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Comment by steveklabnik

5 years ago

I am reminded of jwz, debian, and xscreensaver (Not linking to jwz's blog from HN because... he doesn't want it to be.)

17 comments

steveklabnik

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mcguire  5 years ago

You might want to check what is on the other end of that link when the Referer is HN.

  • steveklabnik  5 years ago

    Did you catch me before the edit? I remembered right after I clicked "submit" and immediately removed it, ha! You must have seen it right at the right moment.

Hublium  5 years ago

What's the story here?

  • jandrese  5 years ago

    IIRC he had xscreensaver start spitting out error messages when it was old because Debian generally keeps package versions fixed per release, meaning if someone had a 2 year old but still updated version of Debian it would ship with a 2 year old version of xscreensaver. Jwz was tired of getting error reports for bugs fixed years ago because someone installed a the default "current" version on their Debian based OS.

barbazoo  5 years ago

> Not linking to jwz's blog from HN because... he doesn't want it to be

I don't think ... that's how the internet works?

(edit: I mean the "because... he doesn't want it to be" part)

  • x0x0  5 years ago

    Follow the link and enjoy

    https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/06/to-be-clear-the-whale-did-n...

    edit: maybe jwz took the image down?

    • Arnavion  5 years ago

      It's still there.

          $ curl -D - -H 'referer:https://news.ycombinator.com' 'https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/06/to-be-clear-the-whale-did-not-want-him-in-its-mouth/'

    HTTP/1.1 302 Found
    ...
    Location: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png

      Your browser probably isn't sending the referer for third-party sites. (I've configured mine to not do that as well.)

  • codezero  5 years ago

    if you follow an HN link to that site it detects the referrer and shows you something you don't want to see, so it's more than just because jwz doesn't want you to, he actively punishes people who unknowingly click a link that violates his preference.

    • barbazoo  5 years ago

      oh for sure, I'm just saying anyone can link to anything on the internet afaik, you can't just say, don't link to me.

  • steveklabnik  5 years ago

    Sure, it's not like, a law of physics or something, but

    1. in this case there's... more to it, as you've been pointed out

    2. I still think it's polite to respect someone's wishes, especially when it is trivial to do so.

    This attitude of "well I can because I can and what you think doesn't matter" is promoted as the culture of "the internet" by a lot of folks, but it's a cultural thing that not everyone agrees with.

Agingcoder  5 years ago

It's the exact same issue.

Author ships code with a permissive license, other people build code, and view things from a purely legal perspective.

Author realizes that code doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that actual binaries/packages matter (different versions, etc) , which he doesn't control, and it's a problem to him.

He then asks the distro guys to do things differently. Distro guys are either offended (evil author!) , legalists (he chose the wrong license, his fault) or sometimes helpful (maybe there's an alternative) .

I think it's obvious the authors made a licensing mistake, and I don't understand why distro maintainers don't want to see this.

All in all, it's quite fascinating : a bit of law, a bit of social contract, and something truly in the 'grey area' where we, humans , don't always shine.