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I think another big, big factor you're missing is people wanting to justify their existence, or "change for the sake of change". For proprietary software, we s

I think another big, big factor you're missing is people wanting to justify their existence, or "change for the sake of change". For proprietary software, we see this in several ways: existing teams and managers want to keep their jobs, so they're not going to say, "this product is excellent and we're calling it done. We recommend that you keep Joe around to maintain it, and lay off the rest of us because we're not needed here any more. Joe will report to a different manager, so you can lay off Jim too. Sorry Jim, good luck finding another cushy middle-management job elsewhere!" The other, related dynamic with proprietary software is wanting their software to seem "up-to-date", and giving customers a reason to keep "upgrading". Is this year's Photoshop really that much better than the one from 2 years ago? Probably not, but you're not going to get customers to keep paying over and over for your product if you don't keep making "upgrades". So you end up shoving all kinds of bloat in there and then trying to sell customers on paying for an "upgrade". You don't see a lot of this stuff as much in the F/OSS world, since for a lot of projects, people aren't getting a salary for their work. But F/OSS isn't immune to it: take a look at Gnome3 for a prime example of fixing something that wasn't broken (and ending up with something that's far worse). But the causes for this aren't quite so clear-cut as in the commercial world. Part could be due to idealistic developers wanting to prove they have a better vision. But part could also be that, combined with getting a salary for it: most of the prominent Gnome developers are employed by Red Hat, so they've managed to sucker someone with money into funding their pet project. You don't see this with a lot of other F/OSS where there is no real funding. vim, for instance, has been chugging along for a couple decades now with not too many changes since it's mostly been done by one guy. There are a couple projects to replace it, but they don't have big corporate funding so they're just products of small teams of idealists and aren't moving that fast. A lot of F/OSS projects just don't have much work on them at all; they're in security maintenance mode only, and only see updates when someone finds some little bug or a security vulnerability. When was the last time TeX had any noticeable changes? Yet lots of academics use it every day.

digi_owl 11y ago
With both proprietary and FOSS code, the architecture astronauts gets all the praise, while the code janitors go ignored. End result is that doing maintenance gets ignored, while features and bottom up rewrites happen at irregular intervals. Perhaps the one thing that has made the Linux kernel so popular, while user space seems to get reinvented over and over, is that Torvalds insist that once a user space interface has been established, it stays in, unchanged, as long as someone somewhere use it. But user space itself do not hold themselves to that policy. And thus you have all the fretting about the program devs wanting the latest libs because older versions have a different interface etc, even between minor versions. Damn it, look at Microsoft. Only with Windows 8 did they retire the 16 bit Windows stuff that has been around since Windows 3.1 (or even longer), and even then only on 64-bit installs. This is why MS keeps being used around the world. Not because the UI is nice and shiny, not because it all those user helping niceties, but because people can continue doing their thing their way.

digi_owl 11y ago

With both proprietary and FOSS code, the architecture astronauts gets all the praise, while the code janitors go ignored. End result is that doing maintenance gets ignored, while features and bottom up rewrites happen at irregular intervals. Perhaps the one thing that has made the Linux kernel so popular, while user space seems to get reinvented over and over, is that Torvalds insist that once a user space interface has been established, it stays in, unchanged, as long as someone somewhere use it. But user space itself do not hold themselves to that policy. And thus you have all the fretting about the program devs wanting the latest libs because older versions have a different interface etc, even between minor versions. Damn it, look at Microsoft. Only with Windows 8 did they retire the 16 bit Windows stuff that has been around since Windows 3.1 (or even longer), and even then only on 64-bit installs. This is why MS keeps being used around the world. Not because the UI is nice and shiny, not because it all those user helping niceties, but because people can continue doing their thing their way.