Basically it just means "if somebody proposes something better we won't tell them to go screw themselves by default". Which I think is very important, as the fu

Basically it just means "if somebody proposes something better we won't tell them to go screw themselves by default". Which I think is very important, as the future of operating systems like Linux is where it has been for the past 2 decades: in distributed computing. For non-desktop computing, what we really need are distributed operating systems. We have been poorly cobbling them together for decades, yet only a few research operating systems actually ship the needed functionality. Currently we use an array of layers of things, like hypervisors, container schedulers, service meshes, etc to sort of fudge together something that can do distributed computing in very specific ways. But they're all very complex, costly, and time-consuming to set up, and usually tailored to specific use cases. What we need is for Linux itself to natively ship all a distributed OS's features, so that apps can simply take advantage of them without having to be strapped into 20 layers of glue. But at the current pace of kernel development, I imagine it'd take 10 years to get all those patches developed, tested, and merged. So instead you could merge only the most core functionality, and extend the rest into the userland, and you'd get something kinda resembling systemd, but actually oriented toward running apps and services on a distributed network. I believe that would make most Linux-specific "cloud" technology obsolete, and in the process greatly simplify the entire technology stack, reducing TCO, speeding up development, and simplifying operations. Assuming that gets developed, "exploring alternatives" is a necessity to eventually get it adopted into Debian, so I'm really glad at least the option is there.