Manifesto www.rebuildworld.net

[USerID]

http://www.rebuildworld.net/manifesto.html

It doesn't sound like old-school nihilism...
It doesn't sound like a cynical political stunt...
It doesn't sound like a heartbreak...
It doesn't sound like the resentment of fired and discarded programmers from the 1960s...
But there's a grain of truth to it!
Do you think this manifesto aligns well with the FreeBSD philosophy?
What's your opinion?

 

[rbranco]

This seems like an elaborate prank to make fun of minimalism or someone hasn't yet realized that the real world is orders of magnitude more complex than IT.

 

[fjdlr]

Stupid consumer economy = stupid software development

 

[kpedersen]

http://www.rebuildworld.net/manifesto.html

Sadly not actionable.

• You could create an open-source PC and people will complain it is more expensive than a bargain bin mass produced Dell.
  
  
• You could create your own entirely open-source, entirely open firmware platform and people will moan that the Steam DRM Platform doesn't run on it.
  
  
• You could create the perfect userland and people will bitch that some GNU extensions are missing

Already people have demonstrated a lack of discipline by the fact that these corporations are stronger than they have ever been. Software runs slower today than it did 10 years ago.

 

[POSIX.1]

But there's a grain of truth to it!
Do you think this manifesto aligns well with the FreeBSD philosophy?

Manifestos tend to be intellectually unsatisfactory. They target a simple minded audience for a purpose. This one is of Russian origin.
But isn't there a grain of "truth" to it? Yeah, that's a characteristic of deception and disinformation for the purpose of manipulation.
Comparing that to a "FreeBSD philosophy" [you had to explain your understanding of that] is an insult to my intelligence.

 

[msplsh]

This is just what various open source movements have been doing since the dawn of time.

 

[LibreQuest]

.:: Phrack Magazine ::.

 

[Espionage724]

You could create an open-source PC and people will complain it is more expensive than a bargain bin mass produced Dell.

I had an ASUS KCMA-D8 desktop and Lenovo T500 laptop both with Libreboot; it was fun! But my Dell laptop is notably faster than both, cheaper, and I have unlocked BIOS settings (disable stuff like Intel BIOS Guard) along with Intel ME HAP bit disabled (basically similar amount of firmware/hardware control with a mix of proprietary)

---

I might read more of that website eventually, but my main way of doing things is less-abstraction: No virtual machines, docker, containers, sandbox, jails; as-little in-between software and the OS as possible, with the OS primarily in-charge. Keep things simple, and it makes em easier to manage over-time!

 

[AlfredoLlaquet]

So many people, so many ideas, so many projects, so many everything. I like that there are so many people in the world who start their own thing. They see everything that already exists and say "nah, they got it wrong; I'll get it right," or "no one is going to tell me how to do things this time." Possibly, this is the force that keeps humanity moving forward.

 

[USerID]

the real world is orders of magnitude more complex than IT.

I agree. Even a regular accountant's job today is far more complex than the everyday open-source perfectionism. I've tried many times to move entire accounting departments to open source. Everything failed, literally everything. Modern accounting is one of those areas that's 100% tied to proprietary code. The code can be poor, buggy, cumbersome, and unoptimized. But then the tax authorities, social security, and pension funds come calling, and so on ad infinitum. And then the accounting department becomes overwhelmed with proprietary software and technologies.

You could create an open-source PC and people will complain it is more expensive than a bargain bin mass produced Dell.

Yes. I agree. I was offered an Operasor smartphone. It was several times more expensive than the average mass-produced Samsung. Of course, why buy something like that? I didn't understand and still don't. I don't work for a secret service. A regular PC with a reliable FreeBSD is enough for banking.

[you had to explain your understanding of that]

I hinted. I thought you'd guess... trivial K.I.S.S.

Keep things simple, and it makes em easier to manage over-time!

Yes, the K.I.S.S. principle is becoming a thing of the past. Everything is becoming more complicated.

Possibly, this is the force that keeps humanity moving forward.

"no one is going to tell me how to do things this time."

This mechanism only works on localhost today. As soon as you start reaching the "middle atmosphere" with institutional structures, things get completely fucked up. I can't work with the tax service, the emergency services, the hydrometeorological center, etc. today, only on an open-source platform.
They're all under proprietary standards. They're part of the state machine. You can't force them or convince them otherwise.
Even here, many people use proprietary platforms. That's just the way things are. They won't be able to fulfill the manifesto, even partially.

 

[Jake0162]

I had an ASUS KCMA-D8 desktop and Lenovo T500 laptop both with Libreboot; it was fun! But my Dell laptop is notably faster than both, cheaper, and I have unlocked BIOS settings (disable stuff like Intel BIOS Guard) along with Intel ME HAP bit disabled (basically similar amount of firmware/hardware control with a mix of proprietary)

---

I might read more of that website eventually, but my main way of doing things is less-abstraction: No virtual machines, docker, containers, sandbox, jails; as-little in-between software and the OS as possible, with the OS primarily in-charge. Keep things simple, and it makes em easier to manage over-time!

Abstraction and dependencies are explosive in their growth in a lot of new projects.

NGL I die a little inside every time I see something like taskwarrior end up joining the mess of hyper dependent projects instead of just improving the existing codebase. Just looking at the nearly 4k line in the cargo.lock file breaks my heart. They include so much crap for things like zeroing memory out.

Man I regret reading the deps now, that rand crate alone is another 6.2k lines of code to help produce random numbers. Seems odd given they already have deps for interacting with C bindings and a quick libc function call could handle the same functionality without inflating the project.

 

[Espionage724]

...They include so much crap for things like zeroing memory out.

Heh, meanwhile I disable that at kernel-wide with init_on_alloc=0 init_on_free=0 on Linux (I don't need memory zero'd, I like performance )

---

But if the kernel can do that, what is software doing trying to do it too? And why should it override what I set at the lower-level?

That might be my main problem with Rust and/or memory-safety targeting: I feel that should be left to the OS and my decisions as the sysadmin. Security apps not trusting the OS might be passable; everything under the sun using Rust including a DE like Comsic doesn't need to be doing double-duty (especially trying to sway power-efficiency in somewhere)

 

[Jose]

Looks incredibly limiting:

• Non-ASCII characters may only be used in documents and other human-readable texts written in natural languages, intended to be read and edited by endusers.
• No multithreading (and shared memory).
• (M)achine-readable data formats with recursive nesting are forbidden.

That last one states "We strongly dislike HTML, and we discourage its use even as a native language markup; better markups exist already..." No examples of these "better markups" are given, however.

I'm in general wary of taboos. They're the just-as-evil opposite of silver bullets. I do have a few personal ones, though.

 

[angry_vincent]

I abstain from things with "manifesto" in it. it ends up with wasting millions of lives. thats how you start rebuilding world, right? joking anyway. sort of.