from Hacker News

The customer has nuclear weapons

by aviramha on 4/2/24, 5:31 PM with 18 comments

• by prpl on 4/3/24, 12:19 AM

  This is a dumb comment trying to pass the buck IMO. Of course it's a national lab, but probably a specific group at a national lab (potentially even in a Office of Science arm) going through their support channels at Cray/HPE to get a fix, presumably porting away from intel compilers or something or trying to onboard to something else (conda/spack).

  Cray/HPE could/should have just do the fix or pay for it, since presumably they are packaging gcc/gfortran as part of the OS. Somebody there has to be qualified to execute such a fix.

• by alphazard on 4/3/24, 12:06 AM

  It's crazy to me that open source maintainers offer free support to corporations or governments that they could easily extract money from for the benefit of the project or themselves.

  An individual wants a feature and is prepared to pitch in, probably worth the time investment for a maintainer.

  The US government wants floating point arithmetic done a certain way, fuck you, pay me.

• by exabrial on 4/2/24, 11:50 PM

  Then they can afford to pay someone to fix it?

• by hm-nah on 4/3/24, 12:13 AM

  And Bob becomes a high value target from a single comment in an open forum. Woops

• by TheDudeMan on 4/3/24, 12:20 AM

  I don't get it.