9 ms·

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by h

by zokier 6y ago

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is also why I like sourcehut, it represents to me sort of downshifting movement in the world that seems to be so very overspeeding. But I do feel that sr.ht does need certain almost monkish attitude to be satisfied with the austere facilities.

ketzo 6y ago
I think there's a certain "hacker cred" that comes from using really user-unfriendly software. And that's cool, but at some point OSS communities are starting to realize that "ease of use" is a hugely important quality. If they don't, they won't keep up with closed-source alternatives, end of sentence.
hyperion2010 6y ago
For better or for worse, this is nothing new. It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. The political leadership has not been bad, but if you go back and dig through the history of open source you will see that there have been multiple repeated failures by the supposed thought leaders to provide the equivalent level of technical excellence that is required to compete. Making the lives of developers of free software easier has rarely if ever been on the list of priorities for many of the core projects.
- charliebrownau 6y ago
  This is what happens when you hire * Jewish Zionists * Mentally ill (trans) * Feminists (anti male brainwashed commie cunts) * Censor people and exlude White straight males that are skilled/qualied/experenced over non white people
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  It's particularly interesting, because the rise of GNU is because it was an overall better set of tools than what Unix vendors shipped (HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun OS, SGi Irix...). The age of web changed all of that. Instead of being stuck on your computer with whatever tools you could obtain for it, you could now access centrally-maintained, quality webservices. The FSF realized the freedom risk that centrally-maintained services posed, and created stuff like the AGPL to address it, but there just isn't as much leverage for that to take off like the GPL did.
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    Stallman's (and the FSF's) view on services is that it's like paying a plumber. The plumber isn't violating any of your freedoms by using non-free tools in their repair work, but it is unfortunate. This is a pragmatic view, because Stallman needed to grapple with continuing riding public transportation, even as they relied on non-free software, so an arbitrary line was drawn in the sand, one that barely made sense in the 80s and only continued to become more bizarre as computers became more and more networked. This line has very bizarre consequences: FSF-supported hardware prefers closed-source firmware to be fused into ROM rather than upgradeble, the theory being that manufacturers shouldn't have more freedoms than the user. My favorite story was a laptop recommended by the FSF went from being "free" to "non-free" because an engineer found an undocumented protocol to upload new firmware to memory that the FSF thought was fused shut. These are the weird results that emerge when extrapolating extreme fundamentalist social policies far beyond their breaking point. The FSF and Stallman do not care about the AGPL that much, they are far more worried about non-free software running on your own machine, like non-free JavaScript. Otherwise, Stallman couldn't ethically ride the T.
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  > It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. I agree that many FSF/GNU projects have made horrible technical choices, but I don’t think that’s really the root cause here. The reality is that good software requires an enormous amount of skilled labor to create and maintain, and the FSF and other OSS orgs can only muster a small fraction of the engineering hours that a mid-sized for-profit software company could. In addition, good user-facing software requires more than just good engineering - you need good UX, product direction, etc. Sometimes the creator or maintainer of an OSS program will have the good fortune to be reasonably good at all of these, but it’s very rare, and there aren’t nearly as many UX designers or product managers looking to contribute to open source as there are developers. Even if someone did want to help in this role, the developers on most projects would probably ignore them.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    And of course, no closed software has _ever_ had a poor UI/UX.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      It has a money in the bank at the end of the month, regardless of the UI/UX.
      - fartcannon 6y ago
        It might? It might also not have money in the bank? Is that relevant? Bad UX is subjective. Money doesn't change that.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        It changes where most people are willing to spend their skills.
        SummerlyMars 6y ago
        Bad UX (for some definition of bad) may be subjective, but that doesn't mean money won't affect it. Suppose we want to optimize user productivity. For any given UX, some users will feel they're more productive with it, and some less. Finding a UX that maximizes the number of users who feel productive is going to help attract users to the product, and money can buy the design expertise needed to find that UX. It might be the case that users only feel more productive with a given UX and aren't actually more productive with it. Even then, if a majority of potential users think that the UX is making it easier to accomplish their goals, a project will have an easier time attracting users.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  FWIW Stallman's stance was always that freedom is more important than technical excellence and that he'd rather use and promote a technically inferior product that respected users' freedoms than one that was technically superior but came with shackles.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Which is one of the reason's Stallman's ideas are fundamentally flawed as if there's a better product available even if it's only free as in beer, people will use it over the worse one, from the end user's perspective.
    - wahern 6y ago
      In the worldview of Stallman, your argument is analogous to saying that advocating for democracy is flawed because if an authoritarian regime or slave society provides a better product, people will choose it over worse democratic ones. To Stallman, your counter-argument is a non-sequitur. His goal is maximizing user freedom. UX may be one dimension of user freedom, but at best it's secondary to certain prerequisite freedoms, such as the freedom to modify code so you can independently improve it, perhaps by improving UX for yourself and your community. Many people sympathetic to Stallman, but more utilitarian, might argue that in the long term, user freedom is necessary for achieving optimal utility (e.g. UX, etc). And getting there might require short-term sacrifices in superficial aspects like UX.
      - Firehawke 6y ago
        It's really simple. If you want me to use your software, it needs to not be like brushing my teeth with a Dremel. I have things to get done, and while the Open Source movement doesn't owe anyone anything, I'm going to pick the product that isn't going to halt my work to try to figure out what broke again. With as many open and closed options that exist out there, competition is a thing and Open Source as a whole needs to compete on more than just being "the freedom option" Stallman's valid points are entirely lost in the ocean-full of software like GNU Image Manipulation Tool that incite frustration from users.
- cdmckay 6y ago
  Can you give some examples of the fantastic failures?
madeofpalk 6y ago
Or, some itches just require more work to scratch than you can reasonably do on the weekend.
stock_toaster 6y ago
These things go in cycles. Way back in the day, it felt like everyone used sourceforge.
tristor 6y ago
> Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. I would argue this is only the case because we've created an intentional social and skill gap in the industry between server administration and operations work and software development. My experiences, especially more recently, have been shocking in how little the average software developer knows about /very basic/ server administration. I don't have a full picture of why this is, but my gut is that part of the reason is that this type of work has become socially considered to be beneath software developers. They see it as the type of thing you're supposed to outsource, scut work for digital janitors, so they never bother learning it. There's definitely a growing sheen of disrespect in the industry towards those very valuable skills. The outcome is, yes, it may feel impractical to do things yourself. The reality is, it's probably never been easier to do things yourself. Everything from the widespread availability of low cost enterprise-grade hardware to the plethora of virtualization technologies and associated low-cost hosting platforms means that doing things yourself has never been easier than it is today. Yet it feels so far away because software developers in our current time are no longer the tinkerers they once were, preferring to focus on abstractions over dig down into the dirt of reality. I think the best way to resolve this challenge is for individual developers to come down from their horses and learn the basics of system administration and actually try this stuff out. You can learn nearly 80% of what there is to know about systems administration and operations with an Ubiquiti router, two Raspberry Pis, and Google given enough time. But so many devs would rather use dubious SaaS tools rather than learn how to host their own Gitlab instance or run their own CI pipeline in their closet.
- lazypenguin 6y ago
  I don't agree. I spent a significant amount of time playing around with servers and never developed "mastery". I think that server administration has gotten more complex and the tools haven't changed much to help. A simple example is setting up an HTTPS/TLS/SSL endpoint. In the past, you just ran the HTTP server and you were off. Now there's a whole load of extra ceremony to setup a CA and sign your own cert or download a cert and merge it into something else. I think one can easily find many tiny little paper cuts like that and each time you have to remember some special process for how you do it. Unless you're repeatedly doing it or taking good notes it's hard for that knowledge to stick. Not to mention things change over time and across distributions (initv, systemd, etc.)
Jasper_ 6y ago
When you're a kid, tinkering is exciting. When you turn 30, you just want your software and tools to work. Janitoring your computer is not fun when it's in the way of your actual day job.
- josephg 6y ago
  My worry is that this has bad long term implications. Modern computing environments aren't very good, and most of the core abstractions haven't changed / improved since the 80s. Those core abstractions have so much stuff built on top of them now that they're very difficult to change. You used to be able to make a usable operating system in a month or two if you knew what you were doing. Now a simple web browser takes 20m+ lines of code to make. Its out of the hands of anyone with less than $1bn or so to spend - and at that scale the only real contributors are big tech companies. Except for some small features like io_uring and device drivers, linux is developed as if its already feature complete. So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[1]? Will we ever have operating systems and software that can properly take advantage of NVMe and Optane memory[2]? Will we ever have desktop computers which sandbox software by default like my phone does, so I don't have to trust every program, npm library and rust crate on my computer with my data? Will there ever be a desktop class UI library which works across all my devices, or are we doomed to waste 90% of our computer hardware keeping electron + javascript fast-ish? I'm worried these ships have sailed, and our grandchildren are destined to inherit a computing experience of electron, + more CSS. In the 90s people would iterate on this stuff by just hacking linux and submitting patches. Now thats really hard because of how tall we've made our mountains of code. By the time you've climbed one mountain, you're halfway through your career. I mean, how many kernel hackers out there are also good at making user interfaces? How many people with frontend experience are even capable of hacking on linux? Its impossible to improve the interfaces between our systems without a holistic understanding. And thats becoming an increasingly rare commodity. [1] Eg fsync(), and in my opinion the filesystem abstraction as a whole. [2] Eg https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/bittman https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/bittman
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    > So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[ For sure, many of us don't use OS where POSIX has any relevant meaning.
dleslie 6y ago
FOSS has always been plagued by the 80/20 rule. Most of it is garbage, of the remaining quality software most are no longer maintained, of the remaining maintained most are slowing in development, and of the very few left that are healthy and active, most are shepherded by a private company or two.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  The only software that actually dies is closed source. And with it, all the money you spent on it. FOSS will outlive us all.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    There's plenty of dead FOSS. Anything that relies on a library or build toolchain that's hard to find or configure comes to mind. Go spend some time trying to get RHIDE working, for instance. You're going to have to bring it back to life to do so. And yet, closed source seems to run just fine in emulation.
    - fartcannon 6y ago
      Luckily, I can bring it back to life. Good luck emulating! That emulator's probably based on FOSS. :)
      - dleslie 6y ago
        It generally takes less effort to emulate ancient software than to bring ancient FOSS back to life. Sure, the emulator is FOSS, but that's fitting in the 80/20 rule just fine. There's plenty of broken, abandoned and dead FOSS emulators, too.
        fartcannon 6y ago
        But if you wanted to, you could bring them back to life. That's the value. With the emulator, first you need to write that emulator, and then you only get precisely that version of the software. After that, you're toast.
pjmlp 6y ago
Being a bit older this is no different than seeing the 70's hippies generation that helped fighting the dictatorship, working in capitalist right wing companies. Eventually other things in life are more relevant and all that idealism fades away. Even Linux will eventually be replaced by something else, when all the kernel engineers that helped its adoption are gone. It won't be tomorrow, but it will come.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  > Even Linux will eventually be replaced by something else, when all the kernel engineers that helped its adoption are gone. I disagree. Linux has reached critical mass, the biggest tech giants depend on it heavily and are the main contributors. If some new fancy subsystem, interface or syscall would benefit Google's workload, they will implement it and it gets merged since even of Google will be the only one using it, that automatically means it has millions of users. You come along with a not completely polished and thoroughly tested Lego mind storms usb driver for Linux today, you'd get laughed of the mailing list, because security and who will maintain that? I mean security is good and stuff, but Linux is a commercial product today and nothing a curious 16 yo can get involved with like in the early 2000s. > It won't be tomorrow, but it will come. I mean if you're talking decades here you're probably right but then again that also will hold true for Windows, Chrome, HTTP/3 and basically everything.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Yes I am talking decades and specifically about Linux, naturally other OSes will eventually share similar fate. Check Android and maker distributions for how much gets merged upstream. The only guarantee of the future is that it is unpredictable.
    - dingaling 6y ago
      > The only guarantee of the future is that it is unpredictable. Yet here you are making predictions... I doubt Linux will fade away until there is some major paradigm change away from Van Neumann architecture. It has survived and become dominant over 30 years by constantly adapting and innovating.

by zokier 6y ago

ketzo 6y ago

I think there's a certain "hacker cred" that comes from using really user-unfriendly software. And that's cool, but at some point OSS communities are starting to realize that "ease of use" is a hugely important quality. If they don't, they won't keep up with closed-source alternatives, end of sentence.

hyperion2010 6y ago

For better or for worse, this is nothing new. It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. The political leadership has not been bad, but if you go back and dig through the history of open source you will see that there have been multiple repeated failures by the supposed thought leaders to provide the equivalent level of technical excellence that is required to compete. Making the lives of developers of free software easier has rarely if ever been on the list of priorities for many of the core projects.

charliebrownau 6y ago
This is what happens when you hire * Jewish Zionists * Mentally ill (trans) * Feminists (anti male brainwashed commie cunts) * Censor people and exlude White straight males that are skilled/qualied/experenced over non white people
AceJohnny2 6y ago
It's particularly interesting, because the rise of GNU is because it was an overall better set of tools than what Unix vendors shipped (HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun OS, SGi Irix...). The age of web changed all of that. Instead of being stuck on your computer with whatever tools you could obtain for it, you could now access centrally-maintained, quality webservices. The FSF realized the freedom risk that centrally-maintained services posed, and created stuff like the AGPL to address it, but there just isn't as much leverage for that to take off like the GPL did.
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  Stallman's (and the FSF's) view on services is that it's like paying a plumber. The plumber isn't violating any of your freedoms by using non-free tools in their repair work, but it is unfortunate. This is a pragmatic view, because Stallman needed to grapple with continuing riding public transportation, even as they relied on non-free software, so an arbitrary line was drawn in the sand, one that barely made sense in the 80s and only continued to become more bizarre as computers became more and more networked. This line has very bizarre consequences: FSF-supported hardware prefers closed-source firmware to be fused into ROM rather than upgradeble, the theory being that manufacturers shouldn't have more freedoms than the user. My favorite story was a laptop recommended by the FSF went from being "free" to "non-free" because an engineer found an undocumented protocol to upload new firmware to memory that the FSF thought was fused shut. These are the weird results that emerge when extrapolating extreme fundamentalist social policies far beyond their breaking point. The FSF and Stallman do not care about the AGPL that much, they are far more worried about non-free software running on your own machine, like non-free JavaScript. Otherwise, Stallman couldn't ethically ride the T.
alexhutcheson 6y ago
> It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. I agree that many FSF/GNU projects have made horrible technical choices, but I don’t think that’s really the root cause here. The reality is that good software requires an enormous amount of skilled labor to create and maintain, and the FSF and other OSS orgs can only muster a small fraction of the engineering hours that a mid-sized for-profit software company could. In addition, good user-facing software requires more than just good engineering - you need good UX, product direction, etc. Sometimes the creator or maintainer of an OSS program will have the good fortune to be reasonably good at all of these, but it’s very rare, and there aren’t nearly as many UX designers or product managers looking to contribute to open source as there are developers. Even if someone did want to help in this role, the developers on most projects would probably ignore them.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  And of course, no closed software has _ever_ had a poor UI/UX.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It has a money in the bank at the end of the month, regardless of the UI/UX.
    - fartcannon 6y ago
      It might? It might also not have money in the bank? Is that relevant? Bad UX is subjective. Money doesn't change that.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        It changes where most people are willing to spend their skills.
      - SummerlyMars 6y ago
        Bad UX (for some definition of bad) may be subjective, but that doesn't mean money won't affect it. Suppose we want to optimize user productivity. For any given UX, some users will feel they're more productive with it, and some less. Finding a UX that maximizes the number of users who feel productive is going to help attract users to the product, and money can buy the design expertise needed to find that UX. It might be the case that users only feel more productive with a given UX and aren't actually more productive with it. Even then, if a majority of potential users think that the UX is making it easier to accomplish their goals, a project will have an easier time attracting users.
badsectoracula 6y ago
FWIW Stallman's stance was always that freedom is more important than technical excellence and that he'd rather use and promote a technically inferior product that respected users' freedoms than one that was technically superior but came with shackles.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Which is one of the reason's Stallman's ideas are fundamentally flawed as if there's a better product available even if it's only free as in beer, people will use it over the worse one, from the end user's perspective.
  - wahern 6y ago
    In the worldview of Stallman, your argument is analogous to saying that advocating for democracy is flawed because if an authoritarian regime or slave society provides a better product, people will choose it over worse democratic ones. To Stallman, your counter-argument is a non-sequitur. His goal is maximizing user freedom. UX may be one dimension of user freedom, but at best it's secondary to certain prerequisite freedoms, such as the freedom to modify code so you can independently improve it, perhaps by improving UX for yourself and your community. Many people sympathetic to Stallman, but more utilitarian, might argue that in the long term, user freedom is necessary for achieving optimal utility (e.g. UX, etc). And getting there might require short-term sacrifices in superficial aspects like UX.
    - Firehawke 6y ago
      It's really simple. If you want me to use your software, it needs to not be like brushing my teeth with a Dremel. I have things to get done, and while the Open Source movement doesn't owe anyone anything, I'm going to pick the product that isn't going to halt my work to try to figure out what broke again. With as many open and closed options that exist out there, competition is a thing and Open Source as a whole needs to compete on more than just being "the freedom option" Stallman's valid points are entirely lost in the ocean-full of software like GNU Image Manipulation Tool that incite frustration from users.
cdmckay 6y ago
Can you give some examples of the fantastic failures?

madeofpalk 6y ago

Or, some itches just require more work to scratch than you can reasonably do on the weekend.

stock_toaster 6y ago

These things go in cycles. Way back in the day, it felt like everyone used sourceforge.

tristor 6y ago

> Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. I would argue this is only the case because we've created an intentional social and skill gap in the industry between server administration and operations work and software development. My experiences, especially more recently, have been shocking in how little the average software developer knows about /very basic/ server administration. I don't have a full picture of why this is, but my gut is that part of the reason is that this type of work has become socially considered to be beneath software developers. They see it as the type of thing you're supposed to outsource, scut work for digital janitors, so they never bother learning it. There's definitely a growing sheen of disrespect in the industry towards those very valuable skills. The outcome is, yes, it may feel impractical to do things yourself. The reality is, it's probably never been easier to do things yourself. Everything from the widespread availability of low cost enterprise-grade hardware to the plethora of virtualization technologies and associated low-cost hosting platforms means that doing things yourself has never been easier than it is today. Yet it feels so far away because software developers in our current time are no longer the tinkerers they once were, preferring to focus on abstractions over dig down into the dirt of reality. I think the best way to resolve this challenge is for individual developers to come down from their horses and learn the basics of system administration and actually try this stuff out. You can learn nearly 80% of what there is to know about systems administration and operations with an Ubiquiti router, two Raspberry Pis, and Google given enough time. But so many devs would rather use dubious SaaS tools rather than learn how to host their own Gitlab instance or run their own CI pipeline in their closet.

lazypenguin 6y ago
I don't agree. I spent a significant amount of time playing around with servers and never developed "mastery". I think that server administration has gotten more complex and the tools haven't changed much to help. A simple example is setting up an HTTPS/TLS/SSL endpoint. In the past, you just ran the HTTP server and you were off. Now there's a whole load of extra ceremony to setup a CA and sign your own cert or download a cert and merge it into something else. I think one can easily find many tiny little paper cuts like that and each time you have to remember some special process for how you do it. Unless you're repeatedly doing it or taking good notes it's hard for that knowledge to stick. Not to mention things change over time and across distributions (initv, systemd, etc.)

Jasper_ 6y ago

When you're a kid, tinkering is exciting. When you turn 30, you just want your software and tools to work. Janitoring your computer is not fun when it's in the way of your actual day job.

josephg 6y ago
My worry is that this has bad long term implications. Modern computing environments aren't very good, and most of the core abstractions haven't changed / improved since the 80s. Those core abstractions have so much stuff built on top of them now that they're very difficult to change. You used to be able to make a usable operating system in a month or two if you knew what you were doing. Now a simple web browser takes 20m+ lines of code to make. Its out of the hands of anyone with less than $1bn or so to spend - and at that scale the only real contributors are big tech companies. Except for some small features like io_uring and device drivers, linux is developed as if its already feature complete. So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[1]? Will we ever have operating systems and software that can properly take advantage of NVMe and Optane memory[2]? Will we ever have desktop computers which sandbox software by default like my phone does, so I don't have to trust every program, npm library and rust crate on my computer with my data? Will there ever be a desktop class UI library which works across all my devices, or are we doomed to waste 90% of our computer hardware keeping electron + javascript fast-ish? I'm worried these ships have sailed, and our grandchildren are destined to inherit a computing experience of electron, + more CSS. In the 90s people would iterate on this stuff by just hacking linux and submitting patches. Now thats really hard because of how tall we've made our mountains of code. By the time you've climbed one mountain, you're halfway through your career. I mean, how many kernel hackers out there are also good at making user interfaces? How many people with frontend experience are even capable of hacking on linux? Its impossible to improve the interfaces between our systems without a holistic understanding. And thats becoming an increasingly rare commodity. [1] Eg fsync(), and in my opinion the filesystem abstraction as a whole. [2] Eg https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/bittman https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/bittman
- pjmlp 6y ago
  > So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[ For sure, many of us don't use OS where POSIX has any relevant meaning.

dleslie 6y ago

FOSS has always been plagued by the 80/20 rule. Most of it is garbage, of the remaining quality software most are no longer maintained, of the remaining maintained most are slowing in development, and of the very few left that are healthy and active, most are shepherded by a private company or two.

fartcannon 6y ago
The only software that actually dies is closed source. And with it, all the money you spent on it. FOSS will outlive us all.
- dleslie 6y ago
  There's plenty of dead FOSS. Anything that relies on a library or build toolchain that's hard to find or configure comes to mind. Go spend some time trying to get RHIDE working, for instance. You're going to have to bring it back to life to do so. And yet, closed source seems to run just fine in emulation.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    Luckily, I can bring it back to life. Good luck emulating! That emulator's probably based on FOSS. :)
    - dleslie 6y ago
      It generally takes less effort to emulate ancient software than to bring ancient FOSS back to life. Sure, the emulator is FOSS, but that's fitting in the 80/20 rule just fine. There's plenty of broken, abandoned and dead FOSS emulators, too.
      - fartcannon 6y ago
        But if you wanted to, you could bring them back to life. That's the value. With the emulator, first you need to write that emulator, and then you only get precisely that version of the software. After that, you're toast.

pjmlp 6y ago

Being a bit older this is no different than seeing the 70's hippies generation that helped fighting the dictatorship, working in capitalist right wing companies. Eventually other things in life are more relevant and all that idealism fades away. Even Linux will eventually be replaced by something else, when all the kernel engineers that helped its adoption are gone. It won't be tomorrow, but it will come.

iforgotpassword 6y ago
> Even Linux will eventually be replaced by something else, when all the kernel engineers that helped its adoption are gone. I disagree. Linux has reached critical mass, the biggest tech giants depend on it heavily and are the main contributors. If some new fancy subsystem, interface or syscall would benefit Google's workload, they will implement it and it gets merged since even of Google will be the only one using it, that automatically means it has millions of users. You come along with a not completely polished and thoroughly tested Lego mind storms usb driver for Linux today, you'd get laughed of the mailing list, because security and who will maintain that? I mean security is good and stuff, but Linux is a commercial product today and nothing a curious 16 yo can get involved with like in the early 2000s. > It won't be tomorrow, but it will come. I mean if you're talking decades here you're probably right but then again that also will hold true for Windows, Chrome, HTTP/3 and basically everything.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Yes I am talking decades and specifically about Linux, naturally other OSes will eventually share similar fate. Check Android and maker distributions for how much gets merged upstream. The only guarantee of the future is that it is unpredictable.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    > The only guarantee of the future is that it is unpredictable. Yet here you are making predictions... I doubt Linux will fade away until there is some major paradigm change away from Van Neumann architecture. It has survived and become dominant over 30 years by constantly adapting and innovating.