him shows him to be insufferable, thats where the negative attention comes from.

There are a lot of distros that have xlibre packages for something that ostensibly doesn't compile.

I wouldn't trust the reason given by the people who have said that they're trying to kill Xorg for why they're rejecting patches from someone trying to improve Xorg

> There are a lot of distros that have xlibre packages for something that ostensibly doesn't compile.

No one says xlibre doesn't compile, but good attempt at a distraction. Have you considered invading a country as an alternative way to distract from terrible views?

> No one says xlibre doesn't compile

>> A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

Emphasis mine, words yours.

Yeah, some submitted patches failed to compile. Others compiled and failed tests.

Not the same as XLibre doesn't compile.

Wow here it shows who's politically motivated and like it or not Xlibre probably felt the same way. Some people cannot sleep or chill if it is not theirs world view.

"... generic human experiment ... creates a new humanoid race ... toxic spike protein ..." - Enrico Weigelt on LKML

"... insane and technically incorrect ... idiotic lies ... you don't know what you are talking about ... SHUT THE HELL UP ..." - Linus Torvalds

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957

It's not just his code.

The COVID conspiracy theories Enrico Weigelt pushes are riddled with bugs, logical errors, and security holes, and don't compile or pass tests either.

Linus already reviewed both the code and the reasoning, and rejected them for failing basic correctness.

This is indeed not at all about his code. I don't care what he thinks of vaccines and COVID - I just as much don't care what Linus Torvalds thinks about these things. They are damn programmers. Their business is to ship reliable, usable, secure software.

"If you don't like the direction of a multi-decade-long, hundreds of manyears, deeply esoteric project, you have the freedom to go in, fork it, and maintain it"

is the most technically true, practically meaningless argument in FOSS

But it happens successfully.

The code base is Xorg rather than Xfree86 because of one such fork.

Gcc went through the egcs fork.

OpenOffice became LibreOffice in a fork.

When leadership of a project fails to keep the volunteers behind them such forks happen.

And? I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution without proposing any alternatives, which tends to be a tacit admission that there is no better solution. If you think you have a better solution, let's hear it:

>I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution

And? Fortunately, free speech and criticism doesn't stop when someone is tired of hearing it.

The alternative doesn't need to be some new solution. A course reversal or change on the existing ones is enough. In which case the criticism already highlights the solution. Besides, the first step of fixing a problem is identifying it.

> If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

But do you have the skill to actually maintain that fork? Do you have the time to keep it going?

We all need to decide where to spend our efforts. If you decide that maintaining a fork isn't worth your time, then that's a revelation of your own preferences.

Sucks for you, but you can't then turn around and expect someone else to invest these for you when they don't want to.

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