Utterly wholesome is the perfect description. It's an instant click from me any time his videos (or hn posts) pop up.
I get the same feeling from Jeff's videos I did when I watched PBS as a kid. That's not a dig; I find his videos extremely calming, informative, and well produced. The man radiates positivity and kindness.
That's a rarity these days on YouTube. Presumably "high energy" content does better algorithmically, but for me personally the false enthusiasm, or manufactured outrage trends grow old rather quick.
No, I don’t think that’s too harsh. I’m in agreement with you on both those points. I still watch his videos but am now more aware of the context influencing the content.
I posted elsewhere; the blog started off in 2003-ish on HTML, then Xanga, migrated to Thingamablog (Static Site Generator before it was cool), then Drupal.
I started writing on the blog 20 years ago while in high school and college. I like leaving up the old to help people see not everyone comes straight out of the womb with the same maturity and style of someone in their 30s/40s.
I still have a lot to learn, and I imagine I would say the same thing when I hit my 40 year blogiversary :)
I love all Geerling's projects, writings, and videos over the years. I was actually concerned that based on the brevity of the title that something tragic had happened. Glad that's not the case!
Probably the headline auto "correcter" lopped off the "Meet" part of the original title. Yet another example of that piece of software being too clever by half if you ask me.
This is the stupidest HN feature. It does very little for clickbait (flagging and voting is better), and routinely screws up titles to the point it drastically changes or reverses their meaning.
If - to paraphrase the other folks before me - it causes more annoyance than it does good, then the fact that one can spend more effort undoing its damage after the fact is, in fact, a bug rather than a feature.
But you're only hearing from the people who are annoyed enough to write a comment complaining about it. Many other users (such as myself) may be +1 or +0 on the functionality, in which case you can't conclude that "it causes more annoyance than it does good". You'd need to know user's preferences (if you're solving for that) or the value HN admin attributes to the feature vs. the value they attribute to the cost imposed on users (if you're solving for that)
Any feature is a "complete anti-feature" if you only count the things it gets wrong! The things it gets right mostly escape notice and never get commented on. It does a lot more good than bad, so keeping it is an easy call.
Some of the things it gets wrong do stand out like sore thumbs. Then again, it's probably good for the community to have something innocuous to hate.
I share this sentiment. Whenever I see his name I end up reading his article and whether I agree with him or not, the quality of content he puts out sets a very high bar. Whenever he writes a comment on HN it's one of those rare instances where I'll stop and read it carefully rather than blaze through it. Jeff is truly a gem in the community.
FWIW I did not expect bad news since I didn't see a date range after the name in parens.
But these are used, cheap new Atom miniPC doesn't have GPIO, and brand new Atom SBCs with GPIO are more $$$ with the same SoC compared to miniPC since they aren't mass produced.
A used Pi with sdcard/case/fan is much less than $40.
These tend to have buffer underrun issues causing latency in the order of seconds, requiring deeper knowledge in the embedded field to mitigate.
Most educational content that involve the Pi tend to use system GPIO libraries and integration, making other SBCs or USB expansion boards difficult to use for newcomers. The Pi is a platform other than the hardware, their forum should be more welcoming though.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
If you're thinking of the USB-C PD input being 5v/5A, that's not a spec violation, just a bit of an extreme use of the more recent version of the standard.
It would be nice if it were higher voltage/lower amperage, but it works at least with their own power adapter through a few clever tricks.
For WPA3, it is what it is... most SBCs have 'middling at best' built-in WiFi, and while the driver support can improve, I typically stick to external or M.2 PCIe WiFi chips if I need something more robust. (Hopefully a WiFi HAT will make its way to the market with Intel AX210 or something like that).
Ah yes, that one was pretty silly. Partly due to not spreading out alpha test hardware wide enough to catch a more obvious bug like that. Also up there with 'don't take pictures of the Pi 2, the camera flash will reboot it' :)
The Pi 5's PCIe implementation has a lot of fixes—to the point where after only a few days of work, Coreforge over on GitHub has Minecraft rendering through the GPU (only at x1 speed so far).
The CM4 uses the silicon from Pi 4, which was never really a fully-baked PCIe implementation, so I'll forgive them a little there. But it opened up a huge number of possibilities that I think will be realized on Pi 5 (and hopefully a CM5 eventually).
And regarding power consumption / efficiency, don't forget about the usefulness of a full Linux computer running at less than a watt (like the Zero 2 W); or with the Pi 5 you can use the watchdog timer to boot and shut down now, going from idle at 2-3W to power off at 0.01W if you need a remote 'edge' device.
But the hardware and efficiency were never the primary drivers for Pi. It's the fact you can buy one (well, sometimes...) and use it. You don't have to spend a few hours getting the right OS, figuring out the right tools to flash it reading sparse forum-based documentation...
And even the Pi 4's PCIe is fine for some things. I have a CM4-based NAS that I put together using Axzez's Interceptor board (a big thank you, Jeff: I learned about it though one of your GitHub issues where you'd been cataloging CM4 carrier boards), and it's just fine for spinning-rust hard drives. It isn't maxing out their performance or anything, but it reads and writes fast enough for anything I need to do with it.
Yeah, it's a little weird that it's a throwaway account. Astroturfing or not, it's IMO off-topic and an annoying distraction; flagged it out of existence.
While Pi software support isn't perfect (it's a little baffling to me that there is still so much that hasn't been upstreamed to mainline Linux in over a decade, but I digress), it's generally light years ahead of the random SBCs you see from... wherever (yes, many from China, but there are others too). Armbian support is a plus, and many of them do run Armbian, but community support when you run into issues is very hit-or-miss. And manufacturer support is pretty much nonexistent for most of these. Some of that may just be language barrier, but the end result is the same.
This is the guy who kicked up all the dirt about Red Hat, which IMO was entirely overblown. Not to say that he's a bad dude...but be careful of who you listen to on the Internet.
Because so much of it was just completely false. Jeff positioned Red Hat as going against the community, which wasn't the case at all. The "bad actors" were squarely Rocky and Alma who just wanted to sell the exact same ten year support enterprise Red Hat as Red Hat themselves without any work. Well, Red Hat said, you want it, you go get it in Stream, which has a 5 year lifecycle.
The only companies that need ten year lifecycles are the same consumers Red Hat caters to with RHEL.
Red Hat is continuing to honor all its licensing terms. It just isn't doing its freeloading competitors any favors. And yes: they're freeloaders.
Red Hat's choice never touched the community in any way. As a hobbyist who uses Red Hat stuff, I'm not using RHEL, and even if I was, Red Hat gives generous licenses for hobbyists like me.
Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.
Thousands of sysadmins, open source devs, even Hatters themselves used CentOS as a proxy for RHEL where they didn't want to deal with licensing crap.
In the middle of the CentOS 8 lifecycle, they converted CentOS to CentOS Stream (nobody asked for this), forcing everyone who had migrated their tooling and infra from CentOS 7 to 8 to migrate instead to... what?
Rocky/Alma stepped in and saved the day for all those folks.
Then in the middle of the CentOS Stream 9 lifecycle, they hid some of the sources required for rebuilding a CentOS-equivalent (at least simply/easily) behind a Red Hat account and told the community they should be happy with 16 dev licenses for RHEL if they truly needed RHEL compatibility.
Jeff, plenty of smarter people than me came out against you to correct your crusade. As a practicing Christian, I'd expect more from you than coming out to lead a mob frothing at the mouth for blood. You didn't even try and have a reasonable discourse with Red Hatters. As an influencer, you have a responsibility not to encourage this kind of social media vitriol that's become all too common. It's a contagion upon the human mind and you are directly responsible for whipping people up in this one.
Ex-Redhatter that watched stuff go down while defending it till I stopped (much after I left). That's not Redhat anymore, it's IBM.
The lovely RHEL people and CentOS people didn't have a say. We kept hearing and believing that the CentOS stream change was never intended to break CentOS users until they hid the sources.
RHEL is built on open source products, and support is sold. To innovate in open source by coming up with ways to get around GPL (we'll retaliate if you publish our legally publishable sources IIUC) is evil. In direct violation of what every other contributor to linux/GNU/anything GPL ever released their software under.
Disclaimer: I was part of other projects, not this directly, and I had nothing, but respect and love for everyone I worked with. We were in denial then too.
> Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.
Hate bandwagon? I'm not a huge follower of Jeff's but I have never seen a single thing from them that I would consider "hateful" or jumping on a bandwagon.
What I can gather is that you disagree with those who did not like Red Hat's actions w.r.t. CentOS and RHEL updates, but just because you side with Red Hat here doesn't really make the argument less valid, neither does unjustly categorizing it as hateful. (Or false. I'm not seeing the reams of false claims. I see some accurate ones though, like that Redhat had promised not to change access to the sources previously[1].)
> Hate bandwagon? I'm not a huge follower of Jeff's but I have never seen a single thing from them that I would consider "hateful" or jumping on a bandwagon
I'll just address this bit. Yes, it was a hate bandwagon and it wasn't jumping on one, it was leading it. It was all over his LinkedIn and everywhere else he could post at the time.
Something isn't hateful just because you don't like it or don't agree with it. (It's also not a bandwagon just because other people agree with it, but that's neither here nor there at this point.)
I tend not to take seriously the opinions of people who call others who use open source software according to the terms of its license "freeloaders".
(And I say this as an open source developer myself, who has spent thousands of hours writing code for free.)
If you want to side with Red Hat on this, fine, but it's not necessary to exaggerate the actions of those with an opposing view to the point that you're trying to make them look bad.
I also in general think it's silly and unnecessary to defend a giant corporation (remember, IBM owns Red Hat now, and it's not like RH had been a scrappy little Linux company for a long while before the acquisition, even) over regular ol' community members and IT sysadmins who have a beef.
I also don't believe in defending big corporate but Jeff's takes were wildly out of touch with what was actually happening. I do not love Red Hat or any corporation and I think their messaging could have been a lot better but I don't think the people who together make up Alma or Rocky acted in any way in good faith and I do find their desire to have everything hand prepared for them by Red Hat spoiled behavior.
The sources are all still there, they just need to work a little harder to get it. Forgive me if I shed no tears.
I had some very early, somewhat tangential, and long-discontinued involvement in the very early days of Rocky. Before CIQ was even a thing.
Generally speaking, the people who did the work to found RESF weren’t doing so in order to have someone else do their work for them and just rebrand it. There was a terrific amount of work that happened because a huge community of users had just had the rugged pulled out from under them.
(To be very clear, on a personal level I have some deep and stringently opposed views to some people in the RESF/CIQ ecosystem. I’m not offering any unconditional or personal defenses.)
Jeff’s takes were some of the most measured of the disagreement with Red Hat’s moves that I’ve seen.
I very much dislike folks who use their influence to spread this stuff. Precisely because the way social media works, it amplifies into a crescendo of shallow takes and worst emotion. People with influence have a responsibility not to abuse their position. Calling them out on it (the first I've ever done) is not a "crusade".
You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text. Telling people to disregard this one persons tech content because of software-politics views. Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
> You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text.
I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.
> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.
To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.
Please don't use throwaway accounts like this. It's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, and eventually it will get your main account banned as well.
Heh, few remember the very early days when I ran a forum on midwesternmac.com — I actually started out doing IT services and web hosting (mostly Drupal, some Wordpress) for local places.
The first project I did as an independent LLC was built out a network with a bunch of eMacs and a central G4 server for a law firm :P
Totally, it seems like every tech thing I’ve gotten to in the last 12 years or so - Drupal, Ansible, rpi, a few other things I can’t think of right now - geerlingguy was there a few years before I found it.
Before clicking on the link I thought you meant he was writing articles on Ansible and putting his non-Ansible opinions in the same articles. I have no problem with him writing his thoughts on his blog, whether they are on Ansible, abortion, or anything else.
What's uncomfortable about it? Good people will have different opinions than you on controversial issues. Understanding that is the cornerstone of a tolerant liberal society.
Wow. Skimming through that article, the articles linked at the bottom and some of Jeff’s comments and replies to the articles, he comes across way more hardcore and intense than the chill, wholesome guy I’m used to seeing. The stuff I just read was from over a decade ago, so maybe he’s changed, or maybe the only thing that’s changed is how outspoken he is about this. I like Jeff’s work, this bums me out.
Most likely one of the blog posts I wrote in the early 00s about abortion.
I started writing my blog in 2004, and decided to leave up almost everything from the earliest days when it was on Xanga, then Thingamablog (SSG before it was cool!), and now Drupal.
Unlike most people, I'd rather be an open book. I figure intelligent people can understand how something written in high school/college days two decades ago can reflect on personality, while also understanding that those words are likely not the same words the person would write today.
It's also why I leave up my very early YouTube videos. It's not like everyone who has seen some success in their 30s/40s popped out of the womb the way they are today!
Thanks for your reply. I'm curious to know if your views have changed in the years/decade(s) since. (I'm asking specifically because there appear to be a few logical flaws in some of the arguments in one of your blog posts from 2009, at the risk of going significantly off topic for this HN thread)
Not only is it off-topic, but I don't think anyone is likely to learn anything interesting from a reply, and the most likely outcome is an abortion-related flamewar.
I don't agree with Jeff's 2009 views on abortion, but it's not really relevant to the work he's done here, and neither is whether or not he's changed his mind in any way about it.
I mostly agree with your point about it being off topic. However I wonder what decides what’s the threshold to separate the art from the artist metaphorically speaking. Not that I don’t think the different shades of grey shouldn’t be discussed in general, but if this was someone else with more controversial issues (eg Stallman) the discussion would be different, and some/many wouldn’t have considered that off topic to the discussion. Anyway, such things are fortunately not critical. (Fwiw I’m not particularly for or against what Jeff has written from an ideological view)
Because of Geerling's early videos on Ansible - I started looking into Ansible and learning it. Also, went down the rabbit hole on how to compile a kernel. (For no real reason other than I could).
It's always fun to stumble on Jeff's content organically. I feels like whatever I'm looking up, The GeerlingGuy has done it first. He deserves all the good vibes.
In I think 2019 or 2020, I found some of Jeff's stuff online. I realized I actually had a pi in a box somewhere I'd won in a hackathon way back when. Set it up. I'd been doing a lot of linux sysadmin stuff in the past and kinda missed having a server I could upload stuff to. I set up a blog and some other stuff.
Got lured into Jeff's cluster shenanigans and got a few more pis and set up a tiny cluster with various services I found useful[1]. I built a bunch of services from scratch. Eventually my hybris grew and I started drawing up plans for my own search engine, running off this cluster.
I figured why not, covid was coviding and I had a lot of time. Turns out you need more than bunch of pis to run a n internet search engine, so I got a bigger server. Still my first iteration indexded like 200k docs.
One thing turned into another and now I've quit my job to work on this full time. Weird how the world works sometimes.
I guess what I wanted to say is: Thanks, Jeff.
[1] This was before the semiconductor shortage, back when pis were abundant. Sorry if I contributed to any shortages. I've sold off the ones I didn't end up using :)
lol that’s very similar to what’s been happening to me: I have a 6-Pi cluster at home, running Docker Swarm + Portainer + GlusterFS to host a series of services I use daily. That includes a blog that I’ve been afraid to post to because the project grew so big I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Besides all his (excellent) tech stuff, I'm really thankful for Jeff being so public about his struggles with Crohn's. I'm fortunate to have a far more moderate case, but in general there isn't a ton of awareness about the disease and its super brave of him to use his platform to talk about his health issues.
> It’s like the tool world: I use DEWALT mostly, because the first tool I bought was a DEWALT. So you gotta use the DEWALT battery, and then you’re like, well, I could buy this cheaper tool, it’s better. But then it won’t work with my battery. So now I have something like 25 DEWALT tools.
Oh man, this is something I wish the EU would work on fixing. There's no reason there couldn't be a battery standard.
At least with the tools, if you pick a brand like DeWalt or Milwaukee... they have been around for decades and will stay around for decades, and the tools don't just die if the company gets bought out.
Well, at least until 'smart' tools start getting forcibly pushed into the market. But Internet connectivity is bad enough in many construction environments that it might never happen (we can hope...).
I have a bunch of Makita cordless tools (and IME, Makita was #1 for pros 10-15 years ago, not a niche brand).
Several years ago (2015-ish?) they changed up the battery shape a little bit so newer batteries wouldn't fit on older tools. It was to add another pin so the battery could tell the tool it was dead and quit drawing power (why the battery couldn't just cut power is beyond me). So (at the time) I had a drawer full of year-old tools that wouldn't work with the extra batteries I just bought.
As it turns out, you can file down part of the tool body and the new batteries fit old tools, but without the power protection. So they didn't end up in the landfill, but it's still hugely annoying.
Yup, I have a Dewalt set, with their older battery design.... unfortunately my batteries are getting old, the tools are fine, but I can't get the old batteries, and if I buy new tools, they will use the new batteries. So... do I buy aftermarket batteries for my existing tools, or get rid of my existing tools and switch to whatever brand next? It is silly.
DeWalt sells adapters so the 20V lithium batteries fit the 18V NiCad tools. You're still locked in, but at least your old tools keep working. It's part number DCA1820: https://www.dewalt.com/product/dca1820/18v-20v-adapter
Thanks! The price is pretty high unfortunately. There are some third party adapters I may get for around 10 dollars each. May be worth it to keep my old tools working.
I’ve had great luck with NOS 18v batteries from eBay. Had to pick up a pair for an 18v trim nailer that doesn’t support their 20v adapter. My neighbor did the same for his 18v collection. All going strong.
Having done a bunch of research into top-end Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Bosch, Hilti, etc tools I've learned that the tools themselves have management circuitry that talks to the circuitry in the battery (which is monitoring remaining charge, temperature, and a lot of other variables) and the tool and battery can negotiate bursts of electrical current based on the work that is happening (like hammer drilling into concrete, hard wood, steel, etc) giving noticeable boosts of torque at times. While I suppose it's possible that a generic battery management/demand API could be built to allow any number of tools make use of it's electrical reserve that hasn't happened yet. I'm kinda surprised that Tesla hasn't pushed for an idea like that... aren't they just a battery company that sells cars as a way to sell their batteries? Why not create a kick-ass line of power tools and outdoor power equipment made to use Tesla batteries on any manufacturer's equipment that is API compliant.
(Oh and Japan mandates a particular kind of battery-to-device interface that isn't required anywhere else in the world which is why Makita batteries look different than everyone else's...)
And that doesn't account for brands like Harbor Freight who clearly are having their tools made by someone else but they refuse to say who is making their Bauer and Hercules lines.
> (Oh and Japan mandates a particular kind of battery-to-device interface that isn't required anywhere else in the world which is why Makita batteries look different than everyone else's...)
Bosch opened their battery ecosystem, branded as "Bosch AmpShare" together with Fein and Rothenberger, which covers now more than 25 brands:
https://www.ampshare.com/us/en/
Geerling is just utterly delightful. Comes across smart, friendly, and razor sharp-- particularly in facing serious adversity, I don't know that I'd bounce back EVER if I had a colostomy bag in my 30s. I'm a fan.
Ah! Always love to see something from Jeff, glad he's getting the recognition he deserves. He's such a smart guy but very humble. An inspiration to us all!
> Philosophically I can understand that stance, but don’t call it open source: call it ‘source available’
Yep, agreed. Huge pet peeve of mine as well.
It's not like anyone's under any obligations to provide any sort of rights, but at some point you have to admit that the term "open source" comes with a lot of expectations and norms that licenses like BSL just simply do not meet, and trying to call your project "open source" or call BSL in the "spirit" of open source is just misleading.
Jeff is awesome! I met him at AnsibleFest 2022, and he was very friendly despite not feeling well (I did not take up much of his time when I realized that, FYI).
Nobody even mentioned his books! His Ansible for DevOps book I have used at 2 companies to teach Ansible.
He's an amazing guy and our industry is better off for having him in it.
126 comments
[ 9.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI get the same feeling from Jeff's videos I did when I watched PBS as a kid. That's not a dig; I find his videos extremely calming, informative, and well produced. The man radiates positivity and kindness.
That's a rarity these days on YouTube. Presumably "high energy" content does better algorithmically, but for me personally the false enthusiasm, or manufactured outrage trends grow old rather quick.
He also seems to be brand loyal, but I'm being too harsh.
I started writing on the blog 20 years ago while in high school and college. I like leaving up the old to help people see not everyone comes straight out of the womb with the same maturity and style of someone in their 30s/40s.
I still have a lot to learn, and I imagine I would say the same thing when I hit my 40 year blogiversary :)
Quite reassuring that there are still nice places on the internet.
I would have killed for this kind of content as a youth.
No yelling or clickbait titles, just someone calmly playing Doom and while explaining game mechanics and level design.
1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ueWjVFJo8
Red Shirt Jeff forever!!!!
https://redshirtjeff.com/
Geerling's an excellent trailblazer, explainer, and all round lovely guy, and his specialties are much broader than just R-Pi.
Some of the things it gets wrong do stand out like sore thumbs. Then again, it's probably good for the community to have something innocuous to hate.
Typically with Crohn's issues you have weeks or months of fun issues that lead up to anything too serious! (But not always)
FWIW I did not expect bad news since I didn't see a date range after the name in parens.
Proprietary blobs aren't that bad with Broadcom...
Gotta admit that Pi foundation never cared about batteries, especially since it's common with makers, audio removal etc...
Most educational content that involve the Pi tend to use system GPIO libraries and integration, making other SBCs or USB expansion boards difficult to use for newcomers. The Pi is a platform other than the hardware, their forum should be more welcoming though.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It would be nice if it were higher voltage/lower amperage, but it works at least with their own power adapter through a few clever tricks.
For WPA3, it is what it is... most SBCs have 'middling at best' built-in WiFi, and while the driver support can improve, I typically stick to external or M.2 PCIe WiFi chips if I need something more robust. (Hopefully a WiFi HAT will make its way to the market with Intel AX210 or something like that).
https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/exploring-the-raspberry-pi-4...
The CM4 uses the silicon from Pi 4, which was never really a fully-baked PCIe implementation, so I'll forgive them a little there. But it opened up a huge number of possibilities that I think will be realized on Pi 5 (and hopefully a CM5 eventually).
And regarding power consumption / efficiency, don't forget about the usefulness of a full Linux computer running at less than a watt (like the Zero 2 W); or with the Pi 5 you can use the watchdog timer to boot and shut down now, going from idle at 2-3W to power off at 0.01W if you need a remote 'edge' device.
But the hardware and efficiency were never the primary drivers for Pi. It's the fact you can buy one (well, sometimes...) and use it. You don't have to spend a few hours getting the right OS, figuring out the right tools to flash it reading sparse forum-based documentation...
The only companies that need ten year lifecycles are the same consumers Red Hat caters to with RHEL.
Red Hat is continuing to honor all its licensing terms. It just isn't doing its freeloading competitors any favors. And yes: they're freeloaders.
Red Hat's choice never touched the community in any way. As a hobbyist who uses Red Hat stuff, I'm not using RHEL, and even if I was, Red Hat gives generous licenses for hobbyists like me.
Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.
Thousands of sysadmins, open source devs, even Hatters themselves used CentOS as a proxy for RHEL where they didn't want to deal with licensing crap.
In the middle of the CentOS 8 lifecycle, they converted CentOS to CentOS Stream (nobody asked for this), forcing everyone who had migrated their tooling and infra from CentOS 7 to 8 to migrate instead to... what?
Rocky/Alma stepped in and saved the day for all those folks.
Then in the middle of the CentOS Stream 9 lifecycle, they hid some of the sources required for rebuilding a CentOS-equivalent (at least simply/easily) behind a Red Hat account and told the community they should be happy with 16 dev licenses for RHEL if they truly needed RHEL compatibility.
As I said then, "no thanks."
Doesn't mean they were right.
The lovely RHEL people and CentOS people didn't have a say. We kept hearing and believing that the CentOS stream change was never intended to break CentOS users until they hid the sources.
RHEL is built on open source products, and support is sold. To innovate in open source by coming up with ways to get around GPL (we'll retaliate if you publish our legally publishable sources IIUC) is evil. In direct violation of what every other contributor to linux/GNU/anything GPL ever released their software under.
Disclaimer: I was part of other projects, not this directly, and I had nothing, but respect and love for everyone I worked with. We were in denial then too.
Hate bandwagon? I'm not a huge follower of Jeff's but I have never seen a single thing from them that I would consider "hateful" or jumping on a bandwagon.
What I can gather is that you disagree with those who did not like Red Hat's actions w.r.t. CentOS and RHEL updates, but just because you side with Red Hat here doesn't really make the argument less valid, neither does unjustly categorizing it as hateful. (Or false. I'm not seeing the reams of false claims. I see some accurate ones though, like that Redhat had promised not to change access to the sources previously[1].)
[1]: https://www.learnlinux.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/red_hat...
I'll just address this bit. Yes, it was a hate bandwagon and it wasn't jumping on one, it was leading it. It was all over his LinkedIn and everywhere else he could post at the time.
(And I say this as an open source developer myself, who has spent thousands of hours writing code for free.)
If you want to side with Red Hat on this, fine, but it's not necessary to exaggerate the actions of those with an opposing view to the point that you're trying to make them look bad.
I also in general think it's silly and unnecessary to defend a giant corporation (remember, IBM owns Red Hat now, and it's not like RH had been a scrappy little Linux company for a long while before the acquisition, even) over regular ol' community members and IT sysadmins who have a beef.
The sources are all still there, they just need to work a little harder to get it. Forgive me if I shed no tears.
Generally speaking, the people who did the work to found RESF weren’t doing so in order to have someone else do their work for them and just rebrand it. There was a terrific amount of work that happened because a huge community of users had just had the rugged pulled out from under them.
(To be very clear, on a personal level I have some deep and stringently opposed views to some people in the RESF/CIQ ecosystem. I’m not offering any unconditional or personal defenses.)
Jeff’s takes were some of the most measured of the disagreement with Red Hat’s moves that I’ve seen.
I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.
> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.
To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.
Huh, me too. Could've sworn I saw this, and now I don't. My bad...
He's not biased at all when it comes to comparing the Pi to the competition in his blogs, I mean erm clones, there is no competition anyways.
Jeff Geerling blog: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog
The guy who was in that Pi factory tour looks similar but is my British doppelgänger.
As https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html explains, throwaway accounts are fine for sensitive information but you certainly shouldn't be using multiple ones in the same thread.
The first project I did as an independent LLC was built out a network with a bunch of eMacs and a central G4 server for a law firm :P
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I started writing my blog in 2004, and decided to leave up almost everything from the earliest days when it was on Xanga, then Thingamablog (SSG before it was cool!), and now Drupal.
Unlike most people, I'd rather be an open book. I figure intelligent people can understand how something written in high school/college days two decades ago can reflect on personality, while also understanding that those words are likely not the same words the person would write today.
It's also why I leave up my very early YouTube videos. It's not like everyone who has seen some success in their 30s/40s popped out of the womb the way they are today!
I don't agree with Jeff's 2009 views on abortion, but it's not really relevant to the work he's done here, and neither is whether or not he's changed his mind in any way about it.
I bought a used print copy of his book during lockdown and bought the digital copy to directly support him.
He’s a good writer on the page as well as a good hands-on/interactive instructor.
Whenever I see just a name on HN, I expect an obituary. Got a few more gray hairs from seeing this.
Got lured into Jeff's cluster shenanigans and got a few more pis and set up a tiny cluster with various services I found useful[1]. I built a bunch of services from scratch. Eventually my hybris grew and I started drawing up plans for my own search engine, running off this cluster.
I figured why not, covid was coviding and I had a lot of time. Turns out you need more than bunch of pis to run a n internet search engine, so I got a bigger server. Still my first iteration indexded like 200k docs.
One thing turned into another and now I've quit my job to work on this full time. Weird how the world works sometimes.
I guess what I wanted to say is: Thanks, Jeff.
[1] This was before the semiconductor shortage, back when pis were abundant. Sorry if I contributed to any shortages. I've sold off the ones I didn't end up using :)
Oh man, this is something I wish the EU would work on fixing. There's no reason there couldn't be a battery standard.
At least with the tools, if you pick a brand like DeWalt or Milwaukee... they have been around for decades and will stay around for decades, and the tools don't just die if the company gets bought out.
Well, at least until 'smart' tools start getting forcibly pushed into the market. But Internet connectivity is bad enough in many construction environments that it might never happen (we can hope...).
I have a bunch of Makita cordless tools (and IME, Makita was #1 for pros 10-15 years ago, not a niche brand).
Several years ago (2015-ish?) they changed up the battery shape a little bit so newer batteries wouldn't fit on older tools. It was to add another pin so the battery could tell the tool it was dead and quit drawing power (why the battery couldn't just cut power is beyond me). So (at the time) I had a drawer full of year-old tools that wouldn't work with the extra batteries I just bought.
As it turns out, you can file down part of the tool body and the new batteries fit old tools, but without the power protection. So they didn't end up in the landfill, but it's still hugely annoying.
(Oh and Japan mandates a particular kind of battery-to-device interface that isn't required anywhere else in the world which is why Makita batteries look different than everyone else's...)
https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-...
This is interesting, got any sources?
Yep, agreed. Huge pet peeve of mine as well.
It's not like anyone's under any obligations to provide any sort of rights, but at some point you have to admit that the term "open source" comes with a lot of expectations and norms that licenses like BSL just simply do not meet, and trying to call your project "open source" or call BSL in the "spirit" of open source is just misleading.
Nobody even mentioned his books! His Ansible for DevOps book I have used at 2 companies to teach Ansible.
He's an amazing guy and our industry is better off for having him in it.