8 ms·

Non Session Manager vs New Session Manager

328 points by beprogrammed 5y ago

beprogrammed 5y ago
Jonathan Moore Liles of non software has been a master craftsman of Linux software. Some of the most beautiful pieces I've had the pleasure of using. This pains me greatly.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I am not really involved in the open source community, but are these kinds of fights and coups as common as Hacker News makes them seem?
- mistrial9 5y ago
  no they are not - but the bigger the stakes, the bigger the audience, the bigger the lever.. Faust comes to mind
- beprogrammed 5y ago
  As of late it seems to be becoming more of a problem. Where we used to have the good will of others we now have a tide of ill intents it would seem.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    It seems like people fighting over fiefdoms. I followed the freenode debacle and that seemed like comic book villain level of insanity.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      For as long as I can recall, it seems that every couple of years someone decides the current state of audio on linux is terrible, but instead of trying to fix the existing available code, they start a new project. Usually there's a node to maintaining compatibility with other libraries, but that interoperability stops right where the new project thinks the old projects are Doing It Wrong. The X vs Wayland fight is polite to a fault in comparison.
      - drmr 5y ago
        NSM can potentially be used with JACK on win and macos. It also works with JACK implementation of PipeWire for Linux. I expect Linux audio to converge on PW (unifying alsa, jack, and pulse in the process). Linux video has this split with Wayland which is a whole different problem (I want my fluxbox :/). PW originates as Pulse Video, and designed to work with gstreamer pipelines and wayland compositing. aiming for better userspace separation of hardware and applications. I really love the idea of having JACK, but then for video. (no more vloopback hacks, named pipes or random socket servers to bounce framebuffers between applications) JACK will then live on for dedicated Pro Audio applications and hopefully on win and macos as the old-skool "this also works" audio API that really only a small niche uses (and can break at the snip of silicon valley's fingers).
        cratermoon 5y ago
        > I expect Linux audio to converge That's what alsa, JACK, and pulse said. That's what they all said, except perhaps OSS, because nothing proceeded it.
- viraptor 5y ago
  I'm interested in audio on Linux, especially recently and I know neither who those people are nor what NSM / Non does. It's a bizarre post that could use a lot more context. The title is also weird - not only is Linux audio not dead, it's doing better than ever with the recent pipewire work.
  - drmr 5y ago
    NSM is an API to launch and manage JACK audio applications to store connections and program state. NON is the "groupware" DAW project of Jonathan Moore Liles from which NSM originated.
- 6f8986c3 5y ago
  Yes.
- Zenst 5y ago
  Whilst such things have been common in large corporation office political culture for decades, too see it play out in the wild like this in open source, is just shocking. Sadly it does seem to be becoming more and more, more since some view open source/projects as potential revenue streams and be it irc, or some carefully nurtured project that has grown over a lifetime, to be rug pulled by such `political games` all in the end for what I dare say be some agenda greed. It just saddens us all.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    At least in corporations there is money at stake, so I get (do not excuse, but understand) shitty behaviour. But all that seems to be at stake here is clout.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Shit happens all over the place. I can point at it happening in the scuba diving industry. High school never ended for some people.
- 01100011 5y ago
  If you asked me 5 years ago if I thought something like this could happen I'd have said no. Then I relocated to SiValley and experienced Machiavellian engineers for the first time in my 20+ year career. It's good to remember that not everyone puts technology and community first. Some people will do whatever it takes to make a name for themselves, even if that just means being slightly less forgotten than they would have been previously.
  - aswanson 5y ago
    Politician engineers, ugh.
  - rStar 5y ago
    are these the same people who chest on exams in undergrad?
    - rStar 5y ago
      *cheat
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  As a guess, the past year or eighteen months has probably been worse than usual. With a global pandemic on, people were stressed and people who feel helpless about very real and large problems often get controlling and nitpicky about anything they feel they actually can control. When all parties to a drama are equally stressed and handling it similarly, it's a recipe for escalation with little hope of real solutions.
- ww520 5y ago
  Years ago I wrote a p2p file sharing program and open-sourced under GPL. Soon a group contacted me for forking the project; I gave them my blessing and wished them luck. Later I looked at their fork. All they did was adding their names to the copyright and the new project name to the comment section for all the hundreds of files. I was frustrated as this was a clear case of taking copyright ownership for the software. I asked them to remove their names from the copyright unless it's new changes by them but they said GPL allowed it. I contacted FSF for clarification and FSF replied that it's allowed as changing the comment constituted a new change. It's a bunch of BS. It took the rosy glasses off my naive self and soured my view on open sourcing my software in the future.
  - beprogrammed 5y ago
    That's a dirty move.
  - deathanatos 5y ago
    IANAL, and this is not legal advice, but I am surprised at the FSF's view here. I believed (and believe) that copyright requires a substantive change to form a derivative work, and I would rather doubt that changing the comments counts. (Now, I think that precedents in the court have set the bar for "substantive" pretty low, but not that low.) I would also say that "legal" is not always the same as "ethical", particularly in this circumstance.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Kind of. Big scraps? No, however it is worth pointing out that small open source communities can be a melting pot of really clever often contrarian/polemical developers who are kind of bound to clash at one point or another.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  It happens. As is said of academic politics: the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.[1] Back at the dawn of the dot-com age, just as Linux was starting to boom, and the first IPOs (Red Hat, VA Linux) were occurring, a company appeared out of nowhere^WReno, Nevada (same thing), called "Linux One", claiming to have their own novel Linux distro. Oh, and plans for its own IPO. It proved to be little more than a search-and-replace of "Red Hat" with "Linux one", though there were also some contributions from MandrakeSoft, another distro at the time. Stealing is copying from one source, curation is copying from several.... The thing is that, at least so far as the software is concerned, that's pretty much perfectly kosher under the GNU GPL and other Free Software / Open Source licences which comprised the scope of Red Hat's offering. In terms of copyright and licensing ... there was nothing actually wrong with this. Skeevy as all getout, yes. But not a GPL (or BSD, or MIT, or Apache, or ...) violation. (The company may have failed its source provision obligations for the GPL, however.) The robustness of the IPO failing, er, filing, might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere though. I seem to recall it being cancelled rather quietly, there's The Register published an investigation of the episode at the time: https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/02/linuxone_takes_more_than/ https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/02/linuxone_takes_more_t... ________________________________ Notes: 1. See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Lost in edits, 'theres..." should read "there's no record of the IPO itself, though I also didn't find any mention of its cancellation."
mistrial9 5y ago
omg - this is dirty tricks playlist.. What must civil people do in the face of this Machiavellian marching band
smoldesu 5y ago
I understand that this title is just verbatim taken from the blogpost, but could we switch it to something more suitable like "Linux Audio Moderation Accused of Misconduct"? The current one just seems silly given how trivial the contents of the article are.
- 6f8986c3 5y ago
  No.
Snarwin 5y ago
Sounds like it might be time to pull a Libera and migrate to a new mailing list.
- drmr 5y ago
  Maybe rasengan can pull some funds out of his ass to host the server.
mxmilkiib 5y ago
A really one sided take. The Non dev was being abusive in public threads and even nastier in private mails to various Linux Audio devs. The full story is on the archives of the Linux Audio Development and Consortium mailing lists. Folk should come visit #lad (Linux/Libre) on Libera.Chat.
- explorigin 5y ago
  (citation needed)
  - fgonzag 5y ago
    He literally stated where you can find the information.
    - pantalaimon 5y ago
      Hyperlinks were invented for a reason.
      - quickthrower2 5y ago
        For people at CERN to make bold claims, with citations
    - roenxi 5y ago
      He hasn't provided a citation. He's told someone they can do their own research an a mailing list. A parallel might be me claiming that we have a highly algorithm for factoring large primes and saying you can look it up on arxiv.org - I've pointed at a repository of knowledge, but not actually cited why I believe the fact. Providing a citation is pointing at a specific place where the information came from at the smallest granular level. In this case, a citation would be something like links to specific threads.
      - mxmilkiib 5y ago
        Your analogy is way off in terms of scale. Edit: also, I've no obligation to provide a citation, I'm one of those that's bored by this particular drama, folk can go search for posts of they want, I've given enough to go by.
Barrin92 5y ago
for people as confused as I am, "Linux Audio" here refers to some sort of libre software group centered around audio applications on linux, not the actual audio stack of linux systems.
- justinjlynn 5y ago
  thank you - neither the article title nor the article text make that terribly clear without specific prior knowledge of both.
- mxmilkiib 5y ago
  https://linuxaudio.org/ https://linuxaudio.org/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dheera 5y ago
  FWIW the actual audio stack of linux systems is pretty broken too. Ever try to use some pretty standard bluetooth headsets with Linux? Never works. I always had to delete and re-pair for every conference call. And you have to go through this nonsense https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/config/install-bt https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/config/install... if you want your audio to sound better than a snake in a swimming pool, and nobody will ever tell you that. On iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, bluetooth headsets pretty much "just work". I'm a Linux fan and all my computers run Linux but Bluetooth audio IS broken.
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    Shouldn't those Bluetooth issues be fixed by PulseAudio 15?
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Yeah my Jabra headset works flawlessly on Ubuntu.
1MachineElf 5y ago
Here's a link to the controversial fork: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
I'm not up on my open source community politics, but I'm intrigued by the motivations. Let's take it as a given that everything in this post is 100% correct. It certainly sounds like a common enough occurrence. Those 3 antagonists are acting out of malice and greed. What's the play here? What does one do once one has acquired control of a linux tool or a mailing list or a consortium? Is it just to have power over something? Or is that power useful to some further goal?
- ww520 5y ago
  Fame, resume padding, and consulting gags, especially recruiters and companies looking at GitHub projects as some kind of metrics.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- drmr 5y ago
  Or maybe there is just a varied group of enthusiastic geeks that just want to collaborate on common tooling like APIs, libraries, frameworks, packaging, and distribution. It may "seem" that there's some sort of "take-over", it's just that people are actually coordinating on these common goals of free software audio tools.
  - rStar 5y ago
    care to share any of your reasons for optimism?
    - drmr 5y ago
      Because I use Linux Pro Audio tools in my studio and daily life and am involved with testing builds, helping with ports, generally messing around (, break stuff), and occasionally make a tune or two. I am very happy with the free and open tools I have at my disposal. Even with the numerous rough edges, duct-tape and hacks to keep some things together. This is Hacker News, right?
pubby 5y ago
Here's a link to the controversial mailing list post: http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/READ-THIS-IF-YOU-CARE-ABOUT-FREEDOM-Fwd-LAA-Non-DAW-release-including-Non-Session-Manager-i-e-the-re-td110707.html http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/READ-THIS-IF-YOU-CARE-... Coelho's reply: http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/Clarifications-and-background-information-td110736.html http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/Clarifications-and-bac...
- beprogrammed 5y ago
  Thanks. The replies to the OP are interesting. "OMG, so silly. I've read the Mail vom J. Lilies with interest. It reflects to some degree similar issues I've encountered. Banning the OP because of this mail is insane. It gives hints on that Filipe Coelho is disliked also by others, because of several actions and deficiencies. So that's why I ask you David Runge to undo the ban. The OP is not the core of the problem. By removing OP, you remove symptoms only."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bolangi 5y ago
To be clear, NSM is one project, and doesn't represent all of Linux Audio.
- LukeShu 5y ago
  The allegation is that the "Linux Audio" consortium (linuxaudio.org, github.com/linuxaudio) is compromised, and therefore "dead". The new-session-manager announcement emails come from software@linuxaudio.org. new-session-manager lives at github.com/linuxaudio . The moderators of the linuxaudio.org mailing lists are banning non-session-manager messages. new-session-manager may be one project, but its leaders have infiltrated the Linux Audio organization.
  - drmr 5y ago
    Oh, no. That's just the NON meta repository mirror (because Jonathan removed his repos from the internet). The New-SM repo is hosted here: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager
    - LukeShu 5y ago
      Half-right. https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager was originally named https://github.com/linuxaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/linuxaudio/new-session-manager and has since been renamed (you can tell because of the redirect). The github.com/linuxaudio URL is the one they were using as recently as January this year: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2021-January/113742.html https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2021-... When I wrote the parent comment, I did not notice that I was being redirected from github.com/linuxaudio to github.com/jackaudio; I apologize for that mistake.
drmr 5y ago
NSM is a decent session management API. Currently recommended for any kind of session management in PipeWire. Unfortunate that JML imploded like this, his work is legendary and software elegant. All smear campaigns aside it's really crap to see this continuing hostility. Free Software also means moving on after a conflict and learning from past mistakes, and fork when necessary. Not to throw a tantrum and destroy all your work. Btw most NSM stuff works pretty good under PipeWire. RaySession is a nice tool for that: https://github.com/Houston4444/RaySession https://github.com/Houston4444/RaySession
- mxmilkiib 5y ago
  Agordejo is also a good NSM front-end. https://www.laborejo.org/agordejo https://www.laborejo.org/agordejo RaySession kinda unilaterally pushes the spec for advanced features, but there was stagnation in the core NSM because the main dev essentially refused to work with most other developers. Now there is the community NSM and the spec is slightly tighter and the reference client is a bit more reliable.
  - drmr 5y ago
    I find RaySession very reliable in my experience so far. And we have an awesome patchbay with grouped ports (stereo patching!)
- Craighead 5y ago
  Imploded? Tell me, what would you be doing in his shoes precisely?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  "NSM" meaning "Non"? Or "New"? Not saying just adds to the confusion.
  - drmr 5y ago
    The API is NSM, there is no difference between the two. 'New' is a fork of 'Non' implementation, but they are compatible. Heck, now that Jonathan removed _all_ Non project repositories basically no longer exists. Only in the git history of the fork. At this point in time we do not have a Non-SM other than legacy packages and forked repositories, but the NSM API lives on. The NSM design is sound, people are using it. Thank you Jonathan
chmod775 5y ago
That's one side of the story, if anyone cares to read the other, this appears to be the mailing list thread that is being referred to: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-dev/2021-February/037954.html https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-dev/2021-F... Then there's also this reddit comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/lk3u74/non_session_manager_vs_new_session_manager/gnine0o/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/lk3u74/non_sess... > New Session Manager was created as a fork because Non Session Manager grew stale and Jonathan was very abrasive to work with [..] getting PRs/patches merged didn't go anywhere. > Also Jonathan (the Non suite creator) removed all his repos [..], which is something that's obviously not acceptable behavior. The "new session manager" appears to be on GitHub: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager Please also note that this drama is months old at this point.
- mastrsushi 5y ago
  I figured something was up, the original author’s post reeked of bitterness.
- wwweston 5y ago
  The truly surprising behavior to me is choosing to name the forked project nsm. Fork the heck out of anything for any reason you like. Say critical things on mailing lists. Fight over who's right and who's a jerk. But actions which lead to less clarity -- like, say, polluting a claimed name in the process of making a fork -- doesn't look like good faith to me.
  - chmod775 5y ago
    > The truly surprising behavior to me is choosing to name the forked project nsm. I think the point was having the binary be of the same name, so it could work as a drop-in replacement that is compatible with existing software.
    - dogorman 5y ago
      New's bogus insinuation that Non had ads or spyware makes me disinclined to buy this innocent justification.
cratermoon 5y ago
How do you kill that which has no life?
not2b 5y ago
It appears that Fedora dumped this guy's version in favor of the fork some time back: they package new-session-manager, not NOM. Seems the fork was years ago.
- LukeShu 5y ago
  > Seems the fork was years ago. The article says this all started in "early 2020"; about a year and a half ago. Indeed, looking at the new-session-manager commit history, the fork was started in April 2020[1], and first announced in June 2020[2]. > It appears that Fedora dumped this guy's version in favor of the fork some time back So did Arch Linux. Notably, the Arch Linux contributor who did it is David Runge, one of the 3 people called out in the article. [1]: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager/commit/635202694882d31c9a0eda2c3c1cb113d69c4602 https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager/commit/6352... (the first commit after the last commit from Jonathan Moore Liles) [2]: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2020-June/113197.html https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2020-... (1.3 is the initial version of the fork, as at the time 1.2.0 was the latest version of non-session-manager)
- drmr 5y ago
  Jonathan Moore Liles removed all NON repositories from the internet. Only backups and forks exist.
  - Corrado 5y ago
    Well, I guess that means the new-session-manager project has won out. If the NON stuff doesn't exist anywhere, then people / distros don't have much of a choice to include it.
young_unixer 5y ago
Misleading title. This is personal drama about a group of people. Nothing to do with audio on Linux.
vfclists 5y ago
The fact of using the same binary names makes it totally shady. They seem to have taken advantage of the fact that the original author did not create official packages to basically steal the name in Ubuntu launchpad. If the forkers are sincere they should not use the same binary names, eg "nsmd". That is totally unethical, and is technically a trojan as it misleadingly replaces on program with another without making it clear to the existing users that is a new package by a new team altogether. Even the page at https://libreav.org/software/new-session-manager https://libreav.org/software/new-session-manager has broken links to files dated 2017 clearly named "non-session-manager"
- mxmilkiib 5y ago
  libreav.org is my site, and that's an edge-case artefact of the github release feed for the new-sm project and/or the way I have configured the aggregation so far
ncmncm 5y ago
I never heard of either project before today. Searching Debian for anything that seems related reveals only LADI Session Handler. It is not at all clear how Non Session Manager fits into the Linux audio milieu. It does not seem as if I have needed a session manager. But I might be mistaken. It has been a long time since I had any complaints about audio on Linux, basically since PulseAudio and things that talk to it got working. Who uses this? And, why would anybody do something as shady as to make off with somebody's project name? What benefit do they imagine they could get from that? I would rather see, instead, an announcement of a new discussion group with decent governance, and clean packages for Debian, Fedora, Arch, Nix, etc., renamed if necessary. Needing to rename an old project to work around malfeasance is inconvenient, but nobody is married to the old name.
- willismichael 5y ago
  This kind of audio session management is used by musicians and audio engineers. The idea is to be able to launch multiple applications that have audio/midi input and output, and manage the signal routing between them. Think of it as being kind of like Unix pipes for sound.
irateswami 5y ago
the linux community never fails to deliver drama, it's like watching a bunch of nerds have a slap fight.
- dogorman 5y ago
  If there is such a thing as a non-trivial commercial software project without office drama, I have never seen nor heard of it. I think drama occurs whenever and wherever there are a non-trivial number of people working together. It has nothing to do with linux specifically.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Personal issues are at least as important as technical issues in large software projects.
Black101 5y ago
they keep changing the audio server and every time there is more problems if you switch... the latest being Pipewire, I think...
synergy20 5y ago
The title is misleading, this is just one application for linux audio, which I never heard about. is this similar to JUCE?
- drmr 5y ago
  NSM is an API to launch and manage JACK audio applications to store connections and program state. NON is the "groupware" DAW project of Jonathan Moore Liles from which NSM originated.
imwillofficial 5y ago
This article is why desktop Linux is so broken. Nobody firmly in control to root out misbehavior like this. This article broke my heart, because it’s indicative of a greater problem in our beloved Linux community.
egberts1 5y ago
still on freenode IRC?
greyhair 5y ago
Forking a project is fine. Stealing the name is not. It creates confusion as to which is 'real'. The original is the real NSM, the fork, if they really want to be seen as legitimate, should do a full scale rename. It really is that simple. All the rest of the comments are noise.

328 points by beprogrammed 5y ago

Jonathan Moore Liles of non software has been a master craftsman of Linux software. Some of the most beautiful pieces I've had the pleasure of using. This pains me greatly.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I am not really involved in the open source community, but are these kinds of fights and coups as common as Hacker News makes them seem?

mistrial9 5y ago
no they are not - but the bigger the stakes, the bigger the audience, the bigger the lever.. Faust comes to mind
beprogrammed 5y ago
As of late it seems to be becoming more of a problem. Where we used to have the good will of others we now have a tide of ill intents it would seem.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  It seems like people fighting over fiefdoms. I followed the freenode debacle and that seemed like comic book villain level of insanity.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    For as long as I can recall, it seems that every couple of years someone decides the current state of audio on linux is terrible, but instead of trying to fix the existing available code, they start a new project. Usually there's a node to maintaining compatibility with other libraries, but that interoperability stops right where the new project thinks the old projects are Doing It Wrong. The X vs Wayland fight is polite to a fault in comparison.
    - drmr 5y ago
      NSM can potentially be used with JACK on win and macos. It also works with JACK implementation of PipeWire for Linux. I expect Linux audio to converge on PW (unifying alsa, jack, and pulse in the process). Linux video has this split with Wayland which is a whole different problem (I want my fluxbox :/). PW originates as Pulse Video, and designed to work with gstreamer pipelines and wayland compositing. aiming for better userspace separation of hardware and applications. I really love the idea of having JACK, but then for video. (no more vloopback hacks, named pipes or random socket servers to bounce framebuffers between applications) JACK will then live on for dedicated Pro Audio applications and hopefully on win and macos as the old-skool "this also works" audio API that really only a small niche uses (and can break at the snip of silicon valley's fingers).
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        > I expect Linux audio to converge That's what alsa, JACK, and pulse said. That's what they all said, except perhaps OSS, because nothing proceeded it.
viraptor 5y ago
I'm interested in audio on Linux, especially recently and I know neither who those people are nor what NSM / Non does. It's a bizarre post that could use a lot more context. The title is also weird - not only is Linux audio not dead, it's doing better than ever with the recent pipewire work.
- drmr 5y ago
  NSM is an API to launch and manage JACK audio applications to store connections and program state. NON is the "groupware" DAW project of Jonathan Moore Liles from which NSM originated.
6f8986c3 5y ago
Yes.
Zenst 5y ago
Whilst such things have been common in large corporation office political culture for decades, too see it play out in the wild like this in open source, is just shocking. Sadly it does seem to be becoming more and more, more since some view open source/projects as potential revenue streams and be it irc, or some carefully nurtured project that has grown over a lifetime, to be rug pulled by such `political games` all in the end for what I dare say be some agenda greed. It just saddens us all.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  At least in corporations there is money at stake, so I get (do not excuse, but understand) shitty behaviour. But all that seems to be at stake here is clout.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Shit happens all over the place. I can point at it happening in the scuba diving industry. High school never ended for some people.
01100011 5y ago
If you asked me 5 years ago if I thought something like this could happen I'd have said no. Then I relocated to SiValley and experienced Machiavellian engineers for the first time in my 20+ year career. It's good to remember that not everyone puts technology and community first. Some people will do whatever it takes to make a name for themselves, even if that just means being slightly less forgotten than they would have been previously.
- aswanson 5y ago
  Politician engineers, ugh.
- rStar 5y ago
  are these the same people who chest on exams in undergrad?
  - rStar 5y ago
    *cheat
DoreenMichele 5y ago
As a guess, the past year or eighteen months has probably been worse than usual. With a global pandemic on, people were stressed and people who feel helpless about very real and large problems often get controlling and nitpicky about anything they feel they actually can control. When all parties to a drama are equally stressed and handling it similarly, it's a recipe for escalation with little hope of real solutions.
ww520 5y ago
Years ago I wrote a p2p file sharing program and open-sourced under GPL. Soon a group contacted me for forking the project; I gave them my blessing and wished them luck. Later I looked at their fork. All they did was adding their names to the copyright and the new project name to the comment section for all the hundreds of files. I was frustrated as this was a clear case of taking copyright ownership for the software. I asked them to remove their names from the copyright unless it's new changes by them but they said GPL allowed it. I contacted FSF for clarification and FSF replied that it's allowed as changing the comment constituted a new change. It's a bunch of BS. It took the rosy glasses off my naive self and soured my view on open sourcing my software in the future.
- beprogrammed 5y ago
  That's a dirty move.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  IANAL, and this is not legal advice, but I am surprised at the FSF's view here. I believed (and believe) that copyright requires a substantive change to form a derivative work, and I would rather doubt that changing the comments counts. (Now, I think that precedents in the court have set the bar for "substantive" pretty low, but not that low.) I would also say that "legal" is not always the same as "ethical", particularly in this circumstance.
mhh__ 5y ago
Kind of. Big scraps? No, however it is worth pointing out that small open source communities can be a melting pot of really clever often contrarian/polemical developers who are kind of bound to clash at one point or another.
dredmorbius 5y ago
It happens. As is said of academic politics: the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.[1] Back at the dawn of the dot-com age, just as Linux was starting to boom, and the first IPOs (Red Hat, VA Linux) were occurring, a company appeared out of nowhere^WReno, Nevada (same thing), called "Linux One", claiming to have their own novel Linux distro. Oh, and plans for its own IPO. It proved to be little more than a search-and-replace of "Red Hat" with "Linux one", though there were also some contributions from MandrakeSoft, another distro at the time. Stealing is copying from one source, curation is copying from several.... The thing is that, at least so far as the software is concerned, that's pretty much perfectly kosher under the GNU GPL and other Free Software / Open Source licences which comprised the scope of Red Hat's offering. In terms of copyright and licensing ... there was nothing actually wrong with this. Skeevy as all getout, yes. But not a GPL (or BSD, or MIT, or Apache, or ...) violation. (The company may have failed its source provision obligations for the GPL, however.) The robustness of the IPO failing, er, filing, might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere though. I seem to recall it being cancelled rather quietly, there's The Register published an investigation of the episode at the time: https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/02/linuxone_takes_more_than/ https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/02/linuxone_takes_more_t... ________________________________ Notes: 1. See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Lost in edits, 'theres..." should read "there's no record of the IPO itself, though I also didn't find any mention of its cancellation."

mistrial9 5y ago

omg - this is dirty tricks playlist.. What must civil people do in the face of this Machiavellian marching band

smoldesu 5y ago

I understand that this title is just verbatim taken from the blogpost, but could we switch it to something more suitable like "Linux Audio Moderation Accused of Misconduct"? The current one just seems silly given how trivial the contents of the article are.

6f8986c3 5y ago
No.

Snarwin 5y ago

Sounds like it might be time to pull a Libera and migrate to a new mailing list.

drmr 5y ago
Maybe rasengan can pull some funds out of his ass to host the server.

mxmilkiib 5y ago

A really one sided take. The Non dev was being abusive in public threads and even nastier in private mails to various Linux Audio devs. The full story is on the archives of the Linux Audio Development and Consortium mailing lists. Folk should come visit #lad (Linux/Libre) on Libera.Chat.

explorigin 5y ago
(citation needed)
- fgonzag 5y ago
  He literally stated where you can find the information.
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    Hyperlinks were invented for a reason.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      For people at CERN to make bold claims, with citations
  - roenxi 5y ago
    He hasn't provided a citation. He's told someone they can do their own research an a mailing list. A parallel might be me claiming that we have a highly algorithm for factoring large primes and saying you can look it up on arxiv.org - I've pointed at a repository of knowledge, but not actually cited why I believe the fact. Providing a citation is pointing at a specific place where the information came from at the smallest granular level. In this case, a citation would be something like links to specific threads.
    - mxmilkiib 5y ago
      Your analogy is way off in terms of scale. Edit: also, I've no obligation to provide a citation, I'm one of those that's bored by this particular drama, folk can go search for posts of they want, I've given enough to go by.

Barrin92 5y ago

for people as confused as I am, "Linux Audio" here refers to some sort of libre software group centered around audio applications on linux, not the actual audio stack of linux systems.

justinjlynn 5y ago
thank you - neither the article title nor the article text make that terribly clear without specific prior knowledge of both.
mxmilkiib 5y ago
https://linuxaudio.org/ https://linuxaudio.org/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dheera 5y ago
FWIW the actual audio stack of linux systems is pretty broken too. Ever try to use some pretty standard bluetooth headsets with Linux? Never works. I always had to delete and re-pair for every conference call. And you have to go through this nonsense https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/config/install-bt https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/config/install... if you want your audio to sound better than a snake in a swimming pool, and nobody will ever tell you that. On iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, bluetooth headsets pretty much "just work". I'm a Linux fan and all my computers run Linux but Bluetooth audio IS broken.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  Shouldn't those Bluetooth issues be fixed by PulseAudio 15?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Yeah my Jabra headset works flawlessly on Ubuntu.

1MachineElf 5y ago

Here's a link to the controversial fork: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

I'm not up on my open source community politics, but I'm intrigued by the motivations. Let's take it as a given that everything in this post is 100% correct. It certainly sounds like a common enough occurrence. Those 3 antagonists are acting out of malice and greed. What's the play here? What does one do once one has acquired control of a linux tool or a mailing list or a consortium? Is it just to have power over something? Or is that power useful to some further goal?

ww520 5y ago
Fame, resume padding, and consulting gags, especially recruiters and companies looking at GitHub projects as some kind of metrics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
drmr 5y ago
Or maybe there is just a varied group of enthusiastic geeks that just want to collaborate on common tooling like APIs, libraries, frameworks, packaging, and distribution. It may "seem" that there's some sort of "take-over", it's just that people are actually coordinating on these common goals of free software audio tools.
- rStar 5y ago
  care to share any of your reasons for optimism?
  - drmr 5y ago
    Because I use Linux Pro Audio tools in my studio and daily life and am involved with testing builds, helping with ports, generally messing around (, break stuff), and occasionally make a tune or two. I am very happy with the free and open tools I have at my disposal. Even with the numerous rough edges, duct-tape and hacks to keep some things together. This is Hacker News, right?

pubby 5y ago

Here's a link to the controversial mailing list post: http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/READ-THIS-IF-YOU-CARE-ABOUT-FREEDOM-Fwd-LAA-Non-DAW-release-including-Non-Session-Manager-i-e-the-re-td110707.html http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/READ-THIS-IF-YOU-CARE-... Coelho's reply: http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/Clarifications-and-background-information-td110736.html http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/Clarifications-and-bac...

beprogrammed 5y ago
Thanks. The replies to the OP are interesting. "OMG, so silly. I've read the Mail vom J. Lilies with interest. It reflects to some degree similar issues I've encountered. Banning the OP because of this mail is insane. It gives hints on that Filipe Coelho is disliked also by others, because of several actions and deficiencies. So that's why I ask you David Runge to undo the ban. The OP is not the core of the problem. By removing OP, you remove symptoms only."

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bolangi 5y ago

To be clear, NSM is one project, and doesn't represent all of Linux Audio.

LukeShu 5y ago
The allegation is that the "Linux Audio" consortium (linuxaudio.org, github.com/linuxaudio) is compromised, and therefore "dead". The new-session-manager announcement emails come from software@linuxaudio.org. new-session-manager lives at github.com/linuxaudio . The moderators of the linuxaudio.org mailing lists are banning non-session-manager messages. new-session-manager may be one project, but its leaders have infiltrated the Linux Audio organization.
- drmr 5y ago
  Oh, no. That's just the NON meta repository mirror (because Jonathan removed his repos from the internet). The New-SM repo is hosted here: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager
  - LukeShu 5y ago
    Half-right. https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager was originally named https://github.com/linuxaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/linuxaudio/new-session-manager and has since been renamed (you can tell because of the redirect). The github.com/linuxaudio URL is the one they were using as recently as January this year: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2021-January/113742.html https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2021-... When I wrote the parent comment, I did not notice that I was being redirected from github.com/linuxaudio to github.com/jackaudio; I apologize for that mistake.

drmr 5y ago

NSM is a decent session management API. Currently recommended for any kind of session management in PipeWire. Unfortunate that JML imploded like this, his work is legendary and software elegant. All smear campaigns aside it's really crap to see this continuing hostility. Free Software also means moving on after a conflict and learning from past mistakes, and fork when necessary. Not to throw a tantrum and destroy all your work. Btw most NSM stuff works pretty good under PipeWire. RaySession is a nice tool for that: https://github.com/Houston4444/RaySession https://github.com/Houston4444/RaySession

mxmilkiib 5y ago
Agordejo is also a good NSM front-end. https://www.laborejo.org/agordejo https://www.laborejo.org/agordejo RaySession kinda unilaterally pushes the spec for advanced features, but there was stagnation in the core NSM because the main dev essentially refused to work with most other developers. Now there is the community NSM and the spec is slightly tighter and the reference client is a bit more reliable.
- drmr 5y ago
  I find RaySession very reliable in my experience so far. And we have an awesome patchbay with grouped ports (stereo patching!)
Craighead 5y ago
Imploded? Tell me, what would you be doing in his shoes precisely?
ncmncm 5y ago
"NSM" meaning "Non"? Or "New"? Not saying just adds to the confusion.
- drmr 5y ago
  The API is NSM, there is no difference between the two. 'New' is a fork of 'Non' implementation, but they are compatible. Heck, now that Jonathan removed _all_ Non project repositories basically no longer exists. Only in the git history of the fork. At this point in time we do not have a Non-SM other than legacy packages and forked repositories, but the NSM API lives on. The NSM design is sound, people are using it. Thank you Jonathan

chmod775 5y ago

That's one side of the story, if anyone cares to read the other, this appears to be the mailing list thread that is being referred to: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-dev/2021-February/037954.html https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-dev/2021-F... Then there's also this reddit comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/lk3u74/non_session_manager_vs_new_session_manager/gnine0o/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/lk3u74/non_sess... > New Session Manager was created as a fork because Non Session Manager grew stale and Jonathan was very abrasive to work with [..] getting PRs/patches merged didn't go anywhere. > Also Jonathan (the Non suite creator) removed all his repos [..], which is something that's obviously not acceptable behavior. The "new session manager" appears to be on GitHub: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager Please also note that this drama is months old at this point.

mastrsushi 5y ago
I figured something was up, the original author’s post reeked of bitterness.
wwweston 5y ago
The truly surprising behavior to me is choosing to name the forked project nsm. Fork the heck out of anything for any reason you like. Say critical things on mailing lists. Fight over who's right and who's a jerk. But actions which lead to less clarity -- like, say, polluting a claimed name in the process of making a fork -- doesn't look like good faith to me.
- chmod775 5y ago
  > The truly surprising behavior to me is choosing to name the forked project nsm. I think the point was having the binary be of the same name, so it could work as a drop-in replacement that is compatible with existing software.
  - dogorman 5y ago
    New's bogus insinuation that Non had ads or spyware makes me disinclined to buy this innocent justification.

cratermoon 5y ago

How do you kill that which has no life?

not2b 5y ago

It appears that Fedora dumped this guy's version in favor of the fork some time back: they package new-session-manager, not NOM. Seems the fork was years ago.

LukeShu 5y ago
> Seems the fork was years ago. The article says this all started in "early 2020"; about a year and a half ago. Indeed, looking at the new-session-manager commit history, the fork was started in April 2020[1], and first announced in June 2020[2]. > It appears that Fedora dumped this guy's version in favor of the fork some time back So did Arch Linux. Notably, the Arch Linux contributor who did it is David Runge, one of the 3 people called out in the article. [1]: https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager/commit/635202694882d31c9a0eda2c3c1cb113d69c4602 https://github.com/jackaudio/new-session-manager/commit/6352... (the first commit after the last commit from Jonathan Moore Liles) [2]: https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2020-June/113197.html https://lists.linuxaudio.org/archives/linux-audio-user/2020-... (1.3 is the initial version of the fork, as at the time 1.2.0 was the latest version of non-session-manager)
drmr 5y ago
Jonathan Moore Liles removed all NON repositories from the internet. Only backups and forks exist.
- Corrado 5y ago
  Well, I guess that means the new-session-manager project has won out. If the NON stuff doesn't exist anywhere, then people / distros don't have much of a choice to include it.

young_unixer 5y ago

Misleading title. This is personal drama about a group of people. Nothing to do with audio on Linux.

vfclists 5y ago

The fact of using the same binary names makes it totally shady. They seem to have taken advantage of the fact that the original author did not create official packages to basically steal the name in Ubuntu launchpad. If the forkers are sincere they should not use the same binary names, eg "nsmd". That is totally unethical, and is technically a trojan as it misleadingly replaces on program with another without making it clear to the existing users that is a new package by a new team altogether. Even the page at https://libreav.org/software/new-session-manager https://libreav.org/software/new-session-manager has broken links to files dated 2017 clearly named "non-session-manager"

mxmilkiib 5y ago
libreav.org is my site, and that's an edge-case artefact of the github release feed for the new-sm project and/or the way I have configured the aggregation so far

ncmncm 5y ago

I never heard of either project before today. Searching Debian for anything that seems related reveals only LADI Session Handler. It is not at all clear how Non Session Manager fits into the Linux audio milieu. It does not seem as if I have needed a session manager. But I might be mistaken. It has been a long time since I had any complaints about audio on Linux, basically since PulseAudio and things that talk to it got working. Who uses this? And, why would anybody do something as shady as to make off with somebody's project name? What benefit do they imagine they could get from that? I would rather see, instead, an announcement of a new discussion group with decent governance, and clean packages for Debian, Fedora, Arch, Nix, etc., renamed if necessary. Needing to rename an old project to work around malfeasance is inconvenient, but nobody is married to the old name.

willismichael 5y ago
This kind of audio session management is used by musicians and audio engineers. The idea is to be able to launch multiple applications that have audio/midi input and output, and manage the signal routing between them. Think of it as being kind of like Unix pipes for sound.

irateswami 5y ago

the linux community never fails to deliver drama, it's like watching a bunch of nerds have a slap fight.

dogorman 5y ago
If there is such a thing as a non-trivial commercial software project without office drama, I have never seen nor heard of it. I think drama occurs whenever and wherever there are a non-trivial number of people working together. It has nothing to do with linux specifically.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Personal issues are at least as important as technical issues in large software projects.

Black101 5y ago

they keep changing the audio server and every time there is more problems if you switch... the latest being Pipewire, I think...

synergy20 5y ago

The title is misleading, this is just one application for linux audio, which I never heard about. is this similar to JUCE?

drmr 5y ago
NSM is an API to launch and manage JACK audio applications to store connections and program state. NON is the "groupware" DAW project of Jonathan Moore Liles from which NSM originated.

imwillofficial 5y ago

This article is why desktop Linux is so broken. Nobody firmly in control to root out misbehavior like this. This article broke my heart, because it’s indicative of a greater problem in our beloved Linux community.

egberts1 5y ago

still on freenode IRC?

greyhair 5y ago

Forking a project is fine. Stealing the name is not. It creates confusion as to which is 'real'. The original is the real NSM, the fork, if they really want to be seen as legitimate, should do a full scale rename. It really is that simple. All the rest of the comments are noise.