I don't understand the harassment and I think it's terrible that a maintainer got so much criticism that they felt they had to resign.
But more generally, I think he has a negative reputation largely because of his blogging. He has criticized others in strong terms, in blog posts that get a lot of attention. We aren't that into reading another criticism when the previous ones didn't seem that well thought out.
Sometimes the advocacy for his own work is also based on strong criticism of others for doing it wrong. It's "my way is good and other projects are harmful" rather than "I think my way is better, but other projects have different goals and people have their reasons for preferring their workflows."
But he's getting attention because people keep sharing his blog posts in various forums, and he's not responsible for that. (Including this blog post appearing in Hacker News.)
He has his own ideas. I think it's refreshing, he's not afraid of going against some popular opinions. Sometimes he's controversial or showing some risky humor - like the time he was encouraging destruction through npm, but not really. (quote: https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/16/Cash-for-leftpad.html )
That’s fine and I enjoy reading his posts quite a lot (haven’t used any of his services but they seem very cool in a particular HN minimalist kind of way).
However if you’re going to traffic in language war melodrama and controversy-for-clicks (let’s be real, it’s a deliberate content strategy), then it’s sort of weak to cry about others not being nice enough in their criticisms of your own stuff. Pot meet kettle and all that /shrug.
Regardless, I hope he gets through the rough patch and I look forward to reading more of his posts that may or may not eloquently shit all over some of my favorite programming tools :)
You broke the site guidelines very badly in this thread, and repeatedly. We ban accounts that do that. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. That includes no more swipes and no more personal attacks.
Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how badly another commenter is behaving or you feel they are. It only makes everything worse.
I don’t see either of those as particularly hateful. He’s got strong opinions, yes, and you’re certainly free to disregard his posts for whatever reasons you’d like, but they don’t strike me as obviously derogatory or repulsive. He makes good points in both - electron is great in some ways, but terrible in others, and dependency management with npm/node is, charitably, problematic.
To his credit, the blog post about electron was made on his own platform. It's not like he went out of his way to spread Electron developers on public forums. You can never achieve on a personal blog the vitriol Twitter, etc. can bear.
I'd call your summarization of his takes more even-handed than the source material. I suspect, though, that his post wouldn't have gotten the traffic it did were all of it easy to nod along with.
I use Sway and I pay to host my code on SourceHut. I admire Drew and I think he is making invaluable contributions to FOSS.
That said, he has a history of... rash? impulsive? reactions to situations that might have been resolved with less bad blood if he had stepped away from the keyboard until he was less upset. The classic example is when he got upset about people wanting to unofficially add favicons to the Gemini protocol, and he threatened to blackhole any IP address which requests a favicon. https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I do not know if there is some specific recent event triggering vitriol, but the way this post is written, it sounds like Drew thinks it is resulting from less recent actions like the favicon threat.
> I realize that my blog has been a source of a lot of negativity in the past, and I regret how harsh I've been with some of the projects I've criticised. I will make my arguments by example going forward: if I think we can do better, I'll do it better, instead of criticising those who are just earnestly trying their best.
But it is also true that many people will not be quick to forgive him, and some people never will. It will take him time to undo the negative image he has created with some people, but after seeing Linus Torvald's positive changes, I am optimistic that Drew can change for the better if he wants to, and help create a welcoming community for everyone. If he doesn't give up first.
Dunno if he still have his Mastodon account, but after seeing continuous posts calling GNOME devs "complete idiots" and constantly bashing Rust for their decisions, I stopped following him completely.
You're seeing the posts in his blogs. His timeline was full of bashing devs of other open source projects. Never a constructive criticism, just plain bashing (with occasional self-congratulatory comment for his own decision).
PS: I think part of his Rust criticism was towards the attempt to make Sway use wlroots-rs and it not fitting his idea. So, instead of saying "Sorry, it didn't work", he jumped into full bashing Rust for not doing what he was trying to do.
I don't think he is still on Mastodon, and while deleting his Mastodon could be interpreted as hiding the public record of him being a jerk, it could also be interpreted as him leaving an environment where he had a habit of toxicity, which seems like it could be a healthy choice.
He says he's trying to do better, but I'll believe it when I see it. Even his recent posts are full of mean sarcasm that probably rubs a lot of people the wrong way. This is from 2 weeks ago:
> Congratulations to Rust for its first (but not its last) supply-chain attack this week! They join a growing club of broken-by-design package managers which publish packages uploaded by vendors directly, with no review step, and ship those packages directly to users with no further scrutiny. [1]
And in the post where he's complaining about GoModuleProxy, he manages to self-righteously insult the entire Go team for no good reason:
> I will say that if I was in their position, and my service was mistakenly sending an excessive amount of traffic to someone else, I would make it my first priority to fix it. But I suppose no one will get promoted for prioritizing that at Google. [2]
Yeah, that's fair. I frequently agree with what he's saying, but he tends to say it in an abrasive way that won't make him friends or convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him. And maybe that's part of why there are all of these comments where people are like "I don't understand why people would hate Drew!" I think people tend to forget how obnoxious such comments are if they agree with the content, and that's part of how Drew became a divisive figure with so many fans and haters.
> I have made no shortage of mistakes, and there are plenty of hurt feelings which can be laid at my feet. I am regretful for my mistakes, and I have worked actively to improve. I think that it has been working. Perhaps that’s arrogant of me to presume, but I’m not sure what else to do. Must I resign myself to my fate for stupid comments I made years ago? I’m sorry, and I’ve been working to do better. Can I have another chance?
When you are working on yourself and reach new milestones, then it will take time until even your closest will recognize and really trust the observed changes. And I assume public / anonymous people will take even longer.
This can feel unfair, because these things are very hard like improving, changing your habits, getting a bit wiser, or learning a new skill. But it is how it is. People have an image of you and it changes in a delayed manner. It's even doubly unfair if that image is distorted in the first place.
Also people like jumping on negativity bandwagons. It seems to be one of the really stupid parts of human nature. I do it too, most people do it even if we try to avoid it most of the time. It sucks.
> ... it will take time until even your closest will recognize and really trust the observed changes. And I assume public / anonymous people will take even longer.
In my observation it's quite the opposite. Those closest to you have the longest history with whatever was the "old way" and will therefore take the longest to believe that any change is for real.
I’ve been a very delighted user of Sway for at least 5 years and am grateful for the work Drew has put into it.
I once made a trivial PR to sway that was maybe 6 chars in total but Drew made sure I felt welcomed and even mentioned me in the list of contributors.
I find it a bit puzzling why someone who contributes so much to the community gets so much hate. Even if the opinions might not always be popular, the volume and quality of his work should speak much louder than words.
> I find it a bit puzzling why someone who contributes so much to the community gets so much hate.
Watch out, because even this self-pitying blog post manages to find time to reach out and troll the Rust community.
Internet troll gets back internet hate is not exactly unexpected right? And we all know Drew says some trollish things sometimes. I don't think the way that some handle it and him is anywhere near correct, but Drew might consider the way he presents himself isn't always conducive to good faith disagreement.
That sums it up nicely. I put my heart and soul into a product that at one point Drew personally decided was harmful and worthy of self righteous scorn, and that wasn’t very fun, but I don’t wish the same back on him. It’s just kind of the way people behave on the internet sometimes, and you can’t take it too seriously.
He doesn't "troll" the Rust community at all in the post. The line about the borrow checker was directly snagged from a lobsters or HN thread around Hare's announcement.
Keep in mind that the line was written by some throw-away account [1]. To suggest that it is anything to do with the broader Rust community is trolling.
> No, it isn't, and that "throwaway" account has hundreds of karma.
That account was registered only two months ago, enough to be classified as such. And actually the account seems to have garnered karma mostly from cryptocurrency criticism (which is a surefire way to get or lose lots of karma in HN).
> Also, wasn't your comment here longer a second ago? I seem to recall it having a bit on "or some other form of memory safety," which proves the point.
Sorry for that, I forgot to add an intervening sentence and realized that the comment is better without the (original) second sentence.
(For the context, the removed sentence was roughly "Drew could have gotten far less criticism if he had a roadmap about safety, not necessarily borrow checker but even something like sanitizers or instrumention would suffice". I originally put this sentence to show that the "safety" criticism to Hare is not just from Rust proponents, but it wouldn't work without further quantification.)
That account was registered only two months ago, enough to be classified as such. And actually the account seems to have garnered karma mostly from cryptocurrency criticism (which is a surefire way to get or lose lots of karma in HN).
You've been here long enough to know you can't innuendo at other users like this, however wrong they may be. Extra lame if they're not part of the conversation to begin with.
To my eyes caslon is claiming that that throwaway account is somehow representative of Rust community because it has lots of karma, and I responded with the fact that the karma most likely came from other heated debates than Rust or Hare in a short amount of time (in fact the comment in question was a passing mention for that account). I don't care about karma otherwise, you know it's nothing.
It doesn't matter, you can just say it was an individual user and isn't representative of the Rust community. Going all Bureau of User Investigations is explicitly disallowed cause otherwise that'd be half the messageboard.
Fair, some users are (for the lack of better expression) more representative than other users and my intention was to show that the latter was the case, but I may have gone too far.
The point was -- was that line really necessary? Was it anything more than a throwaway line, providing more heat than light?
If he wants some sympathy and, wow, does it ever seem like he wants some sympathy, couldn't he just have avoided this incendiary nonsense? The answer is, of course not, this is Internet Troll Drew DeVault.
I honestly don’t understand why someone should feel triggered by that sentence, unless they actually agree with its content in a dogmatic way. As a fan of effect systems, I found it an amusing hyperbole.
> I honestly don’t understand why someone should feel triggered by that sentence, unless they actually agree with its content in a dogmatic way. As a fan of effect systems, I found it an amusing hyperbole.
Getting into an "I'm not triggered, you're the one who is triggered" discussion on the Internet is about as dumb as thinking Drew DeVault is a software intellectual.
Drew can be toxic at times, and on the internet you reap what you sow in smaller communities. That doesn’t excuse the negativity but instead attributes why he is experiencing this hate.
Other than what the other commenters wrote, there is also a lower level library called wlroots which is used by basically every “niche” wayland server. So if you are not plasma or gnome and want to write a wayland compositor you will more than likely just depend on this library as well.
There’s so much hate towards Drew that the other day we had a major name of fly.io here defending Google engineering malpractices just because Drew was on the receiving end of it.
Well, at least it made me sure I’ll never use their services.
I wouldn't be too quick to discredit something merely on hearsay.
Drew DeVault from Sourcehut and Thomas Ptacek from Fly.io are seemingly two of the smartest people in the software space I've come across this past year or so.
I feel like I'm coming in to the middle of an emotional conversation about a topic which has a lot of backstory I don't know about. Someone here care to bring me up to speed?
Drew didn't like Rust very much, and criticized it a lot for it's complexity. He is also a very vocal supporter of open-source, going so far as to disable NVIDIA's non-free driver support in his wayland window manager/compositor Sway.
On top of that, he made SourceHut, an alternative to GitHub/Gitlab and some other innovative projects, like Gemini.
EDIT: Drew did not make Gemini, but he is still one of it's most vocal promoters. /EDIT
Recently, he even disclosed a new systems language, much simpler than Rust and more flexible than Golang.
Suffice to say, he's made some enemies that don't want him and his team to succeed.
Your summary is very one-sided and even misleading. (Drew never invented Gemini for example.) It is fair to say that Drew did bring lots of great things to F/OSS but is also a controversial figure due to his writing and communication style.
He has a bad habit to not distinguish hate speech from criticism. This time it might be an actual hate speech, but we can't be never sure without further information. (And I'm very supportive of his works! But I can't condone his communication style because that diminishes the value of his works.)
I think he has been involved in the Gemini community at some level(?); I expect he's made a server and/or client, but lots of people have done that. Indeed, making the protocol simple enough for ~anyone to implement it is one of the goals of Gemini as far as I understand it.
> going so far as to disable NVIDIA's non-free driver support in his wayland window manager/compositor Sway.
AFAIK this is backwards. It was NVIDIA developers that decided to invent their own thing (EGL Streams) instead of supporting Mesa GBM. This meant open source projects had to support a special backend for wayland specifically for NVIDIA harware. KDE also refused to support it until an NVIDIA dev stepped up to do the work for them.
Sway works on Nouveau (the severely limited open source NVIDIA driver) with the wonderfully named flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia".
I'm glad Nvidia made the right call at the end of the day. I like to think that developers taking a stand against EGL Streams contributed to their move to open more of their Limux driver stack.
> Suffice to say, he's made some enemies that don't want him and his team to succeed.
This is the "Donald Trump is an American politician..." take.
Drew is most well-known as a high-profile FOSS troll. You should view some other entries in his blog.
My first experience with Drew was "Developers shouldn't distribute their own software." That post goes directly to the heart of the question, "Why would you call him a troll?" Because he has glib and self-serving answers for every seemingly hard question in software.
Sure. No argument there? It's fine if he expresses his opinions, and even if some people enjoy these opinions. Serious people just shouldn't take his opinions seriously.
Why? Because I've yet to experience an instance where his views were at all illuminating or helpful. For each and every issue I've seen him confront, he seems to choose the most shallow, uncritical, provocative path. It's Fox News-style opinion journalism for FOSS.
That was a completely sensible post, though. Shipping binaries that users can't reproduce is harmful to users, and wastes time on behalf of developers.
Ugh. I'm not sure you remember the article correctly.
This is kind of the problem with his writing in general; it has a Rashomon quality. In this particular post, he expresses an admirable sentiment (devs shouldn't be responsible for packaging, users need to take more responsibility for their distro) and then fails to consider any of the practical problems with his approach (What if devs want users to use their software? Users and maintainers generally don't give a shit about your software). Yet with his usual DeVault-ian flourish, he concludes that he's solved all the intractable problems of software distribution.
I do remember the post. He's not wrong. A user compiling from source or using a distribution's package manager is unambiguously less harmful than having them rely on opaque binaries.
> Shipping binaries that users can't reproduce is harmful to users, and wastes time on behalf of developers.
> A user compiling from source or using a distribution's package manager is unambiguously less harmful than having them rely on opaque binaries.
The question I have is: Is that really his argument? Because I guess I missed it. Please read it again, and then again. Because I think you may be seeing what you want to see. See my discussion re: the Rashomon quality of his writing.
The blog entry that really hit home for me re: what Drew is really about was "A megacorp is not your dream job". Drew, as far as I know, isn't speaking from some deep well of experience or knowledge ("I worked for Google and let me tell you..."). He also never makes an argument. After awhile you realize he's not really saying anything at all. It's fundamentally contentless (like this entry "bleh"). It's all just vibes, like Fox News's opinion journalism or Trump is just vibes.
> The question I have is: Is that really his argument? Because I guess I missed it. Please read it again, and then again. Because I think you may be seeing what you want to see. See my discussion re: the Rashomon quality of his writing.
Yes, that is his argument. I reread the post when you contested the first time, and I reread it again now, and it is unambiguously his argument.
> Drew, as far as I know, isn't speaking from some deep well of experience or knowledge
He worked for SpaceX, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
Oh yeah? Guess I'm too thick to get it then. FWIW, I don't see him ever mention reproducible binaries, and I don't see that post as being especially in favor of users compiling from source.
> He worked for SpaceX, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? And I'm afraid you may be missing mine. He doesn't talk about his SpaceX experience in the post, and that fact only goes to underline my point. What he's talking about is not his experience, at least as far as we can discern, rather it's about the vibey-ness of the thing (Drew: "We all know Megacorps are evil...").
(And, wow, the fact he worked for SpaceX is hilarious given his views on FOSS. Tesla/SpaceX are terrible re: FOSS. Much, much worse than any FAANG.)
The fact is that workflows that are forced on you by hosting a project on SourceHut don't work for the majority of open source contributors anymore.
It's no reason for hate or any kind of personal attacks of course, but saying "then don't contribute" is not an option for most project leads that want to build successful open source software today. You have to choose your audience and the size of it.
To my knowledge Sourcehut is strictly based on mailing lists and email patches, which is by no means obsolete (Linux still uses them for a good reason) but old-fashioned compared to say, Github PRs, limiting a pool of potential contributors.
Drew wrote an interesting piece on the mail-based workflow (I linked to it elsewhere on this page). Yes it's been around for awhile, but it also seems like it really works better for certain use-cases.
If the maintainer chooses to use SourceHut they know and accept the costs and benefits.
Anecdotally, the quality:quantity ratio in regards to both contributions and contributors is far higher if you use a service like SourceHut. There are no activity charts so there's no reason to game the system with low effort pull requests and features.
Really must be anecdotal, I've been running a major open source project on Github for 3 years now and the only pull requests I've ever had to turn away were major refactorings that I preferred to do myself. You can work very methodically and receive high quality contributions everywhere - as I said, really depends on your audience.
It isn't about you-the-project-maintainer, it is about you-the-project-contributor. That criticism seems to come from the latter, i.e. people who dislike SourceHut's workflow and feel that if they want/need/have to contribute to a project hosted on it, that project's workflow would be forced on them. From that perspective it makes sense that there would be people that try to dissuade others from hosting their projects on it.
Perhaps it this has something to do with the backlash, not just against me and my work, but against others who use and participate in that work.
this a thousand times. i didn't care when people insulted or criticized me, but when they went against my team, then that hurt deeply and i really took that personal.
shrugging off attacks directed at me is kind of doable, but when others are attacked because of me, then i want to be able to protect them. sometimes it works to redirect the attention to me, but when it doesn't it makes me feel helpless.
Thank you Drew for doing your best! Please, never give up, no matter who wants you and your hard work to go away.
I have used Sway and fell in love with it, it was such a discovery of simplicity and beautiful design. I read about your new language many months ago, even then realizing the potential behind it. They want to silence you because you are a beacon of new hope and ideas. They fear your potential. Don't let anyone to belittle your talent and skill.
I guess I should have known better but I was surprised to learn that Drew would be on the receiving end of that stuff.
The vibe I got from sourcehut is that it's built by peers for peers, they are remarkably open about everything. The service is straightforward and doesn't force you to a particular workflow. It's a solid hosted version control with a no-nonsense web UI - open source to boot. What's not to like?
It blows my mind that someone would actively hate on such a project. Oh well, internet.
(I signed up for srht and pay a small amount for my personal non-work stuff.)
> The service [...] doesn't force you to a particular workflow.
I've never actually used it, but isn't that exactly what it does? As far as I know, it only allows submitting patches using emails, not using the "pull request"/"merge request"/etc workflow of most other big hosted Git solutions. But it's very possible I just don't have the whole picture here.
You are not wrong - there is no web UI for pull requests or merge checks. However the features it does have are simple and thus easily interoperable and composable. There's no push to adopt ever more interlocked services or upsell premium features.
Like a nice buffet that just does not have a particular (albeit popular) dish on offer. Where you can bring your own bottle or even an appetizer and nobody will mind.
Sourcehut is designed to operate the way Git itself operates, and the way the Linux kernel project uses it. In other words, the way it was designed to be used, not the "embrace, extend, extinguish" way that Github uses to insert itself into the process.
Or most git hosting solutions. Gitea and Gitlab do exactly the same thing, gitea even looks exactly like GitHub, works the same way, and can be hosted on pretty much any machine.
It might be GitHub that popularized this, but it made open source more accessible to a lot of people and a majority of developers clearly get something out of it.
I should have written more clearly: Github's pull-request workflow is regarded by some (obviously including myself) to be the "extend" part of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" play. In other words, 1) embrace Git, 2) extend it using a Github-only feature and encouraging an entire generation of developers to think that you can't use Git without pull-requests, 3) making it some sort of proprietary product.
IIRC Sourcehut was Drew's way to develop a Git hosting solution that integrated the Linux kernel project's workflow. The idea being that this is a completely open-source project that uses open standards, i.e. email, rather than proprietary things like pull-request.
Pull-requests don't have to be proprietary. We just need a standard format. I'm not opposed to using email, but right now the UX/UI looks far too lacking. Perhaps Sourcehut could also release an email client specifically for viewing pull requests, but until then I think it will be difficult to adopt
I know it's a bit late to raise this, but you may find it relevant.
> Pull-requests don't have to be proprietary. We just need a standard format.
A standard format for pull requests actually exists - that too as part of git itself [1]. Github decided to just redefine the term like they did with 'forking'. Torvalds was pretty annoyed with this [2]:
> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github
> instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version.
> As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things.
While git's PR is designed primarily for email, it can be shared on any medium of text communication. Git's PR can also be made from any random git host, as long as the changes are hosted there. This makes it immediately usable for almost every hosted git repo - especially for sourcehut. No registration required.
> I'm not opposed to using email, but right now the UX/UI looks far too lacking.
Again, a problem with current solutions. Most email clients, especially web clients like gmail are terrible for text mails, threaded views, proper quoting, etc - all of which are necessary for a clean email-based workflow. You have to use something like mutt or astroid, and email workflow becomes immediately more enjoyable. While that's what we have now, it doesn't have to end there. Someone could come up with flashy GUI or web interface that's as pleasing as Github's and email workflow will actually become more attractive than Github's.
> Perhaps Sourcehut could also release an email client specifically for viewing pull requests
Sourcehut is actually working on an email client suited for email workflows, called aerc [3].
> but until then I think it will be difficult to adopt
From personal experience, I find adopting email workflow with neomutt or aerc much easier than adopting git itself. Though rebasing is not a strict requirement for email workflow, email patches look janky without it. Learning rebasing is the hard part, not mailing and applying the patches. But the skill to rebase makes your contributions immediately better everywhere - not just for email patches.
> It blows my mind that someone would actively hate on such a project. Oh well, internet.
It's not the internet, it is our whole society.
We are living a very strange moment in our society where people actively hates everything that is not mainstream. It is not only on the internet, it is everywhere. You should conform to whatever is mainstream or face hate.
Just yesterday I was telling a friend about Sway, and then about Drew and all of his other projects I use and love. To me he is no less than legend developer with ethics that don't just show in his words, but in his code. We need more people like Drew.
I happily pay for sourcehut, not only but also because sourcehut aligns so much with the software world I am hoping to see more of.
Imagine just 10% of the revenue involving software globally would go into supporting all excellent open source projects that millions of people depend on on a daily basis. What a beautiful world that could be.
The following are only my lax feelings. There was a time here on HN a few years back were Drew was often on the front page. He seemed to be a growing Open Source star. He had opinions, but also projects to show. I don't know if he changed or I changed, but for me he got some attitude problem. It certainly is not easy to be impartial when you are in the spotlight, but his opinions took a bit too self-righteous turn for me. It could be just miscommunication on his part (or misreading on my part), but I felt many times that I mostly agreed with him, but was not a fan of how he put it. I like what he does even if I don't really use any of his software.
Now that he was involved in a new language he seems to get more bad press with it, I think mostly because he is someone that is Internet semi-famous.
I think he has his niche and people should just leave him be. As it is the question of popularity it is sad that work he was involved with also suffers, making this spiral that gets back to him. Probably what would help the most would be to go a little under the radar. It is unfair, but the Internet drain pipe must forget that he's a subject to pin things to. In his place I would limit writing to things not easily consumed by masses or associated with him - like mailing lists. It sucks, because who wouldn't like to be free to express himself and to advertise his work, but there is no spam filter for the public Internet.
i feel this is similar to dan bernstein, who also was/is a vocal critic of some projects, and also created software that is loved by many but hated by others. i haven't heard from him lately but i remember controversial discussions a few decades ago.
Drew's been doing really cool stuff. I'm a paying user of Sourcehut myself and I'm considering moving from the "Amateur" to "Pro" tier just to support the project.
I also don't get how someone would get out of their way just to be toxic against a free, open and community-oriented project. If you don't like it, don't use it.
I am greatly appreciative of Drew's work. I too have found that people will be intensely negative about anything I do online. It can be really hard to tune out the trolls because there is often truth to what they're saying. I just try to remind myself that trolls accomplish nothing and the end of the day I've at least done something.
> [...] This kind of harassment is something I hear about often from many maintainers of projects on SourceHut. It breaks my heart and I feel helpless to do anything about it.
I most certainly can't provide an answer here but doesn't the medium (IRC, mailing lists, forums, etc) facilitate this toxic environment too? People whose sole intent is to manufacture a narrative in order to harass someone, or their project(s), are a lot more comfortable doing so online. They are guaranteed a wide audience, lots of views and publicity which in turn maximizes the damage. Rarely do I encounter this behavior in workplace meetings, conferences or venues that require physical attendance.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that sourcehut users are taking the hit for hosting their code there. Some of it is because of natural tech activism and the coders need to create their desired order, but certainly there just typical bullying as well. Of course we're all just human, but I hope that retelling Drew's faults is not to justify any retaliation delivered to sourcehut users.
I consider drew a prolific coder who seems to be focused on all aspects relating to getting good code out of our brains. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he would come out with a new keyboard next.
I always look forward to reading Drew's blog posts and I suspect that there's more people that, like me, value Drew's work, but we mostly just shut up about it.
The haters are always going to have a louder voice because hate is an emotion that provokes people to be loud and outspoken. Appreciation is usually silent.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadThat said, I don' t know and couldn't tell you.
But more generally, I think he has a negative reputation largely because of his blogging. He has criticized others in strong terms, in blog posts that get a lot of attention. We aren't that into reading another criticism when the previous ones didn't seem that well thought out.
Sometimes the advocacy for his own work is also based on strong criticism of others for doing it wrong. It's "my way is good and other projects are harmful" rather than "I think my way is better, but other projects have different goals and people have their reasons for preferring their workflows."
But he's getting attention because people keep sharing his blog posts in various forums, and he's not responsible for that. (Including this blog post appearing in Hacker News.)
However if you’re going to traffic in language war melodrama and controversy-for-clicks (let’s be real, it’s a deliberate content strategy), then it’s sort of weak to cry about others not being nice enough in their criticisms of your own stuff. Pot meet kettle and all that /shrug.
Regardless, I hope he gets through the rough patch and I look forward to reading more of his posts that may or may not eloquently shit all over some of my favorite programming tools :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: this has come up more than once before. Seriously not cool, so please stop posting like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29665662 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27875046 (July 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25826399 (Jan 2021)
> The reason people choose Electron is because they are too lazy to learn the right tools for the job.
> For the love of God, learn something else.
Now contrast with what he complains about in this blogpost:
> SourceHut’s email-oriented approach might not be for everyone, and instead of simply not using it, skeptics must harass any projects that do.
His blogpost on electron was fueling this exact brand of hate.
That said, he has a history of... rash? impulsive? reactions to situations that might have been resolved with less bad blood if he had stepped away from the keyboard until he was less upset. The classic example is when he got upset about people wanting to unofficially add favicons to the Gemini protocol, and he threatened to blackhole any IP address which requests a favicon. https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/19...
I do not know if there is some specific recent event triggering vitriol, but the way this post is written, it sounds like Drew thinks it is resulting from less recent actions like the favicon threat.
In Drew's defense, he has made (limited) apologies and I do believe he is trying to do better. https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disas... has a note at the bottom, saying:
> I realize that my blog has been a source of a lot of negativity in the past, and I regret how harsh I've been with some of the projects I've criticised. I will make my arguments by example going forward: if I think we can do better, I'll do it better, instead of criticising those who are just earnestly trying their best.
But it is also true that many people will not be quick to forgive him, and some people never will. It will take him time to undo the negative image he has created with some people, but after seeing Linus Torvald's positive changes, I am optimistic that Drew can change for the better if he wants to, and help create a welcoming community for everyone. If he doesn't give up first.
You're seeing the posts in his blogs. His timeline was full of bashing devs of other open source projects. Never a constructive criticism, just plain bashing (with occasional self-congratulatory comment for his own decision).
PS: I think part of his Rust criticism was towards the attempt to make Sway use wlroots-rs and it not fitting his idea. So, instead of saying "Sorry, it didn't work", he jumped into full bashing Rust for not doing what he was trying to do.
That was never a goal, not for Sway and not for wlroots-rs.
I wrote that to port Way Cooler, it was no different from the other wrappers in other languages that exist.
> Congratulations to Rust for its first (but not its last) supply-chain attack this week! They join a growing club of broken-by-design package managers which publish packages uploaded by vendors directly, with no review step, and ship those packages directly to users with no further scrutiny. [1]
And in the post where he's complaining about GoModuleProxy, he manages to self-righteously insult the entire Go team for no good reason:
> I will say that if I was in their position, and my service was mistakenly sending an excessive amount of traffic to someone else, I would make it my first priority to fix it. But I suppose no one will get promoted for prioritizing that at Google. [2]
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/12/Supply-chain-when-will-we...
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/25/Google-has-been-DDoSing-s...
When you are working on yourself and reach new milestones, then it will take time until even your closest will recognize and really trust the observed changes. And I assume public / anonymous people will take even longer.
This can feel unfair, because these things are very hard like improving, changing your habits, getting a bit wiser, or learning a new skill. But it is how it is. People have an image of you and it changes in a delayed manner. It's even doubly unfair if that image is distorted in the first place.
Also people like jumping on negativity bandwagons. It seems to be one of the really stupid parts of human nature. I do it too, most people do it even if we try to avoid it most of the time. It sucks.
In my observation it's quite the opposite. Those closest to you have the longest history with whatever was the "old way" and will therefore take the longest to believe that any change is for real.
I once made a trivial PR to sway that was maybe 6 chars in total but Drew made sure I felt welcomed and even mentioned me in the list of contributors.
I find it a bit puzzling why someone who contributes so much to the community gets so much hate. Even if the opinions might not always be popular, the volume and quality of his work should speak much louder than words.
Watch out, because even this self-pitying blog post manages to find time to reach out and troll the Rust community.
Internet troll gets back internet hate is not exactly unexpected right? And we all know Drew says some trollish things sometimes. I don't think the way that some handle it and him is anywhere near correct, but Drew might consider the way he presents himself isn't always conducive to good faith disagreement.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Also, wasn't your comment here longer a second ago? I seem to recall it having a bit on "or some other form of memory safety," which proves the point.
That account was registered only two months ago, enough to be classified as such. And actually the account seems to have garnered karma mostly from cryptocurrency criticism (which is a surefire way to get or lose lots of karma in HN).
> Also, wasn't your comment here longer a second ago? I seem to recall it having a bit on "or some other form of memory safety," which proves the point.
Sorry for that, I forgot to add an intervening sentence and realized that the comment is better without the (original) second sentence.
(For the context, the removed sentence was roughly "Drew could have gotten far less criticism if he had a roadmap about safety, not necessarily borrow checker but even something like sanitizers or instrumention would suffice". I originally put this sentence to show that the "safety" criticism to Hare is not just from Rust proponents, but it wouldn't work without further quantification.)
You've been here long enough to know you can't innuendo at other users like this, however wrong they may be. Extra lame if they're not part of the conversation to begin with.
If he wants some sympathy and, wow, does it ever seem like he wants some sympathy, couldn't he just have avoided this incendiary nonsense? The answer is, of course not, this is Internet Troll Drew DeVault.
Getting into an "I'm not triggered, you're the one who is triggered" discussion on the Internet is about as dumb as thinking Drew DeVault is a software intellectual.
Linux user, not Nvidia GPU, interested in custom tiling window managers (i3) AND next generation display protocols (Wayland).
I use this on my Thinkpad T510 but can't even run it on my desktop because of (Nvidia's) hardware incompatibilities.
Well, at least it made me sure I’ll never use their services.
Drew DeVault from Sourcehut and Thomas Ptacek from Fly.io are seemingly two of the smartest people in the software space I've come across this past year or so.
Drew didn't like Rust very much, and criticized it a lot for it's complexity. He is also a very vocal supporter of open-source, going so far as to disable NVIDIA's non-free driver support in his wayland window manager/compositor Sway.
On top of that, he made SourceHut, an alternative to GitHub/Gitlab and some other innovative projects, like Gemini.
EDIT: Drew did not make Gemini, but he is still one of it's most vocal promoters. /EDIT
Recently, he even disclosed a new systems language, much simpler than Rust and more flexible than Golang.
Suffice to say, he's made some enemies that don't want him and his team to succeed.
Drew didn't make Gemini, at least not if "make" means started the project or came up with the idea. See also, the Gemini FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
I think he has been involved in the Gemini community at some level(?); I expect he's made a server and/or client, but lots of people have done that. Indeed, making the protocol simple enough for ~anyone to implement it is one of the goals of Gemini as far as I understand it.
Drew has built some great gemini software, but he didn't make Gemini, it is a community project led by Solderpunk.
AFAIK this is backwards. It was NVIDIA developers that decided to invent their own thing (EGL Streams) instead of supporting Mesa GBM. This meant open source projects had to support a special backend for wayland specifically for NVIDIA harware. KDE also refused to support it until an NVIDIA dev stepped up to do the work for them.
Sway works on Nouveau (the severely limited open source NVIDIA driver) with the wonderfully named flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia".
Also, that legendary flag was removed in a recent commit:
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/commit/b48cb6b0ec1320ad25fd2c...
This is the "Donald Trump is an American politician..." take.
Drew is most well-known as a high-profile FOSS troll. You should view some other entries in his blog.
My first experience with Drew was "Developers shouldn't distribute their own software." That post goes directly to the heart of the question, "Why would you call him a troll?" Because he has glib and self-serving answers for every seemingly hard question in software.
The guy has his opinions. It's his blog. You are free to express your opinions on your blog.
Why? Because I've yet to experience an instance where his views were at all illuminating or helpful. For each and every issue I've seen him confront, he seems to choose the most shallow, uncritical, provocative path. It's Fox News-style opinion journalism for FOSS.
This is kind of the problem with his writing in general; it has a Rashomon quality. In this particular post, he expresses an admirable sentiment (devs shouldn't be responsible for packaging, users need to take more responsibility for their distro) and then fails to consider any of the practical problems with his approach (What if devs want users to use their software? Users and maintainers generally don't give a shit about your software). Yet with his usual DeVault-ian flourish, he concludes that he's solved all the intractable problems of software distribution.
Spoiler alert: He hasn't.
> A user compiling from source or using a distribution's package manager is unambiguously less harmful than having them rely on opaque binaries.
The question I have is: Is that really his argument? Because I guess I missed it. Please read it again, and then again. Because I think you may be seeing what you want to see. See my discussion re: the Rashomon quality of his writing.
The blog entry that really hit home for me re: what Drew is really about was "A megacorp is not your dream job". Drew, as far as I know, isn't speaking from some deep well of experience or knowledge ("I worked for Google and let me tell you..."). He also never makes an argument. After awhile you realize he's not really saying anything at all. It's fundamentally contentless (like this entry "bleh"). It's all just vibes, like Fox News's opinion journalism or Trump is just vibes.
Yes, that is his argument. I reread the post when you contested the first time, and I reread it again now, and it is unambiguously his argument.
> Drew, as far as I know, isn't speaking from some deep well of experience or knowledge
He worked for SpaceX, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
Oh yeah? Guess I'm too thick to get it then. FWIW, I don't see him ever mention reproducible binaries, and I don't see that post as being especially in favor of users compiling from source.
> He worked for SpaceX, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? And I'm afraid you may be missing mine. He doesn't talk about his SpaceX experience in the post, and that fact only goes to underline my point. What he's talking about is not his experience, at least as far as we can discern, rather it's about the vibey-ness of the thing (Drew: "We all know Megacorps are evil...").
(And, wow, the fact he worked for SpaceX is hilarious given his views on FOSS. Tesla/SpaceX are terrible re: FOSS. Much, much worse than any FAANG.)
It's no reason for hate or any kind of personal attacks of course, but saying "then don't contribute" is not an option for most project leads that want to build successful open source software today. You have to choose your audience and the size of it.
Anecdotally, the quality:quantity ratio in regards to both contributions and contributors is far higher if you use a service like SourceHut. There are no activity charts so there's no reason to game the system with low effort pull requests and features.
this a thousand times. i didn't care when people insulted or criticized me, but when they went against my team, then that hurt deeply and i really took that personal.
shrugging off attacks directed at me is kind of doable, but when others are attacked because of me, then i want to be able to protect them. sometimes it works to redirect the attention to me, but when it doesn't it makes me feel helpless.
I have used Sway and fell in love with it, it was such a discovery of simplicity and beautiful design. I read about your new language many months ago, even then realizing the potential behind it. They want to silence you because you are a beacon of new hope and ideas. They fear your potential. Don't let anyone to belittle your talent and skill.
The vibe I got from sourcehut is that it's built by peers for peers, they are remarkably open about everything. The service is straightforward and doesn't force you to a particular workflow. It's a solid hosted version control with a no-nonsense web UI - open source to boot. What's not to like?
It blows my mind that someone would actively hate on such a project. Oh well, internet.
(I signed up for srht and pay a small amount for my personal non-work stuff.)
I've never actually used it, but isn't that exactly what it does? As far as I know, it only allows submitting patches using emails, not using the "pull request"/"merge request"/etc workflow of most other big hosted Git solutions. But it's very possible I just don't have the whole picture here.
Like a nice buffet that just does not have a particular (albeit popular) dish on offer. Where you can bring your own bottle or even an appetizer and nobody will mind.
It might be GitHub that popularized this, but it made open source more accessible to a lot of people and a majority of developers clearly get something out of it.
IIRC Sourcehut was Drew's way to develop a Git hosting solution that integrated the Linux kernel project's workflow. The idea being that this is a completely open-source project that uses open standards, i.e. email, rather than proprietary things like pull-request.
He wrote a great article on the email-driven workflow: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html
You're right, though, Github has done a service to the open-source community, and nobody forces you to use pull-requests.
> Pull-requests don't have to be proprietary. We just need a standard format.
A standard format for pull requests actually exists - that too as part of git itself [1]. Github decided to just redefine the term like they did with 'forking'. Torvalds was pretty annoyed with this [2]:
> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github > instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. > As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things.
While git's PR is designed primarily for email, it can be shared on any medium of text communication. Git's PR can also be made from any random git host, as long as the changes are hosted there. This makes it immediately usable for almost every hosted git repo - especially for sourcehut. No registration required.
> I'm not opposed to using email, but right now the UX/UI looks far too lacking.
Again, a problem with current solutions. Most email clients, especially web clients like gmail are terrible for text mails, threaded views, proper quoting, etc - all of which are necessary for a clean email-based workflow. You have to use something like mutt or astroid, and email workflow becomes immediately more enjoyable. While that's what we have now, it doesn't have to end there. Someone could come up with flashy GUI or web interface that's as pleasing as Github's and email workflow will actually become more attractive than Github's.
> Perhaps Sourcehut could also release an email client specifically for viewing pull requests
Sourcehut is actually working on an email client suited for email workflows, called aerc [3].
> but until then I think it will be difficult to adopt
From personal experience, I find adopting email workflow with neomutt or aerc much easier than adopting git itself. Though rebasing is not a strict requirement for email workflow, email patches look janky without it. Learning rebasing is the hard part, not mailing and applying the patches. But the skill to rebase makes your contributions immediately better everywhere - not just for email patches.
[1] https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull
[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
[3] https://aerc-mail.org/
It's not the internet, it is our whole society.
We are living a very strange moment in our society where people actively hates everything that is not mainstream. It is not only on the internet, it is everywhere. You should conform to whatever is mainstream or face hate.
Imagine just 10% of the revenue involving software globally would go into supporting all excellent open source projects that millions of people depend on on a daily basis. What a beautiful world that could be.
Now that he was involved in a new language he seems to get more bad press with it, I think mostly because he is someone that is Internet semi-famous.
I think he has his niche and people should just leave him be. As it is the question of popularity it is sad that work he was involved with also suffers, making this spiral that gets back to him. Probably what would help the most would be to go a little under the radar. It is unfair, but the Internet drain pipe must forget that he's a subject to pin things to. In his place I would limit writing to things not easily consumed by masses or associated with him - like mailing lists. It sucks, because who wouldn't like to be free to express himself and to advertise his work, but there is no spam filter for the public Internet.
I also don't get how someone would get out of their way just to be toxic against a free, open and community-oriented project. If you don't like it, don't use it.
SourceHut turned out to be a company which values i very much share
i wasn't aware about the harassment-campaign, but i wish a soon recovery!
consider going off-line for a while and start talking to a therapist
Take it as a compliment, Drew. :)
The rustacean cries out in pain as it pinches you.
I have survived through my awesome power of not having to use them.
I most certainly can't provide an answer here but doesn't the medium (IRC, mailing lists, forums, etc) facilitate this toxic environment too? People whose sole intent is to manufacture a narrative in order to harass someone, or their project(s), are a lot more comfortable doing so online. They are guaranteed a wide audience, lots of views and publicity which in turn maximizes the damage. Rarely do I encounter this behavior in workplace meetings, conferences or venues that require physical attendance.
Why not point this hate to corporations that are destroying our society with their unethical business practices?
I consider drew a prolific coder who seems to be focused on all aspects relating to getting good code out of our brains. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he would come out with a new keyboard next.
The haters are always going to have a louder voice because hate is an emotion that provokes people to be loud and outspoken. Appreciation is usually silent.