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Yet in practice, has it hurt Linux? Linus' entire point is that he doesn't think more is better. He'd rather have a smaller group of more talented individuals w

Yet in practice, has it hurt Linux? Linus' entire point is that he doesn't think more is better. He'd rather have a smaller group of more talented individuals working the kernel. Even if you disagree, the premise of your argument, that Linux devs are largely an unpaid, voluntary workforce, is incorrect.

hutzlibu 8y ago
"Yet in practice, has it hurt Linux? " Very much, yes. There are still so many bugs and the monolithic nature which forces driver to be integrated in the kernel ... requires so much more people at least to understand the kernel better. Linus could still have his elite darwinist selected core hacker group, but for the whole linux eco system it is very bad that the barriers for the kernel are so arbitarily high.
- setr 8y ago
  >forces driver to be integrated in the kernel Isn’t that a result of the intentional non-guarantee on not maintaining abi compatibility? Otherwise you end up with microsoft’s much more difficult to fix situation (maintain abi, difficult to update apis in general, but vendors can trivially produce them without a concern). Im not sure how microservice architecture or something would sidestep the issue; its more of a political question of who's in charge of maintaining the drivers
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    "its more of a political question of who's in charge of maintaining the drivers" And even more stupid to set the bar then artificial high, when you don't have enough elitist, ideological pure enough hackers to do that.
    - setr 8y ago
      What bar..? It gives freedom to kernel developers to update their apis more freely and maintain effective backwards compatibility, at the cost of extra work managing/updating the drivers themselves instead of relying on vendors to do it. The only bar then is that the driver needs to be in a sane state before being accepted into the kernel tree, so that it remains easy to maintain sanity. Which seems to me a very fair, if not necessary, ask. It’s a pretty clearcut tradeoff, and they apparently have managed the manpower for it thus far... I don’t know why you need “elitist, ideological hackers” to support this strategy

hutzlibu 8y ago

"Yet in practice, has it hurt Linux? " Very much, yes. There are still so many bugs and the monolithic nature which forces driver to be integrated in the kernel ... requires so much more people at least to understand the kernel better. Linus could still have his elite darwinist selected core hacker group, but for the whole linux eco system it is very bad that the barriers for the kernel are so arbitarily high.

setr 8y ago
>forces driver to be integrated in the kernel Isn’t that a result of the intentional non-guarantee on not maintaining abi compatibility? Otherwise you end up with microsoft’s much more difficult to fix situation (maintain abi, difficult to update apis in general, but vendors can trivially produce them without a concern). Im not sure how microservice architecture or something would sidestep the issue; its more of a political question of who's in charge of maintaining the drivers
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  "its more of a political question of who's in charge of maintaining the drivers" And even more stupid to set the bar then artificial high, when you don't have enough elitist, ideological pure enough hackers to do that.
  - setr 8y ago
    What bar..? It gives freedom to kernel developers to update their apis more freely and maintain effective backwards compatibility, at the cost of extra work managing/updating the drivers themselves instead of relying on vendors to do it. The only bar then is that the driver needs to be in a sane state before being accepted into the kernel tree, so that it remains easy to maintain sanity. Which seems to me a very fair, if not necessary, ask. It’s a pretty clearcut tradeoff, and they apparently have managed the manpower for it thus far... I don’t know why you need “elitist, ideological hackers” to support this strategy