I still think what I wrote about this last year in a talk I gave on linux is pretty good. I did about 5 months of research full-time on it. You can read the who

I still think what I wrote about this last year in a talk I gave on linux is pretty good. I did about 5 months of research full-time on it. You can read the whole thing here: https://siliconfolklore.com/scale/ https://siliconfolklore.com/scale/ " Things like paradigmatic ways of doing open source software development took 20 years to dominate because the longevity and applicability of the more abstract solutions is on the same time frame as their implementations. But within that exists lower-level Maslovian motivations. And keeping things there makes them more actionable. Let’s say your network card isn’t sending out packets. We can say this bug is known, agreed upon, and demonstrable. So although it may not be easy, the labor path is traversable. A new network card comes out, you need it to work on Linux. That’s a need. You can demonstrate and come to an agreement on what that would look like. Pretend you want that network card to do something it wasn’t designed to do. That’s harder to demonstrate and agree upon. To get that actionable you need to pull the desire into the lower curve so that a development cycle can encompass it. VVV here's where it comes in VVV It’s worth noting the Tannenbaum-Torvalds debate from 1992 to illustrate this. Tannenbaum chastised Torvalds approach because it wasn’t a microkernel and Linux was exclusive to the 386. Really Linus was in these lower curves and Tannenbaum was trying to pull it up to the higher curves where things move far slower. That’s where the hot research always is - people trying to make these higher level concepts more real. GNU/Hurd is a microkernel approach. Stallman claimed in the early 2000s that’s why it was taking so long and wasn’t very stable. The higher level curves are unlikely to succeed except as superstructures of the lower level functions in the same way that our asymmetric approach to platonic ideals happens on the back of incrementally more appropriate implementations which is why you can snake a line from 1950s IBM SHARE to GitHub. Through that process of clarifying the aspirations, they get moved to the concrete as they become material needs and bug problems. The clarity of the present stands on both the triumph and wreckage of the past. For example, the Mach 3 micro-kernel led to Pink, NextStep, Workplace OS, Taligent, and eventually XNU which is part monolithic and is now the basis for macOS. To get there that curve burned over a decade through multiple companies and billions of dollars. Also the OSF group I mentioned before had a Mach-BSD hybrid named OSF/1. Apple was going to use it in an alliance with IBM but that got canceled. It went on to become Tru64 whose last major release was in 2000, 24 years ago, to add IPv6 support. How’s that transition going?"