The customer has nuclear weapons

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4

by aviramha • 2 years ago

48 18 2 years ago

gcc.gnu.org

exabrial• 2 years ago

Then they can afford to pay someone to fix it?

sealeck2• 2 years ago

They afford to, but it's surprisingly non-trivial for a government to fill out all the paperwork involved and get the various approvals needed to procure/pay someone.

mschuster912• 2 years ago

Yeah but that's why governments hire consultancies... they're not just preventing the government's payroll not explode (usually, government jobs are all but unfireable whereas contracts with consultants aka body shops can be discontinued easily), but they can also act far, far more flexible than any government entity can on their own.

themerone• 2 years ago

It's common in big companies too. My employer has to use a 3rd party supplier for Google Maps, because Google sure as hell isn't going to jump through the hoops necessary to become our supplier.

iSnow2• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure if they need it for something around the nuclear weapons programme, they can cough up a million USD for a bounty.

If I were a maintainer there and got such a "funny" comment on a feature request, they'd get a very snotty response.

alphazard• 2 years ago

It's crazy to me that open source maintainers offer free support to corporations or governments that they could easily extract money from for the benefit of the project or themselves.

An individual wants a feature and is prepared to pitch in, probably worth the time investment for a maintainer.

The US government wants floating point arithmetic done a certain way, fuck you, pay me.

subjectsigma• 2 years ago

I work for a government contractor with military sponsors. I agree with this 100%; the government should pay people to work on FLOSS code. Not only because I might get paid more, but because I strongly believe that classification and bureaucracy are tools to hide incompetence, and also that as (much as possible) public money taken from everyone should produce public code that benefits everyone. It’s really a win for everyone doing the right thing.

tgamblin• 2 years ago

It's disappointing that this response linked by OP was posted at all. And even more disappointing because context gets lost every time it shows up on HN.

The linked email is from an HPE/Cray employee interacting with the upstream gcc team, not from anyone in the U.S. government.

The U.S. Government, via lots of programs, national labs, etc. does pay people (and companies) to work on open source code. This has at various points included LLVM, clang, flang, gcc, and many other projects. We like it when things get upstreamed and we also contribute ourselves to these projects.

Certain companies' willingness to put in the work required to upstream has been an issue at times, but it is improving and it's something that we push on very hard.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

FOSS users don't usually advertise their line of work and what they are going to do with the software.

That, and also, there's a donation link in many of the repos. Why isn't it used as much as it ought to be?

hm-nah• 2 years ago

And Bob becomes a high value target from a single comment in an open forum. Woops

DarmokJalad1701• 2 years ago

All the Jia Tans, Jigar Kumars and Dennis Ens should be swooping in any time now.

sealeck2• 2 years ago

I mean "the customer has nuclear weapons" means "I work for the US government" which has roughly 3 million employees.

prpl• 2 years ago

This is a dumb comment trying to pass the buck IMO. Of course it's a national lab, but probably a specific group at a national lab (potentially even in a Office of Science arm) going through their support channels at Cray/HPE to get a fix, presumably porting away from intel compilers or something or trying to onboard to something else (conda/spack).

Cray/HPE could/should have just do the fix or pay for it, since presumably they are packaging gcc/gfortran as part of the OS. Somebody there has to be qualified to execute such a fix.

TheDudeMan• 2 years ago

I don't get it.

dullcrisp• 2 years ago

The US government will nuke the FSF if they don’t get this patch in asap

iSnow2• 2 years ago

Someone trying to be funny to get their feature instead of paying.

The customer has nuclear weapons

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