My experience is that commercial software has teams of programmers rewarded for velocity. Velocity doesn't encourage good architectural decisions. It rewards bu

My experience is that commercial software has teams of programmers rewarded for velocity. Velocity doesn't encourage good architectural decisions. It rewards building stuff quickly. Most commercial systems I see become rats nests very quickly. With free software, if I waste a year tweaking something to figure out how to Do Things Right, that's okay. If I'm a downright a-hole about accepting commits (Hi Linus!), that's okay too. It's different incentive structures. From my perspective, Linux circa 1995 was just fine. If anything, Linux 2020 is a modest step backwards. I'd rather have long timelines and high reliability. That's not something commercial teams can sustain. People need to keep externally signalling productivity. Ubuntu and Red Hat are a bit of a wildcard, since they take a hybrid model which seems to be dragging Linux down the path to look a lot like Windows 95, with layers of hairballs upon layers of hairballs. I'm not thrilled about that.