## Reuniting Bitreich and Suckless

## Reuniting Bitreich and Suckless

Reuniting Bitreich and Suckles

- Is it possible? -

by

Christoph Lohmann <[email protected]>

## Intention of this Talk

Summarize a history of 18 years into a small talk.

Force the focus on what I think is relevant for a better future.

Keep out what is worth a historican discussion or back-thinking of
suckless old-timers at a campfire reflecting their life.

Start a discussion on how to unite Suckless and Bitreich.

## The Founding of Suckless

Suckless was founded in 2006 as a reaction to to the over complexity of
IT industry.

I am one of the founding members of Suckless.

Software became more and more bloated.

Instead of using simple principles and keeping things small, software
became bigger and bigger over time.

Moore's Law, which says that computers power doubles every one to two
years.

Software doubles in complexity even faster.

## Suckless Manifesto

"Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We
believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector.
Unfortunately, the tendency for complex, error-prone and slow software
seems to be prevalent in the present-day software industry. We intend to
prove the opposite with our software projects."
-- Suckless Philosophy

## Suckless Growth

Suckless grew constantly in the time from its founding 2006 to 2013.

People went away, people came to suckless.

It was a great time.

## 2013 to Now

In 2013 the 'e.V.' (registered association) was founded at slcon2, with
the goal to use this for legal stuff and the finances.

This led to a demise in leadership in suckless.

Things got boring.

What got boring?

## 2013 to Now

With this struggle of less ideas and leaders being gone, suckless was
maintained.

The old software was patches, new releases came out.

Nothing new was coming along.

## Suckless as Playball for Controversies

Do you remember cancel culture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org

"Just out of curiosity, why is Wikipedia censoring coverage of
Suckless.org's neo-Nazi torchlit march? It's well-sourced. Seems like a
violation of NPOV to censor well-sourced information that might give
Suckless.org unfavorable press" -- anonymous

"I suggest to keep it as a controversy section, as the version I edited
was so far fetched and absurd, that I had to edit as this is quite a
discrediting claim for all contributors and for myself as the founder."
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Garbeam

Finally this got resolved.

## Public Reception of Suckless

Suckless is now mainstream. You find youtubers with their own sub culture
who define suckless on their own. People have internalized suckless and
reuse it for many software developer generations.

Suckless software is used everywhere and as an example for good ideas.

2024: Suckless did not fail! Suckless succeeded!

## Summarization of a Bystander

https://dev.to/l04db4l4nc3r/what-is-suckless-all-about-4hp
Angad Sharma
Posted on 6. Apr. 2020

"A lot of people view suckless as an extremist community, who openly and
rather blatantly bash other people's software in order to try and
promote their own vision of how the software can suck less. Although a
lot of their arguments can be backed up by credible evidence. "

"I was randomly browsing online when I came across this great article:
contempt culture which changed my whole view about verbal extremism in
the developer community, and I have since started seeing suckless as an
elite community who are just trying to make better software. "

## Contempt Culture

https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture
Presented by aurynn shaw

"So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities
I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other
languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they
would just use a real language, such as the one we used, everything would
just be better."

"Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real
language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because
their particular path was not blessed enough."

## Contempt Culture

"Because we were the problematic elements."

"The best advice we give programmers is to leave things better than how
they started. We do it with code, why don’t we do it with communities?
Why don’t we do it with people, colleagues, friends?"

## Bitreich

Founded in 2016 because of internal struggle in Suckless.

The Bitreich Manifesto:

"## Bitreich
We form a movement to improve our daily software life. Software has to
not misbehave, it has to follow our rules, it has to be reusable, it has
to be easily maintainable, it has to provide its recompilable source and
it has to be easily understandable."

## Bitreich

* Less extremist in for example source lines of code.

* An extension to suckless in protocols and community.

* Focus on memes and culture.

* Adaptability to new cultures in the good old text UNIX form.
* see AI meme generation
* video filters
* gopher humor and fun
* lately: gophers://bitreich.org/1/bsod.gph

See the State of Bitreich talks on how things evolved.

## Summary So Far

* Old calamities have been resolved.

* Suckless and Bitreich have its own history and legacy.

* There is no anger or different opinions left inbetween suckless and
bitreich.

## Can we Unite?

I called Anselm R. Garbe, the founder of suckless, who now lives in
Canada, in June 2024 to begin a process of reunification of Bitreich and
Suckless.

We had a long talk. It came to the conclusion, that a unification is
possible.

## Problems To Solve

Times are now different. We are older and realities have changed.

New ideas are needed.

What are the current problems that still need to be solved?

Is there a need for anything radical?

## Outlook

The process has just started.

## Thanks.

Thank you for listening.

Any questions?

Now or to

Christoph Lohmann <[email protected]>