Because of the ongoing fucktastrophe, the cries of "Use SIGNAL!" are constant and unavoidable. And I get it, it may be the least-bad option in a sea of terrible options. If, that is, you choose to ignore the advice of "don't use your phone for that shit" (the Stringer Bell Rule). But out of curiosity, because I haven't been keeping up, has the Signal Corporation addressed: The fact that they ...
Just an old FOSS coder who spews way too much vitriol about how nobody gets it except him.
He mostly wrote xscreensaver and once built a timebomb into it because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy.
And look at that article: he only links back to his own previous blog posts. Everything he writes is “I’ve been saying it for years, see how right I am?”
And I’m not even going into how dubious his timing is with yet another attack on Signal. I mean there’s nothing new in that article except “now even Trump agrees with me”?!
The “timebomb” wasn’t only because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy, it was because Debian users kept reporting already patched bugs on xscreensaver’s upstream issue tracker that were only broken on the old versions Debian kept insisting they ship with because they have an insane “older is more stable” mentality.
Also, he wrote more than xscreensaver. He was an original dev of Netscape, was a huge advocate for them open-sourcing the code, and founder of Mozilla.org (both coming up with the name and registering the domain - although he’s not exactly a huge fan of modern Mozilla). It’s pretty safe to say that the open internet would not exist in the way it does today without him.
Yes, he’s an opinionated “old man” at this point, and nobody is going to agree with everything he says. But as opinionated old men go, there are far worse out there - like Richard Stallman for example.
Whatever his reasons, he’s definitely in the wrong in the time bomb situation. Seems like the easiest solution is to require users to say what version they are using, and then automatically close reports from old versions.
Iirc the debian maintainers ended up stripping it out.
Just an old FOSS coder who spews way too much vitriol about how nobody gets it except him.
He mostly wrote xscreensaver and once built a timebomb into it because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy.
And look at that article: he only links back to his own previous blog posts. Everything he writes is “I’ve been saying it for years, see how right I am?”
And I’m not even going into how dubious his timing is with yet another attack on Signal. I mean there’s nothing new in that article except “now even Trump agrees with me”?!
The “timebomb” wasn’t only because he didn’t like Debian’s release policy, it was because Debian users kept reporting already patched bugs on xscreensaver’s upstream issue tracker that were only broken on the old versions Debian kept insisting they ship with because they have an insane “older is more stable” mentality.
Also, he wrote more than xscreensaver. He was an original dev of Netscape, was a huge advocate for them open-sourcing the code, and founder of Mozilla.org (both coming up with the name and registering the domain - although he’s not exactly a huge fan of modern Mozilla). It’s pretty safe to say that the open internet would not exist in the way it does today without him.
Yes, he’s an opinionated “old man” at this point, and nobody is going to agree with everything he says. But as opinionated old men go, there are far worse out there - like Richard Stallman for example.
Whatever his reasons, he’s definitely in the wrong in the time bomb situation. Seems like the easiest solution is to require users to say what version they are using, and then automatically close reports from old versions.
Iirc the debian maintainers ended up stripping it out.