[HN Gopher] GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not d...
___________________________________________________________________
GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do "bounty"
Author : scblzn
Score : 211 points
Date : 2021-12-29 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gcc.gnu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (gcc.gnu.org)
| sgt101 wrote:
| PS50k and I'll do it today!
| xyst wrote:
| This is open source software with access to the source code. Why
| not just submit a patch on your own? Just bill the customer with
| "nuclear weapons" for time spent contributing to OSS. Contractor
| gets paid. Client gets working software. OSS community gets a
| patch.
|
| Is it incompetence? Is it laziness? Is it bad management? Is it
| all of the above?
|
| Personally, I would love to get paid to work on OSS on behalf of
| X company. Much better than re-inventing the wheel, plus with the
| added benefit of learning something new.
| qzw wrote:
| If the customer has nuclear weapons, then the customer has
| magnitudes more money in their couch cushions than would be
| required to pay to have this functionality implemented. For that
| matter, they're probably paying Bill Long's employer some
| significant chunk of change, and it would be easy for them to
| offer to pay for this functionality. But it's free/oss software,
| so let's just keep bugging the maintainers instead.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I wouldn't because I know better but if I'm reading the tone of
| the comment correctly I would seriously consider responding
| "you have nuclear weapons? Great. Fuck off". Again, don't say
| that, but you're right that they should either bounty it or do
| the damn patch themselves.
| qzw wrote:
| But then the customer might get MAD...
|
| Sorry, couldn't resist.
| tejtm wrote:
| I might as well go down with you suggesting they put on a
| bake sale.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| I think Bill Long needs to be added to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Long
|
| Done.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Why would you do such a lowly thing?
| layer8 wrote:
| And already undone due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip
| edia:Manual_of_Style/Disa... .
| ridethebike wrote:
| In practice it's also very likely that customer mind boggling
| amount of bureaucracy, allocating extra penny might require
| approval from several committees.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Usually most customers, even government, have different
| thresholds, where something under, say, $25k takes very few
| levels of management approval.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I recall buying $50-60k worth of hardware at one of my
| previous employers, with only 2 signatures required, both
| of which I was able to obtain within the space of an
| afternoon.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Was that employer working with the government? Government
| contracts are notorious for bureaucracy and bean
| countering.
| numbsafari wrote:
| I've made proposals to state universities for $20k
| software projects that required a vote in the state
| legislature for approval.
|
| Moved on to other projects until after the next
| legislative session, and the period after where the
| bureaucracy makes it all happen, then we actually
| scheduled a start date that was 3 months later, since
| that was how long it took to get all the resources back
| from other projects.
|
| Government isn't run like a household, nor like a
| business, nor should it be.
| sgt101 wrote:
| For timescales of ~6mths (depending on where you are in the
| year) yes, for right now outside our budget... possibly
| not.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| This bug has been open for 1.5 years now though
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| In that case, it sucks to be the customer.
| talideon wrote:
| That's Cray's problem. They're getting money from this
| customer, and they should be the ones ponying up the money
| from that contract to cover the development of the feature.
| danShumway wrote:
| That's Cray/HPE's problem then. And if they can't fund
| bugfixes, maybe they shouldn't be in the business providing
| support for operations that handle _nuclear weapons_. And if
| their client can 't allocate funds to keep the software they
| use secure, maybe they _also_ shouldn 't be working with
| nuclear weapons.
|
| We keep coming up with excuses for why companies can't give
| Open Source projects money, and they all seem to boil down
| to: "companies are systemically unable to make secure/stable
| products, can't adapt to emergencies or pay for fixes even
| when it's the obviously most efficient way to get the fixes
| in, and because of that these companies shouldn't be in
| charge of anything dangerous or important."
|
| Which is maybe not the conclusion those companies would want
| us to draw, but it seems to be what they're suggesting
| whenever they hide behind crippling bureaucracy like that
| somehow makes the situation better instead of worse. It's
| really irresponsible for Cray/HPE to take on a paid contract
| like this if they can't handle the job requirements.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| What's more likely is that HPE/Cray have so much padding in
| the contract that paying someone $200/hour to implement the
| function and appropriate tests and it would be a rounding
| error on the contract.
|
| I think they _would_ do that, except Mr. Master Engineer with
| 25 years FORTRAN experience and 20 years as a principal
| member of a FORTRAN committee would have to explain to his
| employers why he can 't handle this himself.
|
| Either that or he sold himself to HPE as being able to throw
| his weight around because of his committee membership ("hire
| me and you'll get what you want from FORTRAN"), and we're
| seeing narcissistic entitlement when it turns out that's not
| the case and now his job is at risk.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| They should change bug priority to "low", add a label _cheap-
| bastards_ , and go on with their day.
| frays wrote:
| Fascinating thread. Thanks HN.
| somehnguy wrote:
| In my opinion that should have been an instant close of the
| issue. If the customer has the type of money to have a nuclear
| weapons program then surely they have the money to pay for the
| software they're relying on. Or maybe since they're apparently
| paying Bill to handle the software - Bill should take issues he
| has into his own hands and fix it himself. Sheesh.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I suppose threatening to strike GCC developers with nukes might
| be more effective than bounties, but it also seems like a lot
| more expensive to carry out.
| rurban wrote:
| Not GCC, just gfortran. No support for f2018 yet.
|
| GCC itself also doesn't have full support for c11 yet. Which
| was 7 years earlier. So they seem to have other priorities than
| fulfilling standards
| btdmaster wrote:
| What is missing from full C11 support? I couldn't find any
| documentation on this other than C11Status[1] which looks
| fine.
|
| [1] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/C11Status
| jlarocco wrote:
| I don't know, but this more in-depth status page punts with
| "Library feature, no compiler support required", quite a
| bit: https://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html
|
| I can't find a similar page for glibc, so maybe the issue
| is there?
| cozzyd wrote:
| Sure, but gfortran is part of the GNU Compiler Collection :)
| And I think there is C11 support other than optional parts?
| https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/C11Status
| turminal wrote:
| > GCC itself also doesn't have full support for c11 yet.
|
| Neither do other, much better funded compilers, to be fair.
| Someone wrote:
| Are there _much_ better funded compilers? I don't think we
| know much about how much funding the various compilers get.
|
| Apple/Intel/Microsoft may have lots of money, but that
| doesn't mean their C compiler teams get much funding.
|
| I hear people say Apple's work on clang is limited to their
| needs, and those may not involve getting full C11 support.
|
| Microsoft also may not need full C11 support for their
| internal use. That can make getting that a low or zero
| priority task.
|
| Intel recently moved their backend to LLVM. That doesn't
| give me confidence they're investing heavily there.
|
| Now, gcc technically is volunteer work, but lots of
| development is done by people paid to do that by their
| employers.
| worik wrote:
| Apple clearly does not fund any developer tools properly.
|
| I am developing software for iOS and the tooling is very
| bad.
|
| It sure looks good. Nice colours.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Clearly, GCC needs a new GPL licensing exception: "You
| acknowledge that the Program is not designed or intended for use
| in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any
| nuclear facility." If Java does it...
| chrsig wrote:
| GNU generally considers those types of clauses in opposition to
| libre software[0]
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON
| jahewson wrote:
| As phrased in the parent comment it's a disclaimer, not a
| restriction. So it's acceptable but carries no weight.
| biryani_chicken wrote:
| That would stop the GPL from being a FLOSS license, which would
| be against the philosophy of its authors.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Nope, it wouldn't. It's already implied by the general
| disclaimer of warranty in existing FLOSS licenses; adding
| that express provision would merely bring some much-needed
| clarity.
| marcodiego wrote:
| That clause would hurt freedom 0: the freedom to user the
| software for whatever you want.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| How so? "You acknowledge that X is not designed or
| intended for use in Y" is not a _restriction_ on using X
| for Y: it 's just telling you in no uncertain terms that
| the developers of X will not be helping you with any
| issues if it turns out you _are_ using it for Y. This
| looks like the exact situation that OP is in, and that
| the Java provision is designed to guard against.
| Jach wrote:
| Seems useless given the existing clauses with the disclaimer of
| warranty and limitation of liability.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Why? GPL is a license to permit you to modify and distribute
| the source code which is normally illegal under copyright law.
| Nothing more, nothing less.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > Nothing more, nothing less.
|
| Well actually, 2 more things: distribute the modifications as
| well, and to _use it without restrictions_ (Well that, plus
| making sure anybody who gets a copy gets the same rights).
|
| The latter of the two points happens to be the retroactively
| added freedom #0 in the FSF's definition of free software[0],
| which is also repeated in the GPL license text, IIRC
| somewhere at the top. The Open Source Definition used by the
| OSI has clauses to a similar effect (See points 5 and 6)[1].
|
| GP's suggestion, adding restrictions on how the software
| could be used, would run counter to that, conflicting with
| the very philosophy from which the GPL originates.
|
| Bruce Perens, who originally wrote the Debian Free Software
| Guidelines[4] (the OSI OSD is based on that), also commented
| on that in 2019, when the idea to put forward to add ethics
| based usage restrictions to software licenses[2][3].
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
|
| [1] https://opensource.org/osd
|
| [2] https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-
| hippocratic...
|
| [3] https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-
| licens...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidel
| ine...
| janto wrote:
| Well, they might need to distribute the code on the "device"
| it's running on :P
| marcodiego wrote:
| GPL is a free software license. For a license to be a free
| software license, it must guarantee the 4 essential freedoms:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
| [deleted]
| miles wrote:
| > The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do "bounty". :)
|
| Not only is this not funny, it would likely have the unfortunate
| effect of turning off any of the "very, very, very, few
| individuals"[0] who might be able to help. The fact that the
| issue apparently remains open after a year and a half seems to
| attest to that.
|
| [0] https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c8
| wyldfire wrote:
| Indeed. If the bug were assigned to me, my inclination would be
| to respond: you're being paid -- so Use the Source, Luke.
| akersten wrote:
| Yeah, that sort of entitlement would throw this issue at the
| bottom of the priority queue for me. They're lucky they even
| got a nice workaround kludge posted in the thread. Knowing that
| probably 3 layers of government contractors are being paid fat
| stacks to accomplish the task of posting breathless "bump, wen
| fix?" on the maintainer mailing list is salt in the wound. I
| would have closed the issue right then and there as a wontfix,
| personally. We shouldn't enable those sort of attitudes towards
| volunteers.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Definitely nauseating that "Bill Long" probably gets paid
| $450 an hour for their time but can't manage to just write
| the patch themselves or find one of the thousands of
| programmers in their org to deal with it and submit a fix.
| SolarNet wrote:
| Not only that, it seems to actually have. All the developers
| started saying things like this:
|
| > I also did not test the libquadmath portion. ENOTIME.
|
| > I don't have much time, but
|
| With every statement they added. It's actually like clockwork,
| every developer after that point said how they had little time.
| vanusa wrote:
| I don't see how one can _not_ find it funny.
|
| Then again, I've never particularly desired to work for that
| line of "customer".
| scotty79 wrote:
| My first thought was to do a quick vote if maybe we could
| revoke their license to use the software.
| klyrs wrote:
| "Oh, well, you shouldn't have spent _all_ your money at the
| nuclear bomb depot. If you 'd saved a million dollars for lil
| 'ol me, I'd surely help."
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| This is a bit tongue and cheek as sharing just that random bit of
| information on a true SCI program about the customer would cause
| "issues". The customer is obviously DoD/DoE, however bug did not
| come from the SCI side. If Cray/HPE is the contractor to the
| customer in supporting this system and the software being used
| then it is their issue write the fix or pay for a bounty to fix
| it WITHOUT reveling the customer. Even as a joke as the customer
| I would be upset.
|
| Any large tech vendor likely has some dealing with certain
| government agencies. It has been my experience that those
| customers are NEVER referred to by name in any communications by
| the vendor and always given generic names like "customer blue".
| You may see a bug tagged as customer blue in your bug db, but you
| did not know what agency that mapped to.
| gjvc wrote:
| psst... "tongue _in_ cheek "
| iso1631 wrote:
| Sounds like Cray are dealing with North Korea to me
| IshKebab wrote:
| What a dick. "It's not fixed. When will it be fixed? I'm not
| paying."
|
| Ok screw you Bill.
| sanguy wrote:
| You would be shocked at how much "military critical" software is
| built on OSS tools, libraries, and code bases. More shocking are
| the primary contractors charge top rates, contribute little to
| OSS, and try to hide the OSS usage from the end client.
| derefr wrote:
| You'd in turn perhaps be shocked at how much OSS software
| originates in militaries.
|
| Especially in the software security / cryptography space -- if
| a crypto algorithm isn't literally designed by some military,
| it's often designed by some mathematicians who were contracted
| by a military to come up with an algorithm with some particular
| nice set of properties, who then (probably much later) reused
| their paid learning to create another algorithm with similar
| nice properties for public use, but different enough that it
| doesn't "give anything away" cryptanalytically about its
| confidential progenitor algorithm.
|
| "Opened" projects like Tor or Ghidra aren't at-all uncommon,
| either. The unusual part with those projects is that we _know_
| where they came from; usually such things are thoroughly
| scrubbed of their origins and handed over to a maintainer with
| a public identity, who is to claim that they created it
| themselves.
| rackjack wrote:
| Can you name some projects that have been scrubbed and handed
| over?
| derefr wrote:
| That would rather put to waste the effort of scrubbing
| them, no?
|
| A lot of the reason for the scrubbing isn't confidentiality
| of authorship per se (though obviously that's important),
| but rather _optics_. If people see a FOSS project described
| as being e.g. "created by the NSA", they'll get skeeved
| out of using it or contributing to it, even if the NSA is
| no longer involved (or is only involved in the sense that
| people who happen to work at the NSA contribute to the
| project as civilians, in their time off, without the goals
| of the NSA driving the contributions.)
|
| Most of these opened projects are just a result of people
| in the organizations seeing a genuinely-good project that
| was created as a byproduct of some project -- probably by
| some contractors that were actually decent for a change --
| that nobody internally can get the resourcing to maintain
| any more, and so is going to be canned and replaced -- and
| thinking they can advocate to give it a new life as a
| civilian asset. People thinking of the public good,
| basically. If revealing the origins of the work would void
| that benefit to the public good, they'll fastidiously avoid
| doing so.
| turk- wrote:
| Apache Nifi and Accumulo do come to mind, both out of NSA.
| mokus wrote:
| They have way more patience than I do. I'd have pointed out
| pretty quickly that this "customer" is not a customer of the
| gfortran team and is therefore irrelevant to the discussion.
| marcodiego wrote:
| In this case, developers are in the powerful position to say:
| "I don't care about your nuclear weapons, pay me or forget it."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Cray/HPE, presumably, has a contract to provide support to the
| customer with nuclear weapons. If this fix is necessary to that
| contract, Cray/HPE should set the bounty needed to get it done as
| part of the necessary cost of fulfilling their contract (if they
| didn't figure it in, and it's not a cost-plus contract, and it
| cuts into the profit margin, well, that's the risk you take with
| fixed-cost contracting.) Free Software may often tend to be free-
| as-in-beer as well as free-as-in-speech but, where it is, that is
| _as is_. If you have special, and especially time-sensitive,
| needs that aren 't _as is_ , you pay someone to do it. It's not a
| _gratis_ support contract with response time guarantees. As Cray
| /HPE ought to be well aware, that kind of support is expensive,
| and doesn't happen if no one is paying.
| nimbius wrote:
| Agreed. The tone comes across as smug however.
|
| Can the theatricality bill, nobody on the GCC bug tracker but
| you cares if the country that spent two trillion dollars to
| replace the Taliban in twenty years with the Taliban doesn't
| seem to have they acumen to fund something they're now
| critically dependent upon. They can barely get it in gear to
| fund their own budget each year without a partisan meltdown.
|
| If they could do any of this themselves, you'd be on the golf
| course.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> They can barely get it in gear to fund their own budget
| each year without a partisan meltdown.
|
| When is the last time they stayed within budget?
| danShumway wrote:
| Very well written.
|
| This feels like the log4j conversation all over again. Cray/HPE
| knows what the problem is, and they know the developers aren't
| being paid to fix the bug, the customer is hounding _them_ ,
| not the original developers. This is their problem to solve,
| they don't get to pretend that it's someone else's fault that
| they're too cheap to shell out the money for proper
| maintenance.
|
| If this was a bug in Cray/HPE's own internal software, they
| would pay a developer to fix it. It's wild as a company to
| assume that because you're using someone else's stuff for free,
| your responsibility for maintenance is now their problem as
| well.
|
| > Hi Bill, per our operational security procedure we can't talk
| about ieee_arithmetic, especially when we dont get paid.
|
| Good on the developers for saying this. You support people, or
| you don't get to tell them what to do. And if you're a
| commercial company taking on a contract that involves nuclear
| weapons, maybe you devote some resources to making that
| contract and the software running well, because that's what the
| client is paying you to do.
|
| So sick and tired of the backwards mentality that giving
| something away to the world for free means that you now have an
| additional obligation to fix everyone else's problems for free.
| The "as is" clauses in Open Source licenses are there for a
| reason.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, and there's nothing saying Cray, or [customer w/nuclear
| weapons], or anyone else is required to use that OS package.
| Perhaps they would have been better off writing their own in
| this instance.
|
| Or, better yet, they could write a fix and add it to the OS
| package (kind of the way it's supposed to work - the set of
| users maintain it so everyone benefits?).
| hitekker wrote:
| Yeah, I thought Bill Long from Cray was joking at first. But
| his follow-up messages are plain passive aggressive
|
| > Inquiry from the original site: "Does GCC provide a timeline
| for when they will conform to F2018?"
| okl wrote:
| Choosing beggar mentality. I hate it.
| kazinator wrote:
| Beggars can hardly afford stockpiles of nuclear weapons!
|
| (Though when it comes to programming, they have armed
| themselves with a flint arrowhead.)
| scotty79 wrote:
| Begger is defined by begging not by what he has. Not all
| beggers are destitute.
| throwaway19937 wrote:
| I would respond with "F2018 conformance will be fixed sooner
| if you help."
| neltnerb wrote:
| This is extremely polite while still being direct, I really
| like things like this.
|
| It makes clear that there is a way they can help, with
| enough attitude to make clear that the other person is
| dealing with individuals rather than some magic free
| subcontractor.
| skim_milk wrote:
| I think it's just the sad state of the corporate structure at
| the moment. If a manager requested and got a budget to fix said
| bug to his superiors, it's his ass that's on the line if things
| don't work as planned. If same manager said "it's not our fault
| things don't work" nothing happens to him. Hopefully when the
| current generation of managers gets replaced they'll be
| replaced by those that actually understand FOSS and can
| incentivize fixing these issues. But as it stands everyone,
| including the shareholders of these big companies, suffer from
| poorly designed corporate incentives that let FOSS projects
| stay unmaintained.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Fully agree with you.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| According to Bill Long's linkedin page he has ~25 years Fortran
| experience and holds "principal member" status on a Fortran
| committee for much of those. Describes himself as a "master"
| engineer.
|
| Someone with that level of experience and recognition should be
| capable of either implementing the function themselves, or at
| the very least have the professional network to know a number
| of people capable of doing so for HPE.
|
| I would also expect significantly more tact and
| professionalism.
|
| The email record screams "BOFH bench warmer."
|
| Edit: the more I think about this, the more I think he probably
| sold himself to HPE as being able to give them what they want
| from FORTRAN due to his committee membership. Which turned out
| to not be true, thus placing his salary at risk.
| tyingq wrote:
| He's even a co-author on a paper that specifically uses
| Fortran <-> C interop. Which is the kind of work he's asking
| for here.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3418084
|
| I'm aware that sometimes you can get your name on the paper
| by riding the other author's coattails, but it's interesting.
| raincom wrote:
| Even if it is a fixed contract, they can shell out $10k for
| this. However, account managers and their bosses are bean
| counters.
| slackfan wrote:
| Most organizations with nuclear weapons most certainly do pay
| bounties. Generally for foreign intelligence, but I believe it
| applies.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi...
| hughrr wrote:
| I worked for a large defence contractor and getting approval
| for anyone to pay for that would have been more difficult than
| actually learning how to fix it myself and fixing it myself. At
| which point I would never be allowed to contribute the fix back
| to the original project due to the no code export policy and
| airgapped network.
|
| I could of course have done a clean room patch at home based on
| my retained knowledge but quite frankly I probably couldn't be
| assed with it by the time I'd got home and eaten dinner due to
| the depression of working in such a horrible place.
|
| That's the reality of working for such folk.
| derefr wrote:
| > At which point I would never be allowed to contribute the
| fix back to the original project due to the no code export
| policy and airgapped network.
|
| I mean, presumably what you'd be getting approval to _do_ is
| to take PTO to do the work off-hours _for_ the upstream
| project as a volunteer, no?
|
| That's the deal most "open-core upstream maintained in
| public, enterprise SaaS downstream maintained in private"
| companies offer: "we'll compensate you for the time you spend
| volunteering as an engineer/maintainer at the Foundation,
| shipping the code we depend on."
|
| In such a case, the code would never _start_ as work-for-hire
| as part of a confidential project; and so would never need to
| be exported from said confidential project. It 'd start life
| as FOSS code living in your personal GitHub repo fork of the
| upstream.
| hughrr wrote:
| Probably wouldn't work in the end described. The only way
| to get it in would be to get the maintainers to accept the
| patch, then wait for redhat to pull it in, then wait for a
| stable OS release, then wait for the IT guys to approve
| that release for internal use, then wait for the other IT
| guys to install it on your nodes.
|
| Every time we had an issue the only option was to literally
| divert the flow of a river around it in some way.
|
| The positive outcome of this was the sheer amount of
| _outside the box_ thinking practice genuinely lead to some
| of us gaining semi elite debugging and hacking skills. My
| own favourite was writing a tool to frig with the IAT in PE
| files on windows NT so you could inject a new function to
| wrap vendor DLL functions so we could patch bugs without
| involving the vendor.
| bluGill wrote:
| I got around that one place by just writing up a bug report
| and a it seems like line x of file... this wasn't government
| and so they wouldn't have cared anyway so i just avoided
| figuring out the paperwork to contribute.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Sort of, in a depressing way:
|
| - It's pretty doable to get someone's hours for this,
| especially within the contractor or one of their DC buddies:
| there's already a customer and a contractor, and presumably,
| some sort of purchase vehicle & contract. The words "senior",
| "support", and "fee" are probably in there in multiple
| places.
|
| - By (backwards) design, it is much harder for a truly expert
| OSS dev not in the contractor circle, and even harder, an OSS
| product org offering maintenance contracts for events like
| this
|
| - The middle ground becomes sales/lobby-heavy orgs like
| IBM/RedHat, which introduces another multi-layer technical &
| political world of pain. I haven't worked with Cray
| (discussed in the thread), so no comment there. But as seen,
| we're seeing a chain of well-funded stakeholders being fine
| with not supporting for a prolonged period, which is cultural
| red flags.
| pinewurst wrote:
| From 1st hand experience there's a lot of (IMHO) confusion
| in these sorts of organizations between maintenance and new
| features driving this kind of entitlement.
| vkou wrote:
| > I worked for a large defence contractor and getting
| approval for anyone to pay for that would have been more
| difficult than actually learning how to fix it myself and
| fixing it myself. At which point I would never be allowed to
| contribute the fix back to the original project due to the no
| code export policy and airgapped network.
|
| Unless your software was write-once, compile-once, 'fixing it
| myself' includes the time it takes to do the initial fix, add
| unit tests for it, and also the time it takes to patch that
| fix into every future version of GCC you use - and also
| ensure that the institution will remember to do so long after
| you get on the lottery bus.
|
| Given all of the above, it may in fact, be easier to figure
| out who in your org you can bug to just pay the vendor.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm so glad that I never did that work when it was a
| possibility.
| dathinab wrote:
| I wonder if they couldn't "just" put up a misc. software
| support money pool with a reasonable but in the huge picture
| small amount of money they can "low complexity" spend on such
| things?
| hughrr wrote:
| Considering it took three tiers of management and three
| facilities department members to replace a coffee machine
| that had an actual service contract in place already, I
| think something of that administrative complexity would
| have been beyond them.
|
| Either that or like most SMEs I've worked for they're
| actually only using the stuff because it's "free" by their
| corrupted definition of "free" which is basically it didn't
| have to go through a PO process.
| [deleted]
| petertodd wrote:
| I think in this case that comment was just a funny way of
| saying both "this is actually for the well known USA nuclear
| weapons program, which everyone knows uses Crays" as well as "I
| couldn't get anyone to approve a bounty"
| boulos wrote:
| As was the joking response about not discussing IEEE
| implementations due to their ops sec :).
| gowld wrote:
| Oh, I didn't understand what that was getting at, beyond
| the generael idea of trolling the misbehaving requester,
| but which I thought cored devs don't do in their own bug
| tracker.
|
| > Hi Bill, per our operational security procedure we can't
| talk about ieee_arithmetic, especially when we dont get
| paid.
| pydry wrote:
| Still about 100x more alarming than funny.
| phkahler wrote:
| My guess is that Cray/HPE does not want to set a precedent where
| they actually PAY the developers. They want to cheaply "work
| with" the community to get things done.
| marcodiego wrote:
| This makes me partially sad and even a bit furious. The costumer
| has nuclear weapons, why don't they pay developers then?
| scotty79 wrote:
| They could pay with warheads if that's the only thing they
| have.
| [deleted]
| temikus wrote:
| As an OSS maintainer myself writing something like that on the
| bug tracker would make it less likely to be worked on as this
| indicates complete disregard for maintainer's time and efforts.
|
| I know for a fact that I have at least one trillion and multiple
| billion-dollar companies using a piece of my (somewhat obscure)
| software. Somehow they're always the ones asking for urgent fixes
| and never the ones contributing patches.
| [deleted]
| PreddyMW wrote:
| Airstrike confirmed.
| baybal2 wrote:
| The first thing I thought of in this context was that GCC meant
| "Gulf Cooperation Council"
| gaze wrote:
| "Fuck you, pay me" is the only appropriate response.
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