Rob Linden Leaving the Lab

Rob Linden who is Rob Lanphier in real life announced on the SL Dev list that he is leaving Linden Lab.

I'd like to think that his departue is due to the fact that Linden staff -- whether for reasons of cult-like zealotry or for reasons of blistering cynicism -- who allow a copybot patch to be left out on the JIRA for months on end, cannot remain under the new plan for registering opensource projects under a set of guidelines.

But I bet it really isn't about that, or at least, only about that in some tiny part. Rob tells us he's leaving due to personal circumstances, but people overcome personal circumstances sometimes when they feel they are doing a job that is really, really important where they are really, really wanted.

No doubt the chill on opensource that he would perceive, even though it does not end the program but merely makes it *accountable* is something he opposed, or at least wasn't his idea, or at least wasn't something he wanted to be the one to supervise, having to rein in all those people that he let do what they want all this time.

I can't say I'm sorry he's leaving, because while initially, when I met him in person, I found him to be an affable and even sort of humble guy, I came to see that he epitomized the tyranny of the "iron won't" of open source. He simply refused to contemplate any of the criticism of the people and behaviour on the JIRA, ever. It was his idea to reward those freaky lifers on there with even more special powers and give them the title "good citizens" even though they so often acted in bad faith, such as in presumptively closing other people's JIRA's if they didn't like them, and in their harassment of me for proposals like the famous WEB382 which was enabling only the initiator of a JIRA to close it.

What I do worry about now, however, is whether he will get into e-governance and e-voting, which is something he tinkered with before and even after he came to the Lab. I want the opensource cult to stay as far away as possible from tinkering with the mechanics of democracy, with their legally nihilistical notions of having a "yes" vote but never a "no" vote, with their "voting up and down" and "likes," and their hatred of representative democracy as always "gamed" and 'corrupt" -- as if their fanboy flashmobs weren't far worse. At the Lab, he was kept out of trouble by only tinkering with virtuality; now what?

Does that sound mean-spirited? It's meant to be -- not to be "mean" but to resist, resist, resist the tyranny of the closed society of open-source. You cannot allow people like this, seemingly mild, but actually ominous, to run e-democracies. Rob Linden barred me from posting to the SLDev group after I joined, not because he could actually show any TOS offense -- had he been able to do that, he might have been able to expel me permanently -- and not because in fact I did anything wrong, but just because he didn't like my criticism of the opensource crap on that list in SL -- where he let reign the most vicious and malicious little script kiddies. Anyone who reads SLDEV knows what I mean. What he did was cunning and malicious: technically I wasn't expelled, but each time I posted, I was forced into a moderation queue -- that I never got out of. I never got to post, while extremists like Gordon Wendt or Gig Taggart got to dominate the list.

But here's the worst thing Rob Linden did in his tenure at SL, which lasted some 2 years. When Cyn Linden published the plan to register third-party viewers, he rallied his troops on the SLDEV and sicced them on the forums, where they arrived in large numbers to heckle and bully any critics, especially me. He even tried to coach them on how to behave as if they were "humble" (snort) to be more persuasive. When they persisted in arguing about the merits on the list, he sent them back again to the forums where they ranted and raged, many arguing that no accountability at all should be required of coders, who should just be allowed to roam free and do whatever the fuck they want. Really, that sort of behaviour, where one Linden is undoing another Linden's efforts by rallying residents to savage other residents -- that alone should have been enough to get him a warning, if not a dismissal.

Who should replace Rob? Well, I hope the Lindens will feel the hottest boiling fire on their asses on this not to hire another leftwing e-governance opensource cultist. That if they *must* have an opensource governor, that that person come not from the residents in SL already forming the fanboy choir, or from other games, or from Drupal or some goddamn thing, but from a mature company that uses proprietary code as well as opensource code without the religious zealotry. I would also want such a person to be in a position to really weed out the outright criminals on the lists of JIRA contributors and never let such a thing happens as a posting of copybot for months on the grounds that "well, it's out there anywhere" and "who can stop it".

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 14:31:19 -0800
From: Rob Lanphier <robla@lindenlab.com>
Subject: [sldev] An announcement
To: SLDev Mailing List <sldev@lists.secondlife.com>
Message-ID:
    <ab42f67e0911061431v1ae6cabat3b1fe9221346792d@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi everyone

I'm sad to announce that I've decided to leave Linden Lab.  My last day is slated for November 13 (next Friday).

This has been quite an adventure!  I'm really proud of where the community is today and its potential.  Over the years, this community has attracted a lot of really stellar people who now form a great
team.  Snowglobe is off to a great start.  Things aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination (as anyone who tries to build with VS 2008 will testify), and there's all sorts of things that still need to
be done and need to improve, but things right now really aren't bad, and there's a lot of great people around to make it better.  This latest Snowglobe release is a great example of that, with 28 of the
100 direct commits in the 1.2 cycle (so far) coming from four different non-Lindens, and many of the Linden commits being checkins of contributed code from those that don't yet have commit access.
That's not to mention the swell of activity around alternative viewers outside of Linden Lab.  I'm sure future versions of Snowglobe will have even greater levels of non-Linden participation, and with any
luck, maybe even combine with one or two of the alternative viewer efforts.

What does my departure mean for open source at Linden Lab?  Don't read too much into it.  My departure is about my personal circumstances, not about any abrupt change in direction on Linden's part.  My hope is that this will make room for a fresh approach to our open development
work.  We're working on the general plan for my replacement now, which you should all hear more details about soon.  I have no doubt that Linden Lab will be able to attract more great people to augment the
talented and passionate team we already have working in the community, and that the company will continue to develop its open source chops.

I'm going to hold a couple extra office hours next week in addition to the normal 2pm Thursday one.  We'll keep the Thursday office hour in Hippotropolis and text-only (typical Thursday), but the other two I'd like to use voice + text (accommodating text only folks as best we can), and hold them in the cubicle on the hill in Grasmere:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Grasmere/114/82/27

Agendas:
Monday, 2pm PST (Grasmere) - voice+text - informal gab/Q&A session
Wednesday, 8am PST (Grasmere) - voice+text - informal gab/Q&A session
Thursday, 2pm PST (Hippotropolis) - text only - advice for the future
of Snowglobe - we'll capture the transcript and save it off for the
future regime

As for what's next for me, I'm not yet in a position to talk about it. One thing I will say is that I'm definitely planning on staying in open source development.

I'm going to miss working with you all as much as I do today, but I'll still be around.  I'm going to get signed up for sldev@ on my personal email address, log into IRC (though probably just as "robla") and I'll
weigh in from time-to-time.  I'll be sure to fill everyone in when I land in my new spot.

Thanks for the ride!

Rob
p.s. now let's get Snowglobe 1.2 out the door ;-)   RC1 available now:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Download_Snowglobe

Comments

[melponeme_k]

He'll probably be back one day as a GSP. *shrug*

[cube inada]

never knew him,
but i just read his blog...

first post references his joining the TAO of Linden...

thought Id hyperlink...

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2006/07/25/the-tao-of-linden

And melponeme has it "transparently" pegged i think.

robs bio reads like one will start of a silly animal consultant group thats gonna focus on SL Enterprise support and consulting.

millions of sheep maybe?

best to him.

[Troy McLuhan]

In most democratic countries, the constitution and laws are all written down. They're not secret; they're open for inspection by anyone.

Unfortunately, things like constitutions and laws are written in legalese that's difficult to understand. Legalese is probably necessary. Legal writings must codify the intent of the lawmakers with minimum ambiguity. The result is that only a select group of people (a closed society) can understand and work with the law.

I may not like the fact that only a closed society of people can really work with the law in any meaningful way, but I understand why it *is* that way. It's not because the legal code is open. It's because legal code is inherently difficult to understand.

Laws are not the only kind of code required to make a modern nation function. The computer code that controls e-voting machines is another important piece of code required for the proper functioning of a modern country.

Just as it's a good thing to have an open legal code, it's also a good thing to have open computer code for e-voting machines. Just as it takes a legal professional to understand legal code, it takes a computer programmer to understand computer code.

While I might not understand legal code or e-voting machine computer code, I recognize the importance of having it open for all to inspect, even if only a select few can make any sense of it. The machinery of democracy is too important to be kept secret.

[Prokofy Neva]

Troy, that's a completely specious and ridiculous reading of Constitutional law.

Legal code is not "inherently difficult" to understand because it is written in a human language that any educated person can read and at least try to understand and use dictionaries to understand further. Any educated person can grasp the basis premise of a law -- and I mean with a 12-year-old 6th grade education! Not so computer code that is not comprehensible unless you learn it like a special separate language.

Any educated person can grasp what this means, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech".

You are COMPLETELY missing the point about the e-democracy here.

The argument against opensource code in electronic democracy is against THE CULTURE OF OPENSOURCE, NOT THE LITERAL FACT OF CODE BEING OPEN OR CLOSED.

The CULTURE is one in which binary thinkers and extremists insist on things like "we can't have a 'no' vote because then it would be bombed". Well, yes votes can be bombed too, and no votes are extremely important devices to mitigate against the spamming of yes votes!

Or they say "we need to have what is voted yes remain visible and drive out of view what is voted no".

Or "representative democracy doesn't work, we need massive direct e-voting on everything" -- completely ignoring the problem of who gets to frame the vote (the coders want that power only for themselves), how people are informed, and who participates -- and what to do about those not participating -- the coder believes entirely in the "tyranny of who shows up".

Then one can have a separate discussion as to whether code should be open or closed. I reject the idea that some blessing is conferred on this process by having opensource, not only because of the awful hideous culture of opensource coders I've just explained, their tyrannical and messianic belief in their own rectitude on these matters, but the idea that you are preventing some evil corporation or evil government office from prevailing in doing these same bad things by having opensource -- when in fact their claims of evil representative government and evil corprations are specious and often bunkum.

One might be able to demonstrate that the code is more secure when it is proprietary. In fact, it only becomes insecure because of the legions of opensource that then busy themselves cracking it because they think for ideological reasons "it has to be cracked" and for big IT that needs them to crack it so they can then 'sell solutions'. This evil racket is visible all over and having it invading the voting process is unacceptable.

You've made a completely specious parallel between the "coding" of legal language anyone can read without having to disrupt democracy itself with opensource culture, and "the need to be able to read machine code" which in fact ushers in that disruptive and even criminal culture.

Need to read it...so you can tinker with it?
Need to read it...so you can harm it?
Need to read it...because you think democracy is for dopes and you want to be in charge?
etc.

Banks don't open up their code either, Troy, and likely there are idiots who go around claiming the notion that "all property is theft" and banks should liberate all their cash to the opensource movement on the Internet and allow them to read their code. Perhaps you can see the lunacy in that example, and see the efficacy of creating secure code for voting machines that script kiddies can't hack, tinker with etc.

There is absolutely no proof that having proprietary code makes it "more vulnerable to hacking and exploits and bugs" than having it opensource.

Many opensource freaks make that claim aggressively, but I don't see that it's the case, anywhere, now that we have this process so visible in SL.

It's been my profound and repeated experience that when I find a bug or flaw in design, like 'return on share with group,' rather than that leading to fixing it, it leads to the most aggressive, hateful denial of the truth by arrogant, ideological *fucktards* commandeering the JIRA. Rob was one of them.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

It's impressive to see so much ignorance invested in and endlessly and loudly proclaimed by one person.

"One might be able to demonstrate that code is more secure when it's proprietary." Actually, no, one can't. Counting on secret algorithms for security violates one of the principles famously set forth by Auguste Kerckhoffs in 1883.

"There is absolutely no proof that having proprietary code makes it 'more vulnerable to hacking and exploits and bugs' than having it opensource." Nobody's saying that, save to the extent that having more people examining code for bugs makes it more likely that they'll be found and corrected. What is the case is that people who think that hiding security algorithms makes them more secure are deluding themselves.

[Prokofy Neva]

>Nobody's saying that, save to the extent that having more people examining code for bugs makes it more likely that they'll be found and corrected.

The Big Lie of opensource.

It's one of those mathematical truisms that in fact doesn't really play out if you examine it factually.

Having 1,000 identical nasty nerds like you, Melissa, who beligerently refuse to see where a bug *is* because of your mindset, disseminated through your closed tribal ranks, isn't progress to get some bugs that need finding.

And that occurs in the opensource setting where no one has any obligation to a paying customer or the public at large.

The refusal to admit the "share return" bug is one of the obvious examples of my point. But there are others, having to do with the inability to stop the copybot on the PJIRA for two months...

[Rex Cronon]

@ Melissa Yeuxdoux:
-actually, having a secret algorithm does make it a little harder. you see the hacker has to first obtain the algorithm. what is even more interesting is that the algorithm could be part of the key:)
-there is one more advantage to having many people look over code. it is possible that only a few can discover a flow and they can use it to their advantage until it such flaw is made public:)