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Author Topic: Hijacking of foss community  (Read 17839 times)

Joanna

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Hijacking of foss community
« on: May 30, 2021, 02:30:17 am »
I’m sure you have all heard about the stampede of foss projects from freenode to libera by now because of some squabble between the staff and owner.

I advise caution in this matter for the following reasons. There are a lot of unanswered questions about who is responsible and who really is financing for the Libera servers.

The former staff of freenode use GitHub which is owned by Microsoft who helped destroy pascal as the popular language that it once was by poaching the developers from Borland who were developing Delphi.

There is a good possibility that parties that are not friends of free software are paying for the trolls and spam attacks on freenode.

This whole situation warrants a more thorough investigation before blindly abandoning Freenode irc channels.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2021, 05:00:29 am by Joanna »
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lucamar

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #1 on: May 30, 2021, 02:46:09 am »
Didn't we already have an "announcement" about this? Not in these terms and with a different level of paranoia (whether merited or not), but ... ::)
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denis.totoliciu

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #2 on: May 30, 2021, 02:55:48 am »
Microsoft who helped destroy pascal as the popular language that it once was by poaching the developers from Borland who were developing delphi.

The fundamental idea is that FreePascal, Lazarus and its community should remain independent of politically correctness and abide to freedom of speech. That was already available on freenode. I heard that there isn't enough staff to handle both libera and freenode, but that is false. The #fpc channel on freenode worked very well up until now, it had interesting discussions, a lot of freedom and debate on many subjects, which was great. It has been defended against trolls with active efforts on the channel for the chance of keeping the small community on IRC together and not demoralized by shills.

Why isn't it good enough? The move is purely political. It is not something technical. And you are moving in the den of the enemy. I want to remind you that in open source there is this small category of programmers that fight for a cause. I fall into that one and Joanna does, too. You might call us conspiracy theorists or crazy people, but check out the history and the perspective on longer term, not based on impulse and social trends and you will see that things might not be as they seem in haste at first sight.

M$ has the mentality of an empire, a corporate empire and their purpose is to conquer everything, nowadays open source being one of their greatest targets. It saw that it can't bust it to the ground as it did with other companies/corporations, so now they befriend it so that they can corrupt its principles through money and promises of grandeur to programmers that fall into this trap.
From what I know, Libera uses an IP owned by Github which in turn is owned by M$. Now please remember the history of Delphi and what M$ and Bill Gates did to Borland, Embarcadero, the Delphi IDE and the Object Pascal language.

M$ bought the architect of Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, and they built the C# language inspired by Object Pascal, and the .NET platform inspired by RTL and VCL. The legend says that he was given $3 million just to come over to M$. Then they bought the 2nd man after him with $1.5 million. Then they took another 34 key developers from Borland. Afterwards they infiltrated management and had the company into taking bad decisions such as building their own buggy C# compiler and running always as a karaoke singer after the technologies that M$ was building. Then Delphi 2005 was the complete mess that resulted from all this.

M$ is known for doing these things to companies, corporations and to open source projects now.

You have to look on the long term for keeping the independence of communication and of the programming language from these mischievous strategies and tactics. If you think FreePascal and Lazarus doesn't have their enemies, then you are blinding yourselves intentionally.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2021, 03:00:30 am by denis.totoliciu »

lucamar

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #3 on: May 30, 2021, 04:49:27 am »
Yet, interestingly enough, you're both "new members" in this forum which, along with the mail lists, is the primary FPC/Lazarus users communication channel ... Curioseur and curioseur

Nevertheless, my point is that this thing about freenode isn't exactly "news":  we all (or at least those interested enough) know about this.

All the rest is, you'll excuse me the frankness, plain "we must fight the empire!!!" rhetoric. And not very exact, at that.

ETA: And then I'm breaking my own rule of "never feed a troll" (or two). My excuses to the normal people ... :-[

EATA: I know you're not really a troll, Denis, but come on ... unless someone elese has hijacked your account ...
« Last Edit: May 30, 2021, 04:57:19 am by lucamar »
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trev

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #4 on: May 30, 2021, 04:54:21 am »
I imagine that IRC users use that facility more than they use the Forum and so may forever be "new users" here ;)

Joanna

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2021, 04:57:50 am »
That’s right I prefer to use Irc rather than forums. I wish more people would also use irc but to each is own.
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lucamar

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #6 on: May 30, 2021, 05:08:45 am »
I imagine that IRC users use that facility more than they use the Forum and so may forever be "new users" here ;)

It's not a question of "IRC more than forum/mail lists", it's a question of "only IRC". And it's a "problem" (note the quotes, please) because ...

That’s right I prefer to use Irc rather than forums. I wish more people would also use irc but to each is own.

The problem is that IRC is ephemeral: It's the equivalent of a more or less lousy talk in a bar with some colleagues around a couple beers. The forum and mailing lists are more like a tech talk around the coffe machine at the workplace ... with a notepad and a pen in the pocket, just in case. And let us remember we deal mainly with technical issues ...

To each their own, of course, but the difference of outlook is pretty clear, isn't it?
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MarkMLl

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #7 on: May 30, 2021, 08:16:06 am »
I’m sure you have all heard about the stampede of foss projects from freenode to libera by now because of some squabble between the staff and owner.

I advise caution in this matter for the following reasons. There are a lot of unanswered questions about who is responsible and who really is financing for the Libera servers.

...

There is a good possibility that parties that are not friends of free software are paying for the trolls and spam attacks on freenode.

This whole situation warrants a more thorough investigation before blindly abandoning Freenode irc channels.

With respect, wasn't it you who jumped up saying that everybody should move from Freenode to Libera a few days ago without presenting much of an explanation or argument?

Quote
The former staff of freenode use GitHub which is owned by Microsoft who helped destroy pascal as the popular language that it once was by poaching the developers from Borland who were developing Delphi.

In fairness, MS weren't responsible for that since there were multiple compilers around and they even had their own. It was a gradual process fuelled by many factors, possibly the most significant being bad management at Borland.

MarkMLl



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MarkMLl

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #8 on: May 30, 2021, 08:23:31 am »
The problem is that IRC is ephemeral: It's the equivalent of a more or less lousy talk in a bar with some colleagues around a couple beers. The forum and mailing lists are more like a tech talk around the coffe machine at the workplace ... with a notepad and a pen in the pocket, just in case. And let us remember we deal mainly with technical issues ...

I agree, and would mention that this has been a bit of a hot topic elsewhere over the last few weeks since Arduino abandoned SMF in favour of Discourse which- from an end-user's POV- is far more difficult to manage.

The most productive channels IMO are mailing lists or (marginally better) newsgroups, but there usability is highly dependant on how competent client software is at threading messages properly. I've used a private conferencing system in the past which was better, since every user was guaranteed to have the same URI for each message... something that SMF etc. does of course ensure even if its sequential display is rather crude.

MarkMLl
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trev

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #9 on: May 30, 2021, 08:41:54 am »
I prefer forums because of the better categorisation of posts - but then I was an old FidoNet and EchoMail sysop/developer/zone coordinator from before this new fangled Internet thingie was a thing ;-)

MarkMLl

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #10 on: May 30, 2021, 09:28:06 am »
I prefer forums because of the better categorisation of posts - but then I was an old FidoNet and EchoMail sysop/developer/zone coordinator from before this new fangled Internet thingie was a thing ;-)

I prefer CIX, which is based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoSy_(computer_conferencing_system) ... which is every bit as old.

However the fundamental points are (a) whether every message has a URI (or equivalent) which is consistent for every user and (b) whether messages have an "in response to" or similar header, which allows client software to order messages by thread. Most systems fail to implement one or the other of those properly.

MarkMLl
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Pet hate: people who boast about the size and sophistication of their computer.
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denis.totoliciu

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #11 on: May 30, 2021, 12:23:30 pm »
EATA: I know you're not really a troll, Denis, but come on ... unless someone elese has hijacked your account ...

This is what I believe in and it is my analysis on the subject, regardless of what I am called.
As a matter of fact, I want to suggest to the forum to make a special section for such discussions, such as Conspiracies or The Republic or Defending FreePascal and Lazarus where we can post some of our opinions without interferring with the users that don't believe in such things.
In that way we have our small corner where the heads of the projects can take a look any time, if they are curious, on our analysis that we can post over there and maybe at some point it will help.

But of course, this request can also be seen by the more politicaly correct righteous ones as a means for having the forum going towards `rag fair discussions`, `becoming a mess`, `enabling conspiracy crazies`, `enabling bad behavior`.

Joanna

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #12 on: May 30, 2021, 01:23:16 pm »
That is true I did get mislead and caught up in the libera hype and posted about new channels there. I also received more information and deleted my post as soon as possible on the same day. I never claimed to be perfect and know everything did I ? And neither is anyone else.

Irc chat maybe ephemeral but the things I learn in there and many people I have met mean quite a lot to me.
You will not find anyone who wants irc chat channel to be a success more than I do as you can tell by my previous posts.

The experience in irc depends who you are talking there of course. There are many paid trolls in irc picking fights as well as spammers.
It’s no secret that I don’t want to waste whatever is left of my life spending time with such people. Nor do I want to encounter them in any channel I frequent.

Unfortunately i have unwillingly become an expert on many of the tricks that professional trolls play. I’m a firm believer without any hesitation in the idea that pascal related channels are for people who use the free pascal compiler or at least are interested  talking about the pascal/delphi family of languages.

The pascal channels are NOT in my opinion a place to bash the fpc compiler and harass the people who use it. Anyone who thinks that a paid troll who comes to the channel is a possible convert to using the language is horribly mistaken.   It’s quite easy to tell who is interested in pascal and who is not.
 
I’m so grateful for all the hard work that many people have put into developing the free pascal compiler and it makes me really angry when people come to our channel to try to wreck the project and chase people away.

The troll whom I complained about last year got banned from the channels with nickysns help. However he definitely did not give up. He keeps coming back under different names to try to finish his task of wrecking this project. This means a heck of a lot to me because I only program in Pascal.

Many people here are quite smart and program all sorts of useful things but they are not aware of or can’t accept the fact that the pascal user community is under constant attack by people who want it to be gotten rid of.
Everywhere I go I try to tell people how wonderful Lazarus is but someone else has always convinced people otherwise before I got there and they won’t even give Lazarus a try because “it’s not marketable” or other lame excuses which have no connection to reality.

I know this post might cause some people to not like me but this has to be said . I refuse to compromise or mince words when I say that in my opinion Lazarus is the best programming tool ever made and I will do my best to defend it and it’s users.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2021, 03:07:20 pm by Joanna »
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denis.totoliciu

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #13 on: May 30, 2021, 02:13:53 pm »
Speaking of ethics and principles, I think the FreePascal and Lazarus communities can take can example from SQLite for creating a list of principles that drives the community. This database engine is known worldwide, present everywhere, a real success and maybe there is some wisdom to learn from it, aside from the technical aspects.

Regardless of money and fame, this is what drove this man to create SQLite.

https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
« Last Edit: May 30, 2021, 02:17:04 pm by denis.totoliciu »

Handoko

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Re: Hijacking of foss community
« Reply #14 on: May 30, 2021, 02:21:52 pm »
@Joanna

I appreciate what you've done to 'defend' Pascal.

But I think the best thing to do for defending Pascal is not defending it from the attackers. But by making it better. You are a programmer not a warrior, why should you face the attackers! The more time you spend to eliminate the attackers the less time you can use for doing programming. You fall into their tricks.

Visit the bugtracker, there are a huge amount of bugs are waiting. If you good enough, pick a bug and fix it. Even if you're not so skilled, you still can be helpful. By become a tester and providing feedback.

If you're good in English, you can improve the documentation and wiki. There are many duplicates pages and outdated information. Or if you're good in your native language, you can start a blog, write some howto Pascal tutorials in non-English languages on other sites.

But if you think your Pascal knowledge is limited, visit this forum often. There always some new tricks can be learn everyday. At the same time, help the beginners. Most of beginners' questions are relatively easy to answer, just do some forum or web searching you should be able to provide the answers.

If you like to challenge yourself, do like what I frequently do. If someone asking how to do something, try write a demo as quick as you can, but still the source code is properly written in an easy to understand flow and properly formatted. Don't use JEDI code formatting tool, but do it manually. After a period of time, this kind of exercise will improve you programming skill a lot.

When Lazarus/FPC has more features, less bugs and beginners can get help easily, there will be more people want to use it. When Pascal has a large amount of users, it is very hard to be defeated. Spending more time on doing the things I said, I believe will be better than fighting attackers by arguing with them.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2021, 02:28:47 pm by Handoko »

 

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