I understand there's been drama, and someone walked away or was pushed out. I don't quite care enough to understand it all or point at guilty parties.
However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.
>"Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over.
is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.
In the incident case, it's a post-mortem on the incident. The incident itself is (hopefully) resolved and can now be dissected to learn about what went wrong and how things can improve in the future.
That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
Gamasutra has a famous line of articles where game developers provide retrospectives on how the development of their titles went, maybe I'm influenced by that.
I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
Just based on this blog post it seems like he wanted the project to be more “professional” in some way that the rest of the developer group didn’t. I wonder if that difference in vision, combined with a (probably justified based on your comment) feeling that he was doing a disproportionate amount of the work lead to an unsustainable situation.
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
Software history is rife with projects that outlive a person like that leaving, though. Ulrich Drepper comes to mind immediately. They don't own the project.
It’s worth pointing out that the official Bazzite position is that Antheas was removed from the project for breaching Code of Conduct and harassing people in their official Discord server
or depending on your point of view (I don't know which one is the correct one), it's very easy to find some rule that was infringed for a quick power grab, right at the time when Bazzite is becoming popular.
it was clearly bad enough for everyone else to decide that they didn't want to put up with him anymore. which is what happens in the real world.
online, everyone considers themselves a public figure. and because we can't seem to get shot of public figures, whether they be rapists, homophobes, or just arseholes, alleged or proven, they believe, logically, you shouldn't be able to be rid of them.
offline, if you have someone who makes your life a misery, you tell them to fuck off.
Pretty much. He said some mean words. The cult of personality around the other maintainer has spun it into something way worse that he someone made other people quit OSS or something. It's hog wash and not backed up by anything.
Sometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such.
Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord.
This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX.
But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
Strongly agreed. I'd like to see users pushing more for this. Return to IRC, try XMPP or Matrix, put up a forum. Lots of options exist that would be more freedom-respecting, stable, and publicly searchable.
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Wouldn't any platform have the same problem though? A forum would partition the community between those willing to make an account and submit private information and those who aren't. It seems like no matter what platform you choose there will always be those who are willing to participate and those who are not.
Been on Bazzite for a while now and had very few issues, though to backup the sentiments of Antheas here, they have managed to upset the maintainer of the Go-XLR Linux Utility with their fast and loose HW changes: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/goxlr-utility/issues/239
Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.
I've been testing Bazzite and noticed a couple of things that raised an eyebrow for me. Sexual preferences in Bazaar options tool to update flatpaks seems out of place and even if not the limited subset of flags is odd. To me personally that is risking potential drama in the OS/apps.
There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.
It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.
I guess the good thing about Bazzite, CachyOS, Omarchy and what have you, is that it brings new users to Linux.
I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.
I've been using desktop Linux for 20 years in various capacities. I most recently picked Bazzite for my gaming/desktop VM because it's simple to set up and works better than other distros I've tried to game on in the recent past. It's that simple.
This is pure dramaposting- "post-mortem" is so misleading and mischaracterizes the situation. I don't use bazzite, I don't know Kyle or anybody here, but I am tired of the drama.
All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.
It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.
Readit News
However, my current understanding is that the project remains active, so titling this article "Post Mortem" feels a bit like it's done in bad faith as it's usually applied to projects that are over. It's certainly what I immediately assumed made it newsworthy.
is it? outside of autopsies, i think i have only ever seen it used as a synonym for "incident report". i dont think ive ever associated the term specifically with the end of a project.
e.g. cloudflare uses the tag for all of their incident reports (https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/post-mortem/), not as a signal that they are closing shop
That's what a post-mortem implies to me in the tech industry. A thing happened, it's over now, here are the lessons we learned to take into the future.
I'm aware about the use in incident reports of course, but then you still don't call it "<project name> Post-Mortem" but use a more specific namespace.
People should stop using it as a synonym, then. The Latin effectively means "after death", meaning its a poor synonym for "what happened wrong recently".
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
Dead Comment
online, everyone considers themselves a public figure. and because we can't seem to get shot of public figures, whether they be rapists, homophobes, or just arseholes, alleged or proven, they believe, logically, you shouldn't be able to be rid of them.
offline, if you have someone who makes your life a misery, you tell them to fuck off.
they said it themselves in this post
> Yes, I know I am hard to work with. Yes, I know that I pushed certain OSS contributors away.
generally the kind of person that gives open source a bad reputation, you can be critical or anti-social without being an asshole
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
The most salient part:
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Looking around a couple of adjacent communities, it seems the Bazzite maintainers might have acted in the best community interest on this one, so I'm optimistic things will continue in a positive way. Still, might make me a little less full-throated about recommending Bazzite, knowing there's such drama under the surface.
There is also a suspiciously long delay in closing the shell terminal which feels like it is storing or sending something but I have yet to debug it. This does not occur on any other of the many Linux distributions I have tested.
It is a snappy and decent distro otherwise. Good thing they are removing drama, something that almost nuked Mint not long after its inception.
I would still like to see most users pick established distros, as contributions there have a higher impact on the ecosystem. But self-named gamers are probably harder to reason with.
All of the things listed in the blog are personal and technical disagreements, nothing morally reprehensible, no disrespect, nothing that would make anyone want to burn bridges like this.
It's fine to leave a project and to publicize disagreements but this comes across as spiteful.