Comment by tokyo1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokyo1000 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The fact that there's so much disagreement and discontent surrounding this should concern everyone involved. Trade-offs are being made that may benefit some people and organizations, but these trade-offs are also causing significant problems for others.

While there has always been some degree of disagreement regarding technological matters, I think we're really seeing a lot more of it these days, especially when it comes to projects that are open source, or standards that are supposedly open. HTTP/2 is a good example. But we've also got GNOME 3, systemd, how systemd has been included in various Linux distros, many of the recent changes to Firefox, and so forth.

Not only is this disagreement more prevalent, it's also much harsher than what we've seen in the past. Instead of seeing compromise, we're seeing marginalization. We're repeatedly seeing a small number of people force their preferences upon increasingly larger masses of unwilling victims. We're seeing consensus being claimed, but this is only an illusion that barely masks the resentment that is building.

What we're seeing goes beyond mere competition between factions with differing situations. We're seeing any sort of competition, or even just dissent, being highly discouraged, suppressed, or even prevented wherever possible. Those whose needs aren't being met end up backed into a corner and shunned, rather than any effort being put into cooperating with them, with helping them, or even just with considering their views.

This isn't a healthy situation for the community to be in, especially when it comes to projects that allegedly pride themselves on openness. We've already seen this kind of polarization severely harm the GNOME 3 project. We're seeing things get pretty bad within the Debian project. And the HTTP/2 situation hasn't been very encouraging, either.

Is there "so much disagreement and discontent"?

There's a few high profile critics e.g. PHK, who puts his points as an eloquent rant which of course we as a community tend to love but the reality is HTTP/2 is going to get rollout by companies who've tested it and seen the benefits i.e. not just Google.

> While there has always been some degree of disagreement regarding technological matters, I think we're really seeing a lot more of it these days

I don't have any way to dispute this, but I don't think it's easy to provide evidence for it either. I feel that there may simply be more individuals involved in these kinds of discussions these days.

Obviously at some point you have to stop discussing something and start building it. That's not to say that discussion isn't important or shouldn't be encouraged (quite the contrary), but I find it very difficult to make generalizations about where the line should be drawn.

Obviously at some point you have to stop discussing something and start building it.

No, see, that's where we are having problems: there is a perfectly valid answer of "It's good enough, or simple enough, that we will leave it as-is barring a really big leap".

Assuming that you've got to build something to replace the status quo is still itself an assumption. Saying, in effect, "Hey, we've got to build something" naturally disallows a reasonable engineering conservatism.

Software gets better not as you add things, but as you remove them--people keep forgetting this.

"We're seeing any sort of competition, or even just dissent, being highly discouraged, suppressed, or even prevented wherever possible."

Could you please elaborate on this point?

jgrahamc's comment that I replied to is a mild example of this. If people are repeatedly raising the same concerns whenever HTTP/2 is discussed, then there are clearly issues with it that aren't being sufficiently dealt with. Writing off their problems as merely being "all the same old arguments", and discouraging discussion of them, doesn't exactly help solve these problems.

Things tend to be particularly bad when it comes to systemd, though. It isn't unusual to see censorship occur, either in the form of unjustifiable downmodding, comment deletion, or even the banning of participants, depending on the venue. We also are seeing it become increasingly difficult for Debian users, for example, to opt out of using systemd, or to easily switch to an alternative init system.

Instead of people with different preferences or interests working together, or even working independently, we're more often seeing one group of people quench the ability of the competing groups to participate or to even have choice. When discussion is stifled, and choice is taken away, the outcome will likely never be positive.

Count me in the naysayer group. I don't like HTTP/2.

But comparing it with systemd is completely unreasonable. When a huge group of people complained about HTTP/2, it become an optional standard, and HTTP/1.1 is officially the only web standard capable of satisfying a big number of use-cases. No choice is being taken away, it's just a bad standard that is being pushed at server maintainers.

We're repeatedly seeing a small number of people force their preferences upon increasingly larger masses of unwilling victims

This goes both ways though, doesn't it? Much of the arguing about HTTP/2 tended to be Johnny Come Latelies who, if we're being honest, seemed to just want to toss some refuse in the gears. Microsoft, in particular, watched as Google proposed SPDY, and then iterated and shared their findings, and then right as consensus (or as close to consensus as possible) starts to be reached, Microsoft tries to upset the cart. In that case wouldn't Microsoft, and the naysaysers, be the ones trying to force their preferences? The delay of HTTP/2, or basic improvements to these technologies, not only causes hassles for developers (image sprites, resource concatenation, many domains, and on and on), it marginalizes the web.

It is going to be pretty rare when any initiative sees complete unanimous agreement, especially given that many of the parties have ulterior motives and agendas that aren't always clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com