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People who follow his blog will be familiar with at least some of the following: http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html

by dfrage 7y ago

People who follow his blog will be familiar with at least some of the following: http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html Some distance down the list is reposurgeon, which has been used to convert Gnu Emacs and many smaller/younger repositories to git, and is in the process of converting GCC: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?tag=reposurgeon http://esr.ibiblio.org/?tag=reposurgeon Not directly software: http://www.catb.org/~esr/projects.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/projects.html

cromulent 7y ago
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm just curious - what on that list is "a critical Internet service or library"?
- dfrage 7y ago
  Second item from the top: > gpsd > gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a serial or USB port, decodes the position/velocity/time information it sends, and republishes in a simple uniform format on an IANA-designated TCP/IP port. This enables multiple applications to read from a GPS without contention. The distribution also provides C and Python libraries to encapsulate the client side of talking with gpsd. From the core team page on the following project (https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html), with at least one falsifiable claim: > Eric S. Raymond has been the technical lead of GPSD, a close peer project of NTP and one of its principal time sources, since 2004. GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines. The top item, where he's also the technical lead: > NTPsec > A stripped down-security-hardened and generally improved version of the NTP reference code. Features code bulk reduced by a factor of 4, better monitoring and diagnostic tools, and Network Time Security. Aspires to become one, but it's early in the process to see if it'll succeed. Those are projects I've vaguely followed over the years. Reading down the list, this claims to be one, and the claim is partially falsifiable: > giflib > The ubiquitous service library for rendering GIFs. I handed off the project 1994 to avoid problems with the U.S. patent system, but accepted back the lead in 2012. This code had the odd effect of making me virtually omnipresent; it seems nobody has ever bothered to write a replacement, and it's now ubiquitous in web browsers, cellphones and gaming consoles. In a nicely ironic touch, it earned me an appearance in the credits of the Microsoft XBox.
  - cromulent 7y ago
    Sincerely: Thanks for your detailed reply, I'm more knowledgeable now :)
    - dfrage 7y ago
      A perfectly cromulent reply, you're welcome. :-)
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    GPSD was historically an important project, but I wouldn't call it "load bearing" in the same sense as core networking or service contributions. It's also increasingly less important as the changes dropped in 4.19 are picked up by downstream software authors. Most software installations that care about gps are deployed in SBC configurations. A lot of other folks (e.g., hobbyists with external microcontrollers or arm SBCs) are parsing directly. Folks most interested in linux attached hardware are either older school hardware hackers (who rely on this project) or folks using new LoRa radios (in which case that stuff is in the card and annoyingly locked down because it's part of some LoRa monetization schemes). Sooooo yes. Not a bullshit project. But no, not a ILBS project.
    - dfrage 7y ago
      I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page: > GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines. And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services". You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.
      - KirinDave 7y ago
        Having hand built and written software for a lot of drones, gpsd is not mission critical in most drones and I dunno where they get that claim. You only use gpsd for embedded hardware when you have no drivers OR you're in 2017. As for Android... again that capability is not important to the internet. It's important to Google cheaply getting a feature launched. This seems to me to be specifically ignoring the anti-corporate-centric intent of ESR's post to elevate his importance. This essay is important without these sub-discussions. I fully agree with ESR that capitalism fails to sustain the internet and ruthlessly rides the backs of maybe four dozen skilled individuals in the world who, when they're gone, will be sorely missed and the world will suddenly become more expensive if others don't take up the call. I just don't think ESR is in that critical group. He might be in a group of people writing widely used software. And that's great and important. But it really doesn't seem like what he himself is discussing. > You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring. Both of whom are well compensated for their work, no? Seems to me like we should look more critically at who is not being served by capitalism and help them since their work has value.
KirinDave 7y ago
But none of these are within the implicit scope of "Internet Load Bearing Software" though, are they? We're aware of his prior involvement with ILBS, but he hasn't been sharp in that game for a long time now.
- dfrage 7y ago
  NTPsec aspires to be "Internet Load Bearing Software".
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Well good luck to them. One day the might be. But I think ESR's point about recognizing how load bearing individuals and small groups are being crushed in the wave of monetizable internet growth is a good point. We should folks on people currently in that position.

by dfrage 7y ago

cromulent 7y ago

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm just curious - what on that list is "a critical Internet service or library"?

dfrage 7y ago
Second item from the top: > gpsd > gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a serial or USB port, decodes the position/velocity/time information it sends, and republishes in a simple uniform format on an IANA-designated TCP/IP port. This enables multiple applications to read from a GPS without contention. The distribution also provides C and Python libraries to encapsulate the client side of talking with gpsd. From the core team page on the following project (https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html), with at least one falsifiable claim: > Eric S. Raymond has been the technical lead of GPSD, a close peer project of NTP and one of its principal time sources, since 2004. GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines. The top item, where he's also the technical lead: > NTPsec > A stripped down-security-hardened and generally improved version of the NTP reference code. Features code bulk reduced by a factor of 4, better monitoring and diagnostic tools, and Network Time Security. Aspires to become one, but it's early in the process to see if it'll succeed. Those are projects I've vaguely followed over the years. Reading down the list, this claims to be one, and the claim is partially falsifiable: > giflib > The ubiquitous service library for rendering GIFs. I handed off the project 1994 to avoid problems with the U.S. patent system, but accepted back the lead in 2012. This code had the odd effect of making me virtually omnipresent; it seems nobody has ever bothered to write a replacement, and it's now ubiquitous in web browsers, cellphones and gaming consoles. In a nicely ironic touch, it earned me an appearance in the credits of the Microsoft XBox.
- cromulent 7y ago
  Sincerely: Thanks for your detailed reply, I'm more knowledgeable now :)
  - dfrage 7y ago
    A perfectly cromulent reply, you're welcome. :-)
- KirinDave 7y ago
  GPSD was historically an important project, but I wouldn't call it "load bearing" in the same sense as core networking or service contributions. It's also increasingly less important as the changes dropped in 4.19 are picked up by downstream software authors. Most software installations that care about gps are deployed in SBC configurations. A lot of other folks (e.g., hobbyists with external microcontrollers or arm SBCs) are parsing directly. Folks most interested in linux attached hardware are either older school hardware hackers (who rely on this project) or folks using new LoRa radios (in which case that stuff is in the card and annoyingly locked down because it's part of some LoRa monetization schemes). Sooooo yes. Not a bullshit project. But no, not a ILBS project.
  - dfrage 7y ago
    I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page: > GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines. And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services". You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      Having hand built and written software for a lot of drones, gpsd is not mission critical in most drones and I dunno where they get that claim. You only use gpsd for embedded hardware when you have no drivers OR you're in 2017. As for Android... again that capability is not important to the internet. It's important to Google cheaply getting a feature launched. This seems to me to be specifically ignoring the anti-corporate-centric intent of ESR's post to elevate his importance. This essay is important without these sub-discussions. I fully agree with ESR that capitalism fails to sustain the internet and ruthlessly rides the backs of maybe four dozen skilled individuals in the world who, when they're gone, will be sorely missed and the world will suddenly become more expensive if others don't take up the call. I just don't think ESR is in that critical group. He might be in a group of people writing widely used software. And that's great and important. But it really doesn't seem like what he himself is discussing. > You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring. Both of whom are well compensated for their work, no? Seems to me like we should look more critically at who is not being served by capitalism and help them since their work has value.

KirinDave 7y ago

But none of these are within the implicit scope of "Internet Load Bearing Software" though, are they? We're aware of his prior involvement with ILBS, but he hasn't been sharp in that game for a long time now.

dfrage 7y ago
NTPsec aspires to be "Internet Load Bearing Software".
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Well good luck to them. One day the might be. But I think ESR's point about recognizing how load bearing individuals and small groups are being crushed in the wave of monetizable internet growth is a good point. We should folks on people currently in that position.