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Abuse in the Linux Kernel Community

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Proclamations of concern over the abusiveness of the Linux Kernel Community of been growing louder in the open-source world. Steven Vaughn-Nichols summarizes the concerns in Computerworld. My comment on the matter?

Ancandune remarks wisely on the problem that “rude and hostile” imposes to the transmission of knowledge. I do not necessarily subscribe to his characterization of the motivating psychology. Perfectionists are driven by their own set of hostile interior voices. They don’t just produce something and throw it over the wall – they lie awake at night thinking about all the ways it can blow up in their face. What Linus may be attempting to demonstrate in his communications is how he goes about thinking when he writes code.

Is Linus a healthy person? That’s for him to judge.

The important question is whether the community is healthy. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had boardrooms filled with over-sized egos to help them manage their succession plans. What is Linus going to do? Anoint a successor? Or will the community devolve into a WWF RAW! donnybrook with the last man standing holding the belt? Another possibility is that the corporations that finance many contributors will step in and appoint a successor.

Linus’s authority arose organically over many years. The community allows him the right to be critical. But it is not being critical of others that conditions his success – it is his ability to think critically. The community should recognize that distinction, and mercilessly criticize and purge those that emulate his style without bearing his gifts or responsibilities.

To illustrate my point regarding self-criticism, here’s the content of an e-mail characterizing a problem we had with the build at work recently:

It’s the usual stupidity – I don’t even remember why I created this file, but it’s just a copy of MotorIDCommander.cpp. It was probably intended to link AutoCommCommander with MotorIDCommander, but I never modified the contents.

Anyways – it’s excluded from the build in debug mode but not in release mode. Khalid is off at physical therapy today with the project file checked out, so I can’t publish a fix. If you can do it locally, that would get you moving forward.

Sorry

Brian

This is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve done this – left a file in the build for release mode after excluding it in debug mode.

Just a Merchant of Death, on Average

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Just before the shooting in Roseburg yesterday, I was at Kaiser getting my flu shot. A man walked out of the examination rooms wearing a black t-shirt that proclaimed, “If guns kill people, then so do pencils.”

I guess the point is that a pencil is used to design a gun. It would seem reasonable, then, that God is the cause of all of our trouble with gun violence, for originating this reality in the first place. We have no responsibility for anything, do we? Not even for keeping weapons out of the hands of the people most likely to misuse them.

There are those that face the threat of gun violence every day. They are generally the disadvantaged: families walking through mean streets, the criminal militias known as gangs that seek power through violence, and the police that try to keep them apart. What the last group tells us about the second is that stemming the flow of weapons to criminals is impossible because we do not ensure traceability from the factory to the crime scene. If that information was maintained, they could identify and punish the merchants that purchase for illegal resale to known felons.

There are solutions to this problem. One would be to require that every gun be fired before leaving the factory, and the bullet registered with a federal ballistics database. Another solution is microstamping. A microstamp is an engraving on the firing pin that puts an identifier on every bullet when it is fired. The inventor of the technology has surrendered his patent to public use.

In California, Attorney General Kamela Harris has moved to require microstamping on all guns sold in the state. This came to my attention when I interrupted a young man at work bitching about how purveyors of excellent products would be forced out of the state due to this unfair requirement. This was indeed the threat made by the leading producer of semi-automatic handguns.

So I did a little digging, and found this: the average time between sale of a semi-automatic handgun and recovery at a crime scene is less than four years. Assuming that legitimate gun owners hold their weapons for life, this means that the vast majority of these weapons are sold to criminals.

It seems pretty obvious that the reason the manufacturer wished to pull out of the state is because microstamping would cut off this trade, and therefore eviscerate their profits.

The police, on the other hand, favor microstamping.

Who are we protecting, with our claims of Second Amendment privilege? The criminal militias that terrorize the inner city? Those that produce and sell guns into those communities?

It is certainly not our families or public servants.

Getting Taken to Cleaner

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Volkswagon, the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, issued a software patch for the 11 million vehicles sold with “clean diesel” motors. The patch links to Android and iOS smart phones, enabling the driver to replicate the acceleration profiles used during EPA emissions testing.

In announcing the patch, Volkswagon’s CEO said, “Those already taking directions from their smart phones will be perfectly comfortable with the new feature. Instead of ‘turn left in 200 yards’, the phone will command ‘release the accelerator by two millimeters in five hundredths of a second.'” When asked whether that was a practical solution, the CEO enthused: “That’s the beauty of the engineering! Do you know how hard it was to coordinate the voice announcement to end just in time to allow the driver to take action?”

Facing the prospect of billions of dollars in fines from environmental regulators across the globe, the new VW software prioritizes emissions above collision avoidance. As an explanation, the CEO offered, “Any deviation from the commanded – I mean ‘requested’ – acceleration sequence will cause the exhaust to belch a huge cloud of poisonous particulates. So the driver might as well run over the children in the cross walk.”

In a parallel, ISIS announced the availability of a new freemium game based upon the “Hit-and-Run” scoring system adopted by American teens to vent their frustration with dawdling pedestrians.

Curating the Treasure

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I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday afternoon, plowing through the examples in Troelson’s Pro C#, and a large gentleman waved his derriere in my face as he sat down at the adjoining table. I kept my head in the work, but he interrupted to offer “Sorry to stick my butt in your face like that.” I responded, “It happens,” and kept on grinding.

The place began to thin out at five, so I shifted to the counter against the wall, as the tall chairs allow me to open up my abdomen and breath. He followed a few minutes later, actually pointing out that he was following me. Trying to make it clear that I wasn’t avoiding him, I explained that I preferred the bar seats.

What followed was one of these interesting negotiations that I recognize as attempts by concerned spirits to engage with the work that I do. I remarked that I had noticed his interest in cosmology (he had been perusing a shelf copy of Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time). Through a process of disconnected association – in which the same words were repeated with different meanings – he revealed that he held a patent on a new electrical motor drive method.

Along the way came this story of how he had found a card for a $10,000 invitational for venture capital funding. He thought that was an interesting message from the universe, but when he called the number on the card, the responder just hung up again and again. Not to be deterred, he went to his Ninja master who advised him to print a fake business badge and gain entry to the venue on the pretext of inspecting the air conditioning. Changing clothes after entry, he made his way to the meeting. Identifying a British peer among the investors, he waited at the exit as the body guards passed before reaching out suddenly to grab his hand.

Intrigued by this intervention, the peer invited him to have lunch with another group of investors. The locale had a Japanese temple gateway, which my new friend understood required him to remove his shoes and bow before passing the threshold. He was followed by a group of Japanese investors, which marveled at his sophistication. Into this milieu came the peer, who congratulated him on having “married” the Japanese, who were considering a $400 million investment with Lloyd’s, the British reinsurance group.

After lunch, the peer took him aside to determine his interest in the VC meeting. My acquaintance offered the idea of laying a motor design out flat, as was done in a large accelerator facility. When asked how the idea was originated, he had offered that it came from a privileged supernatural source.

The story wrapped up with the observation that Thomas Edison had succeeded with direct current power because he knew the ins and outs of politics, while Nikolai Tesla just wanted to play with alternating current.

By this time, I had returned to typing in Visual Studio, prompting as I did so with questions just to let him know that I was paying attention. Story concluded, he pressed a business card on me and left.

There are people of influence, such as the British peer, who wander the world casting the net of their wealth around them to attract opportunity. They don’t understand the mechanisms by which it works, they just rely upon it as a privilege. The peer rewarded my acquaintance because he was a sensitive and responsive tool for facilitating the acquisition of wealth.

And then there are those that submit to the purpose of that talent – the goal of joining all of life in a web of mutual concern – to whom that actual mechanisms of the process are revealed. They are given possession of the treasure of the fields, of which Jesus said [NIV Matthew 13:44]:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Lack of money isn’t the problem. The problem is the injection of selfishness into a process of co-creation that makes the participants (both biological and ethereal) incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. Once we learn to discipline ourselves, we’ll find that there is far more power available to us than is required to solve the problems that we confront.

Stopping the Violence

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The exhausted pleas of the Mayor of Kansas City touched me deeply today. Decrying the shooting death of a one-year-old child, he observed that our city officials can’t be everywhere at once, and exhorted all of us to stand up against violence. As a policy prescription, that translates to instituting restrictions on gun access.

It is true that ready access to firearms inflates violent death. Emotional shock or dehumanizing abuse can create a driving urge to remove the source of our pain. When a gun is at hand and familiar to the touch, it represents an immediate solution. But equally true is that a strong person does not employ that solution unless life is under threat.

The problem is that people are becoming weaker, not stronger. This is obvious in the comments on conservative bulletin boards. A steady theme is that the average American is not valued by the social elite, whether political or business leaders. Looking at the decline of the middle class, it is hard to argue with them. We suffer from the naivete of politicians that believed that the war on drugs could be won through incarceration, or that growth would stimulate China to liberalize its economy. And we suffer from the greed of business leaders that lobby to hold down wages and weaken environmental and public health regulations, often using the threat of Chinese competition as a rationale.

A recent study on sexism and racism on gaming sites reveals the social dynamics of the downward slide. What the researchers discovered is that the most successful gamers are nice to everybody – it’s those that struggle that hurl abuse. That abuse is reserved for new entrants to the competition – the skill of winners is widely admired. The abuse is directed at those trying to enter the community and acquire skills. It’s a means of keeping down direct competition.

I think that this is an important aspect of America’s perverse love affair with guns. They provide a false sense of security to those that bear them. They allow the dispatch of the physical intruder that comes to take our property or our jobs, while the elite collects credit card interest every month, drives up working hours and pushes mortgages into default.

But the love affair doesn’t end there. Our over-sized military and jails are social support systems, providing for the basic needs of large cohorts of our society while incubating violence. Our media appeals to our primitive psychological urges with the portrayal of life-threatening circumstances visited upon sexually attractive people whose mastery of physical violence produces victory. And our sports heroes become ever more powerful and intimidating in their performances, to the point that no padding can protect them from long-term disability, and so we simply throw them into the arena without covering for anything except their genitals.

This sounds terribly gloomy, but the celebration of brute physical power above strength of mind and character has a silver lining. It makes those that struggle against violence all the more powerful.

It’s hard to explain until you’ve actually experienced it (though I try in Ma and Golem). It’s to be stalked by a mountain lion in the moonlight, and to calmly escape it from ten feet after freezing it with the mental command, “Go eat something that can’t talk.” It’s to react to the men squared off over a woman in a night club – not by screaming “take it outside” – but by sucking the violence out of the air to the point that the one that threw a punch actually fell over on the floor, reporting later that “I just got all weak all of a sudden.”

But it’s also to give of our selves. It was the CEO of FMC who, having planned a series of acquisitions that created a vertically integrated company without redundancies, offered to the employees of a small, struggling subsidiary that he had “felt your pain.” It is to look the homeless in the eye, validating them as people. It is to tutor in a school for children that walk mean streets every night to homes that may not contain food to fill their stomachs.

It is to let people in fear know that “Yes, this is what it is to be loved.” Once they know, the short-term thrills of adrenaline and lust just don’t have the same attraction.

And more: through an encounter with a disciplined mind and compassionate heart, the promises of our religious avatars become obvious truths. The overwhelming power of those instruments has no material support – they are what they are only because an infinite source of unconditional love enters the world through them. It is through this knowledge that the long-suffering find patience that blossoms into enduring hope. In that endurance and strength, the threat of violence loses the last of its power.

Adulterated Security

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When the Ashley Madison breach was announced, the most confusing aspect of the reportage came directly from the screen capture of the site’s home page. It reads:

Life is too short. Have an affair.

That’s right. Not “hug your child” or “save a tree”, but “engage in conduct destructive to the stability of your marriage that involves logistics almost certain to lead to eventual discovery.”

The press coverage of the incident has focused on the misfortune facing those whose membership in the site has been exposed to the public. The dire predictions presented the image of a tidal wave of attorneys descending upon the nation’s family law courts. In general, the tone is sympathetic towards consenting adults facing the consequences of public reaction to conduct often considered immoral. One case often cited are couples that have open marriages by consent (although why such people would be concerned about exposure is unclear to me). As for the rest, I wonder whether those of us that believe in the sanctity of marital vows shouldn’t be motivated to take action to shut down sites that, like Pirate Bay, are used to hide the identity of people that prey upon our trust.

Discretion was part of the Ashley Madison promise. The image on the home page presents an attractive female face with a finger before pursed lips. Again, given the logistics that make eventual discovery almost certain, a smoking gun would have been a better metaphor than a finger.

Unless of course it was a middle finger. It turns out that Avid Life was defrauding their clientele, fabricating female accounts and collected money for services that they did not perform. Specifically, they did not delete the accounts of users that paid to have them removed.

Now think about this: the subscribers to this service are providing sensitive personal data to an organization that seems to not have any business ethics. Obviously Avid Life is concerned only with maximizing their bottom line. Is anybody watching the store? What evidence do we have that Avid Life was not selling this information on to other companies?

There was another incident in recent history that resonates with this one in my mind. Employed as a systems administrator in the national security industry, Edward Snowden purportedly became alarmed that he and his peers had access to secret information that they were not authorized to view. His way of exposing this to the public was to steal and release government secrets. It was not a limited or targeted release – it was a snowstorm of national security data including unflattering character assessments of many people, both private and official.

What if this is another Snowden-like case? What if an insider at Ashley Madison became aware that the company was planning on selling personal data for direct marketing by other companies? What if that person became outraged that the release would include information on people that had paid to have their accounts deleted?

Would the “hacker” then be a hero, rather than a criminal?

Being Boxed In

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The management guru fad of the ‘80s wound itself up just at the turn of the millennium. This may have been due, in part, to the rise of information technology that shifted analytical emphasis away from the personality of the leader toward those directly involved in creating value. That was evident in the last book I read on leadership, which warned managers that knowledge workers would simply walk away from organizations that did not adopt collaborative management strategies.

I find myself in such a situation at this point. When I started my current job, I sat through meetings that devolved into pitched shouting matches. Such altercations were a daily event between some of my peers. When I intervened with the HR staff to bring this to an end, I exposed patterns that dated back to the formation of the company by people that used competition to maintain control of knowledge workers. Circulating to upper management an essay on triangulation and its consequences did not make me a popular person. When I put a copy of “Breaking The Fear Barrier” on my desk, they just stopped coming into my office.

They kept me on because I sat in my office and did what I do best: create a garden in an overgrown software jungle. The application that I manage, which has always been a critical part of the user’s experience of our products, has gone from being something hidden until the sale is complete to an essential part of the sales process. At the same time I have created component libraries and leveraged them to build new applications, algorithms and regression test suites. Having gone eight years without a pay raise, however, it’s time for me to move on to a place that understands and appreciates the principles that I use to understand the needs of my customers and create success for them.

So I’ve been working on my resume and trying to visualize the kind of place that I would find success in. I have a certain sympathy for Microsoft, and went out to the Research site on Saturday to see whether I could put up a resume. The site indicates that researchers are expected to be recognized experts in their field with a substantial body of publications. Well, shoot, most of my career has been spent in top secret facilities or in small companies that use trade secrets to protect their intellectual property. Microsoft Research does have a category for applications developers, but that link led me through to the main Microsoft site.

And so I find myself where I was eight years ago: a really smart guy who was told by an honest recruiter that “if I knew someone starting an R&D program, you’re the guy I would recommend, but you just don’t market well as either a manager or a software developer.” Where most developers focus on coding efficiency and the arcane syntax, most of my effort is invested in understanding the application domain so that I write the right code. Whether it’s produced in JavaScript or C++ or C# is pretty irrelevant – once I’ve established the design, I evaluate and select an implementation platform, read a book, start writing code, and use the web to find answers to arcane syntax questions when they come up.

Most hiring managers don’t have a clue how to evaluate a person like me. They want a known quantity – a specific skill set that will allow someone to come in and deliver value on day one. They’re not willing to take a risk on learning, and don’t know how to evaluate that capability by probing past experience to determine whether a resume represents individual contribution, or simply takes credit for work done by others.

So I’m resolved to find my own opportunities this time – searching the web for job openings and pushing my resume through directly. I’m making culture an explicit issue by declaring that my loyalties lie first and foremost with the customer.

To those of you who have been following this blog, this probably resonates. I’m hard to pin down because I don’t specialize narrowly. Rather, I examine relationships (personal, institutional and intellectual), and advocate for deepening them where others pick a side. But, damn it, I don’t want to be in a conveniently packaged box that can be moved easily around (itinerancy being the biggest problem faced by software companies). I want a home, and I’m willing to meet people where they are.

Amartya Sen on the Necessary Distinction Between Austerity and Economic Reform

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Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, Sen is widely recognized as the leading moral voice in the field of economics. The New Statesman carries his analysis of debt and its relationship to economic reform and growth. He points out that debt levels were far higher in the aftermath of WWII, but confident and intelligent investment in growth steadily reduced debt even while social services expanded.

The New Statesman has published his remarks.

Sen’s most heartfelt cry is against the destruction of human capital: in Kansas and other “austerity” states, educational levels and consumer spending are collapsing. In Greece, half of all young adults have never had a job (or at least a job that generated tax revenues). As Adam Smith pointed out in his writings, it is human capital that underpins the ability of nations to generate wealth.

While Sen decries his inability to influence policy-makers imposing disastrous austerity on their constituents, I don’t have any need to be politic. I’ll just follow the money.

As described in The Grand Pursuit, the Great Depression was an existential threat for free market economics because it revealed that the financial elite would not invest in long-term growth when falling prices guaranteed increased purchasing power for their accumulated wealth. It was in their short-term interest to exacerbate unemployment, thereby reducing both demand and wages. It was Keynes who convinced the governments to stimulate demand with deficit spending that brought Europe and America out of the Depression.

In the current era, government debt is in the short-term interest of the financial elites. It is the ready stream of bond placement and foreign exchange fees that fuel the financial system. Reducing debt is against their interest. That they fund candidates that have implemented policies to reduce tax revenues while expanding debt is no mystery.

Sen points out that most electorates suffering under austerity are beginning to recognize that growing poverty proves those policies wrong. Whether they can organize themselves to restore intelligent fiscal policy is another question. There are so many other issues to distract them, and voter restrictions in many states disenfranchise the working poor. (Fundamentally, I don’t see why elections should be on a weekday: anyone for a constitutional amendment to move them to Saturday?)

In the United States, we have been propped up by the Federal Reserve, which has kept interest rates low and pumped cash into the economy. However, that is no substitute for governmental action: when interest rates rise, that cash must be soaked up lest inflation run out of control. This will suppress growth. However, in Europe things have been far worse: the Central Bank has been part of the system of austerity, and is only now beginning to follow the lead of its American counterpart.

Capitalism: Friend or Foe

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This is a response to Kiss Me On a Burning Barricade and other recent post at Gods and Radicals. I do sympathize very much with the intentions and energy of this forum. I would just hope to see it focused more precisely on human behavior, rather than abstract ideology.

A speaker at a recent conference exhorted liberals to reclaim Adam Smith, whose concerns regarding abuse of workers under the system of capital have been ignored by the “Greed is Good” and “Invisible Hand” libertarians that took over the Republican Party during the Reagan era. Smith saw capitalism as simply the use of wealth to invest in technology that would amplify the effects of labor. It was this process that finally overturned Malthusian poverty (see The Grand Pursuit) because while the cost paid per shirt went down, the cost of a shirt fell even faster.

Under your definition of productivity, the core problem in the situation that you describe is psychopathy, which is subtle and seductive and has infected many of our institutions. In Smith’s work, this is articulated as the problem of the Commons: well-meaning people create value for one another, accumulate wealth, and then the psychopaths come in and steal it from them.

For example, the sleepy Savings and Loan industry of the ’60s and ’70s allowed the middle class to pay itself interest at 6% while borrowing at 7%. Reagan deregulated the industry, allowing raiders to take the assets it had accumulated and transfer them to high-risk instruments. Now the middle class borrows at 18% and gets interest on deposits of 0.2%.

Regarding the specific situation you outline, there is a movement among the restaurant workers to establish humane working conditions in an industry that exploits mercilessly. Among the industry’s crimes include lobbying against a general working wage increase in order to protect an extremely low minimum wage for their industry. As agitators document, in many states the tips we leave are in fact the bulk of the worker’s wage.

Abstracting from Smith, the theory of Capitalism and productivity is a means for organizing information about economic activity, including work practices. While proponents of capitalism cite the benefits in increasing productivity, the information they gather can also be used to identify psychopathic behavior. The reason that you have the numbers to criticize the workplace practice is because of that theory. Don’t blame the messenger – attack the root cause.

The Abuses of Tyranny

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As I considered in The Uses of Tyranny, communities lacking experience in self-management often call forth people with over-sized egos to lead. Even when they are reviled, as was King Juan Carlos in Spain, the psychological bond is deep. Many Spaniards wept upon learning of his death, for fear of what the future might bring.

In the case of monarchy, at least there is some institutional structure passed on from generation to generation, which means that the monarch is bound, at the very least, by dependency on people who actually know how to get things done. This is something seen in growing up, and helps to check the ego of the ruler.

For nations undergoing dramatic social change, such as occurred after the retreat of the colonial powers, no such institutional checks exist. Leadership is established through visceral struggle, and held largely through intimidation and fear. Once the opposition has been beaten down, there is no brake upon the ego of the ruler, who may even imagine himself to be a divine favorite. Witness, for example, Idi Amin of Uganda.

Of course, it is rare for such nations to be able to project much power on the international scene. This can make them dupes for more sophisticated partners, such as negotiators from multi-national corporations. The convenience of the dictator as single point-of-contact are tempting to those negotiators. It is little known that militant Islam actually was born in Northern Africa, where the people used the ethics of the Qu’ran to structure their criticism of exploitative resource extraction. When Western governments and multi-nationals propped up the abusive regimes, jihad was declared against the West as a whole – and deservedly so, under the circumstances.

So perhaps the grossest abuse of tyranny is the tendency of tyrants to form privileged clubs that prop each other up. The ultimate downfall of such clubs is that they devolve into echo chambers, with the tyrants agreeing upon self-serving policies that cannot actually be implemented by the communities they control. This occurs in two parts: first, the tyrants become divorced from reality, and then they destroy social cohesion and resilience in their attempts to coerce their impossible outcomes. Such was the downfall of the planned economies in China and Russia.

It was this realization – that institutional structure was the ultimate victim of tyranny – that prompted Western philosophers to concern themselves with the creation of institutional forms that mitigated against tyranny. This has manifested not only in the constitutions of governments, but in the legal framework of corporate governance. Separation of powers is visible in the three branches of US government, but also in the allocation of responsibilities between corporate boards and executives. One of the primary benefits of these arrangements is survival of institutional memory, which means that situations that seem new and exciting to the surging tyrant are just old hat to the grey-beards in the institutions.

It is amusing to watch this psychology unfold in Putin’s relationship with the West. Putin paints Obama as his primary adversary, and broadcasts propaganda that projects the image that tensions will dissolve when he leaves office. As a tyrant, Putin does not understand that the West has a huge number of historians and policy analysts in corporate, academic and governmental circles that have studied Russian history, and recognize this view as the view of Stalin and Kruschev and Brezhnev and Andropov. Attack Obama all you want, and circulate as much propaganda among the European public as you want: our institutions have played this game before, and will win it again.

Understand, Putin: you are who you are because Western nations agreed to trade with Russia, providing you with the opportunity to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars into your personal accounts. Do you really think that they don’t have the means to discipline your international adventurism?

And what our institutions also remember is that, following Juan Carlos and Stalin, their nations adapted to the experience to establish systems that regulated tyrannical behavior. When that occurs, the tyrant’s legacy is erased. Yes, Vladimir, you are a big noise now in the world. You’re able to force a lot of people to think about you. But you’re on the wrong side of history. Your destruction and perversion of the institutions of the Russian state ensure that you will leave no lasting mark.

And hear as much, Koch brothers! How much money are you spending to force people to do what makes you money? And how much more could you make if you invested, as did Henry Ford, in their capacity to participate in new markets and opportunities?