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Moreover he's using the large amount of wreckage to argue that the Darwinian process of selecting "category killers" isn't working, which is completely backward
by doublement 7y ago
Moreover he's using the large amount of wreckage to argue that the Darwinian process of selecting "category killers" isn't working, which is completely backwards.
If "category killer" is a winner-take-all competition, then there are going to be a vast number of losers, and we do see a vast number of unmaintained projects. It's just that no one is bothering to remove them from view when they're defeated.
- buzzkillington 7y agoI'm unaware that the goal of evolution is to have one lion win the lion competition and eat all other lions. Maybe we should stop using bad metaphors? Writing software is not a Darwinian process, neither is competition on the market place. Unless you got your OS by randomly twiddling bits in the binary file, in which case why are we even talking about open source?
- zimpenfish 7y ago> have one lion win the lion competition and eat all other lions If that improved the chances of that lion's genes surviving, it would absolutely be selected for. Obviously it generally doesn't because there's safety in numbers, etc. > the goal of evolution Minor nit: evolution has no goal. It is undirected, random, capricious, etc.
- Terretta 7y agoThe analogy might be clearer if instead of GitHub we used Fossil.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoHe does talk about how huge corporations use open source and exploit open source developers for their own profit...
- fargle 7y agoWhich is an important advantage to open-source. Abandoned, failed close-source software is almost never available. Talk about wasted productivity... If an abandoned github repo has any redeemable value, it will get found and used.