The things nobody wants to pay for

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/959069/c96f34ed67a168e4/

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

158 129 2 years ago

I don't know much about the Kernel or testing it, but I submitted one fix years ago that I ended up testing it manually, and that was enough for it to be accepted. I think that's just the culture, which might seem odd to some, but also I imagine it would make coordination almost impossible if they were sticklers for testing. I've also known companies to run full integration tests instead of using stuff like unit tests. Maybe that's more suitable for Kernel testing due to how complex the kernel space environment is. Wondering if anyone has more context.

On a different note, I think it's true that the Linux desktop still sucks in 2024. At this point I would be willing to pay a substantial amount for stuff to be clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop. Doubt we will ever get there, but maybe companies like Valve will clean it up enough.

satiric3• 2 years ago

Of the ones you listed, consistency is the big downside for me. It seems like there's multiple options for everything in the Linux ecosystem. From the beginner questions (e.g., which distro), to the nerdy questions (e.g., systemd vs sysvinit), to the ones in between (e.g., vim vs emacs). I sometimes wonder if GNU Herd would have been better at this, since everything would be designed by the GNU folks for one unified ecosystem.

I don't think Valve will fix it TBH. They only care about Linux UX on their hardware, i.e. Steam Deck. I don't see why they would fund things like KDE, or features in the kernel beyond the ones that they need for their products to work. (Not that I think they're assholes for this; just that it's unfortunate)

p_l2• 2 years ago

They are very much upstreaming things a lot, in ways that support more than just their hardware, which results in general boost for everyone.

They definitely could have done it differently and in cheaper ways (just look at every embedded platform).

As for KDE, Steam Deck runs KDE.

massysett3• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder if GNU Herd would have been better at this, since everything would be designed by the GNU folks for one unified ecosystem.

You just invented *BSD.

internetter• 2 years ago

Valve does fund KDE

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop

In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?

zeroCalories3• 2 years ago

I hate having different install methods for every distro. I don't wanna build from source. Even if you give me a binary, I don't wanna manually make a symbolic link.

I hate having multiple conflicting ways to do the same thing. Even within something like Ubuntu I can think of eight ways I've installed software.

Steam regularly fails to open, and games compiled for Linux, not running through proton, regularly crash.

Hardware features randomly don't work. My laptop won't go to sleep when closed and runs full power while in my backpack. My extra mouse buttons that could be bound in windows without an issue didn't work on Linux.

Everything about Linux irritates me these days. I don't want to use other OSes for ideological reasons, but my problems have only increased since moving to Linux on my personal machine.

narag4• 2 years ago

Not the same person, but I've recently switched from Windows 10 to Debian stable with KDE, so I can share my experience.

It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive.

That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of bugs I submitted to KDE that they say are corrected in the new version. Unfortunately, it seems I'll have to wait a long time until that version is published and then reaches Debian stable.

- KDE look and feel customization is badly scattered in multiple menus. Some options are not accessible and need to be changed in scripts written in a KDE-specific language. There are a couple of very bad UX in the last category.

- Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications use completely different file dialogs with different conventions that I haven't found how to configure. Firefox is more difficult to configure than it seems. I started caring because it had tiny scrool bars. For some appearance configurations I had to look at Firefox source code.

- My Behringer external sound interface doesn't work with the default software. It works with Jack, but I've been unable to configure JackD to start automatically, so I need to start it manually every time I reboot. Mitigated because I always hibernate.

- Drag & drop works in a very weird fashion. When I drop something, a popup menu appears asking me if I want to copy, move or link the dragged item. There's no way to configure KDE to just move. I need to press shift before I start dragging and that conflicts with multiple selection... no way to move multiple files without the shitty menu.

What I found sad was the response to users' request in forums. Some users volunteered solutions and they were told that they won't be included because the fixes needed to be included in some config dialog, documented, translated to all languages... and noone will have time to do all that.

One thing that I had not thought about was the increasing complexity of code bases. I looked what I needed to compile a browser, not sure if it was Firefox or Chromium, 500 GB required. Firefox also needs Rust now.

I'm worried that the OSS projects have no enough volunteers and the barrier-to-entry is high enough to discourage more people helping.

n0-n0-wait• 2 years ago

OT - yes, weekendmodus: check!! But an humoristic aproach, "There was a bug-request for v1.0: 'Copying parts of graphics overwrites the text-buffer, and copying text (for whatever use) overwrites the graphics buffer! Still no progress.', for whatever reason." (-;

Timber-6539• 2 years ago

At this point I would be willing to pay a substantial amount for stuff to be clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop.

Which alternative exists today that comes even close to this described utopian product?

roenxi2• 2 years ago

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much.

In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution to tragedy of the commons in core infrastructure and made a lot of money doing that).

I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. I expect that the network of OSS foundations and companies will regularly becomes corrupt and ineffective and need to be purged then replaced. That implies there is a fine line of healthy complaining - people need to communicate where the problems are by complaining, but it is useless trying to blame people like kernel maintainers for poor testing. It is good to stop and appreciate how beautiful the dance is; this is one of the purest free markets we have in the world and it is pretty amazing how well it hangs together since it looks like a hearty sneeze could bring the whole thing down.

jorvi6• 2 years ago

I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem.

Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great?

Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?).

2022 revenue:

- $400 billion, Apple

- $200 billion, Microsoft

- $120 billion, Meta

- $80 billion, AWS

$800 billion * 0.01 = €800 million of “sovereign OSS fund” funding.

And that’s just the big ones. Bing tells me the 2022 combined revenue of all NASDAQ listed companies is ~$6900 billion. That’s $6.9 billion in OSS funding you’d skim off!

What’s more, with how much that would improve open source projects, those companies would see enough productivity improvement that despite the 0.1% in skimmed revenue, they’d see a net benefit.

Dr_Birdbrain• 2 years ago

Or, give a tax deduction for contributions to open source.

This is America, new taxes are nearly impossible to pass, tax cuts are much easier to pass.

mooreds• 2 years ago

Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost)

I think you are missing the actor there. Who is going to enact and enforce this tax? I can't think of any entity that could and would.

ninkendo• 2 years ago

Who will receive the funding from this tax? What criteria would you use to distribute funding? Windfall for the NPM leftpad module I guess.

bruce5113• 2 years ago

Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source?

Plus, when you're asking for a tax on say Apple, where they get to cough up multiple billions, then expect them to invest plenty in lobbying and lawyers.

In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."

nox1012• 2 years ago

Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source.

Google makes open source Android, Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Lit, ANGLE, Dawn. They also spend millions on open source.

Microsoft makes C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Powershell, and further Microsoft is providing free hosting for probably 95% of all open source projects (github) as well as free CIs (github actions) and free JS/TS library distribution (npm). They're spending millions on open source too.

I don't know what Meta provides except React and LLaMa but that's still millions

Taxing requires administration so what you'd really be doing is giving a bunch of non-developers money in the form of salaries. The rest they'd give for their friend's projects, or whoever bribed them with kickbacks etc...

erehweb• 2 years ago

0.1% of revenue is $80 million for AWS, using those numbers. At that rate, it seems like they'd do better by building their own proprietary software.

WalterBright3• 2 years ago

As always, we're just one tax increase away from utopia!

dehrmann• 2 years ago

It might not be corruption. It could just be that there are unsexy problems neither volunteers nor companies want to work on.

hammock• 2 years ago

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much.

That's an auction, not a market. Markets are two sided, there are differentiated (multidimensional) offers and bids that are seeking to get matched. Much more complex

nly• 2 years ago

The difference is only one of time.

At any given _instant_ in time there is a steady state where there is queue of people willing to buy and a queue of people willing to sell time.

There are no market makers in the job market. What OP says is true

airstrike• 2 years ago

That's an auction, not a market. Markets are two sided, there are differentiated (multidimensional) offers and bids that are seeking to get matched. Much more complex

None of that necessarily invalidates the point that people are paid the minimum amount possible for a given pool of labor supply

artagnon2• 2 years ago

This echoes the problems we see in LLVM. Tooling is de-prioritized in several large corporation-funded open-source projects.

newgre• 2 years ago

can you elaborate?

hashtag-til2• 2 years ago

Many thousands of companies use LLVM in their products and benefit from the technology.

As it is an open source project, in an ideal world, it would e fair to assume they would somehow contribute back, but instead they just take it for granted as there is a group of people who make it available for free.

(please read to the end before posting your "wHy pUt iT oPeN-sOuRcE tHeN???" bigoted comments)

Don't get me wrong: It is perfectly legal for anyone to do so, as the project is available under a permissive license and you are not mandated to do anything to contribute back.

I'm just trying to clarify the point made by OP here, and clarifying that some infrastructure tooling such as compilers and debugger are often taken for granted, and even rich companies opt not to contribute back.

artagnon2• 2 years ago

LLVM deprioritizes helper scripts such as update_analyze_test_checks.py, and the build infrastructure is far from perfect. Scripts like the ones categorizing PRs are very much unpaid work.

LLVM also deprioritizes general cleanup work, such as getting rid off passes that don’t work, and are rotting in the tree: of the top of my head, I can think of GVNSink, LoopFusion.

There are additional problems unique to LLVM, as it doesn’t have a dictator: there are multiple different dependence analysis in tree, for instance.

oneshtein2• 2 years ago

AI can help with documentation. Simple tool can annotate all files and function using ChatGPP4 in few hours, then check it for correctness and completeness, then fix bugs, for few hundred dollars.

Diti• 2 years ago

That wouldn’t help with the issues described in the article, I think. That is, license violations (LLMs happen to produce almost-verbatim copies of copyrighted works at times) and lack of volunteers (you’d need to hire a technical writer to ensure the generated documentation is actually correct and complete, and nobody is going to want to accept being hired for cheap for fixing AI-generated documentation).

ghaff2• 2 years ago

Leaving aside the license violation rathole which is a question that will be resolved or not by courts, to your broader point. Yes, LLVMs are a tool and they may or may not increase productivity. However, for technical docs specifically, it's all about correctness in some sense so I'm not sure how useful a tool they even are if the output needs to be carefully checked.

oneshtein2• 2 years ago

I just checked it with Bard:

Me: Annotate main scheduler in linux kernel version 6 for interactive workload on multiple cores.

Bard: I'm unable to directly annotate kernel code, but I can provide a detailed explanation of the main scheduler's components and mechanisms for interactive workloads on multiple cores in Linux kernel version 6, incorporating images where appropriate:

Key Components:

    Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS):
        Primary scheduling class for interactive tasks
        Aims for fairness and responsiveness
        Employs a red-black tree (image below) to organize processes based on their virtual runtime (vruntime)
        Processes with lower vruntime are given priority
    Зображення: redblack tree data structureВідкриється в новому вікні
    www.eecs.umich.edu
    redblack tree data structure 

    Per-CPU runqueues:
        Each CPU core maintains its own runqueue
        Stores processes ready to run on that core
        Reduces contention and improves cache locality

    Load balancing:
        Mechanisms to distribute processes across cores for optimal performance
        Triggered when a core becomes idle or imbalanced
        Migrates processes from overloaded cores to underloaded ones

Scheduling Process:

    Process Creation:
        New processes are assigned to a suitable scheduling class (CFS for interactive)
        Added to a runqueue, initially on the core where they were created

    Process Wakeup:
        When a process becomes ready to run:
            Added to the runqueue of the core where it last ran or a suitable core (load balancing)

    Process Selection:
        CFS periodically selects a process from the runqueue
        Chooses the one with the lowest vruntime (most deprived of CPU time)

    Context Switch:
        The scheduler saves the state of the running process
        Restores the state of the selected process to resume execution

Key Features for Multi-Core:

    Per-CPU runqueues:
        Minimize cache-line bouncing and inter-core communication
        Improve performance on multi-core systems
    Load balancing:
        Ensures efficient use of all available CPU cores
        Prevents cores from becoming idle while others are overloaded
    Scalability:
        CFS design scales well with increasing core counts
        Maintains fairness and responsiveness in large systems

Additional Considerations:

    Scheduler domains:
        Hierarchical structures for managing CPU resources across multiple cores or NUMA nodes
        Allow for fine-grained control over scheduling policies
    Preemption:
        CFS supports preemption to prevent processes from monopolizing the CPU
        Ensures interactive tasks remain responsive

Remember:

    Linux kernel version 6 is under development, so specific details may change.
    The scheduler is a complex component with various optimizations and tuning parameters.
    Understanding its behavior requires deeper exploration of the code and experimentation.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

Technical documentation is only useful if it's factually accurate. Inaccurate or misleading documentation is generally worse than no documentation.

phyzome• 2 years ago

Based on what I've seen of LLM output, not to mention people's difficulty in detecting problems in it? No.

huijzer• 2 years ago

I once compared Linus Torvalds' net worth to Warren Buffett's net worth. I think they are both extremely capable individuals in their fields. Torvalds earns about 10 million per year. With that income, it would take Torvalds 12k years to reach the same net worth as Buffett (about 124 billion).

Put differently, Buffett could personally fund 10k open source contributors 200k per year for their lifetime (60 years) if he wanted to.

So maybe that's the solution? Convince billionaires that open source software is a philanthropic endeavor?

giantg22• 2 years ago

"Torvalds earns about 10 million per year"

I'm curious how he earns so much? That seems like a lot for someone who is associated with FOSS, even if they are so influential/skilled.

SaulJLH• 2 years ago

Yeah, shocked the heck out of me, if accurate.

mjhay• 2 years ago

Red Hat gave him a bunch of stock way back when. I'd guess whatever he makes at the Linux Foundation is a rounding error compared to that.

kornhole• 2 years ago

You would need to convince them that it is a philanthrocapitalist endeavor. If they see how it can help them avoid taxes and steer policy to benefit their investments, they might join on. Unfortunately open source SW goes pretty much opposite in the direction Gates and Buffet want to go. They want license everything and make us dependent on it as a subscription.

offices• 2 years ago

So maybe that's the solution? Convince billionaires that open source software is a philanthropic endeavor?

Is it, though? This isn't the attitude we have towards things like USB-IF or the Unicode Consortium, both of which are non-profits that were started by for-profit companies trying to solve a technical challenge for their own, joint benefit.

Hardware and software companies need a working operating system to be able to make money.

leosanchez• 2 years ago

Torvalds earns about 10 million per year

Source?

dirkhh• 2 years ago

There's no source since this is a made up number. It massively overstates his income.

Workaccount22• 2 years ago

If Torvalds wants to earn more, he should focus on making Linux more user friendly rather than more Linux-geek friendly.

Linux could get dramatically more resources if they could just drop their big-ego'd "CLI is god" mentality. Yes, Linux is a powerhouse OS, but it only appeals to a tiny slice of the population.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

How goes greater userbase intrinsically mean more resources and not simply a much larger pool of angry emails from users encountering issues with their hardware?

Ologn• 2 years ago

There are currently 3 billion active Android devices, and they are powered by Linux. There is a helicopter on Mars that runs Linux. I think Linus has done fine focusing on what he is focused on.

ableal• 2 years ago

I'd make two notes on this.

First, I've taken to looking at the economics as shared infrastructure costs - companies look at the volunteer built pot and make a self-interested decision on participating.

Second, this observation - "commoditize your complements" - seems still as apposite as when it was published in 2002: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 2 years ago

Open source is the biggest voluntary transfer of wealth from the working class to the business/investor class ever.

Software in the modern economy is the "means of production" and software developers have given it away free to the business/investor class.

The investor class, happily funds software startup gambles that people pour their lives into knowing that most will fail but they will still statistically make bank.

Companies making billions of profits lay off people who have made massive contributions of open source ( see for example Ben Collins-Sussman https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...) knowing that the software will still maintained by volunteers without them having to pay for it.

BiteCode_dev3• 2 years ago

My career solely exist because of foss. My salary level is only that high because of foss. I don't feel like I've been in a bad position.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 2 years ago

My career solely exist because of foss.

You are likely an excellent software engineer. Why would a company not have hired you to work on non-foss software?

smilliken• 2 years ago

You frame it as a negative thing, but FOSS is a positive for society. I contribute to FOSS in ways that directly benefit myself, and incidentally benefit others. Incidentally I benefit from others' contributions to FOSS, as a consumer, and also as a business.

It's a positive sum good for everyone, not some adversarial zero-sum game.

It's so good that we need to be doing a lot more of it, and (I think we'd all agree) figure out more ways to allocate capital to FOSS.

JetSpiegel• 2 years ago

I think Free Software is the means of production, but it's not a wealth transfer, it's capitalist value destruction, it's the elimination of entire swathes of the economy. It's a purely communist system of socialist common good.

The profit of the big corps almost never results from the FOSS itself.

andrey_utkin• 2 years ago

You're welcome to "audiobook" of this by Piper TTS (en_US-lessac-high):

https://autkin.net/audiobooks/things-nobody-wants-to-pay-for... (8:13)

AlbertCory• 2 years ago

I have a better idea for funding:

All the tech billionaires and their ex-wives throwing money at cool and fashionable causes should redirect a small part of it to the industry that made them rich.

planede2• 2 years ago

As an individual where do I click and say donate $20 towards the development efforts of the Linux kernel?

It looks like one can donate towards the LF as a whole [1], but the LF manages a ton of other projects besides Linux. So if was possible to restrict small donations towards the development of the Linux kernel, that would be great.

[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate

phkahler2• 2 years ago

Directed donations don't always work. If there is a fund paying to multiple things and you say "this $20" goes to that project, they can just send that much less from the fund and send it elsewhere.

My state promised that money from the lottery would go to education rather than the general fund. It does, but that doesn't mean education got more money when they started the lottery.

planede2• 2 years ago

The question is how much unrestricted donations would the Linux Foundation get if they offered directed donations as well. They might not get enough unrestricted funds to pull this.

It might also not look good on them if they used the unrestricted donations in a very unbalanced way to counter restricted donations the way you describe, so they might get less unrestricted donations in the future.

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

It's strange not to mention the OpenSSL situation pre-Heartbleed in this article. It would make a very strong case for funding critical "infrastructure" - I think the fallout from that was estimated at half a billion dollars or something?

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

It's not an interesting situation. OpenSSL is a dysfunctional project, maintained by unreasonable, antisocial people, following exactly none of the practices that professional software developers take for granted. Throwing money into that project solves none of its problems. On the other hand many of these problems are solved by just ignoring them and reimplementing their junk, which is what several companies have done.

skybrian• 2 years ago

I'm guessing that with some neglected projects, fundraising is neglected as well? Maybe people would contribute with the right fundraising campaign?

There are no guarantees that anyone is interested, but it seems hard to tell whether that's true in advance.

bxparks• 2 years ago

I must not be the first person to think that government sponsorship can play a positive role with funding and promoting critical software projects. Just as basic science research is funded by agencies such as the NSF, NIH, DARPA, DoD, and so on. Even the Arts have the NEA. Where is the National Institute of Critical Software?

People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a panel of peers and experts, then funded, and the impact of the software project can be reviewed. I would think that judging the value of a software project would be easier than many basic science research, because the impact of software is more immediate and easier to measure. Yes, any system that involves money will be susceptible to some amount of fraud, waste, and deception. But most people still support funding science and medical research.

WalterBright3• 2 years ago

Open source software is doing just fine. The siren song of government intervention will not make it better.

People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a panel of peers and experts, then funded, and the impact of the software project can be reviewed.

That's the dream. The reality is that the money will get allocated according to politics and corruption. The money will come with strings attached, and a lot of extraneous bureaucratic requirements. An industry will spring up that is specialized in getting as much grant money as possible.

r14c2• 2 years ago

If we recognize that the US government is corrupt, which I believe is a pretty universal sentiment among Americans, why aren't there any substantial anti-corruption movements?

madsbuch2• 2 years ago

My impression was, that there was consensus that the bay area was build on public funds and institutions. My intuition is that it is only later, ie. within the past 30-40 years, that the US has adopted this antipathy towards governmental organisations.

lamontcg• 2 years ago

probably hit an inflection point in the 1990s when the internet backbone went private and libertarianism started to become so popular in tech circles.

sgift• 2 years ago

Germany has the https://www.sovereigntechfund.de, which does exactly that.

ThinkBeat• 2 years ago

I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation.

Linus gets paid $1,5 million (from the Linux foundation).

I think given the central position and importance of Linus compared to the head of the Mozilla foundation seems a bit off.

A little while ago Linus announced that they had lost power at their home due to a large storm.

I was picturing large corporations sending in giant Tesla batteries and diesel generators and hooking it all up in hours. (free of charge of course). but as far as I know it did not happen.

It might have if he asked for it I suppose.

Linus seems like a most humble guy, given his celebrity status, his life's work and his high importance to the world.

(I do see things that he has several other income streams than just the Linux Foundation so that s good)

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

"I find it hard to understand that the head of Mozilla foundation is paid nearly $7 million for the important job to run the foundation."

That's pretty insane. I used to view Mozilla as "good guys" but it seems they are more like a lot of other non profits that are run mainly for the benefit of their executives.

ametrau• 2 years ago

I believe a good size chunk of that 7 million comes from Google. Which is a pretty strong conflict of interest.

wmf• 2 years ago

Linus doesn't bring in any revenue or manage the foundation. He's more like the CTO of Linux. Mozilla has over $500M revenue and almost a thousand employees.

ofcourseyoudo• 2 years ago

At first glance, I genuinely that this was a troll post about paywalled content with the title and the "subscriber-only" messaging all around it.

phkahler2• 2 years ago

> Have you ever wondered why KDE was deprecated in RHEL? It wasn't just because KDE Plasma 5 was so big that they couldn't make the jump for RHEL 8, it was also because people were not paying for RHEL for the desktop, so they had no budget for more people.

When you make code libraries or other "infrastructure" software it's important to be as stable as possible so your users don't have to constantly maintain compatibility. I suspect if it was easier to upgrade RH would have kept it KDE around. Same can be said for some of the Gnome updates too, and other software as well. "Maintenance" should be minimized particularly when people are working for free.

ranger207• 2 years ago

This is why I'm sad to see the widespread use of MIT and BSD licenses, and others that allow the project to be pulled into closed-source services without anything returned. At the least use the GPL so that changes are upstreamed; ideally license it for free under something like the AGPL and then offer it under less restrictive terms in exchange for a fee

pie_flavor• 2 years ago

I love the irony in this being a subscriber link to a paid LWN article, LWN being one of the things people do not want to pay for.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

The kernel community has never put the effort into tooling that it needs;

I know a certain git that might disagree.

The things nobody wants to pay for

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