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Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. Much like the post world

Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history. Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.

vednig 2y ago
> Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Linus isn't a renewable resource unfortunately.
  - znpy 2y ago
    > Linus isn't a renewable resource unfortunately. The main issue i see is that we aren't really "cultivating" the next Linuses
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  The kernel is only a small part of the overall Linux ecosystem. These days even GNU is a small part. systemd, Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio, CUPS, KDE, Gnome, etc are all maintained outside of Linus and GNUs governance. What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant. So I wouldn’t say Linux is immune to having its “well poisoned” because if Linus.
  - II2II 2y ago
    > What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant. True. On the other hand, Linux (the kernel) does provide the foundation. You can replace most of components above it and you will still have hardware support for a wide range of hardware. Even if you were to develop an entirely new kernel, the Linux kernel can serve as a proxy for documentation for undocumented or poorly documented hardware. I realize that places a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the device drivers when the kernel offers so much more and an incredible amount of effort goes into the ecosystem outside of the kernel, but the reality is that most alternative operating systems grow beyond the academic toy phase. Part of the reason is the difficulty in attracting potential users, including developers, if those users have to use said operating system in a virtual machine.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      Linux isn’t a unicorn here. Sure FreeBSD has pretty good driver support. In fact back in the 00s I had fewer problems with FreeBSD WiFi drivers than Linux. I don’t know what the driver story is like for all of the other main BSDs but DragonflyBSD is a really interesting platform with some real innovations in the kernel. Technically XNU, the macOS kernel, is open source too. Though there doesn’t seem to be much community effort behind that. There’s also OpenIndiana. Which itself has some really novel ideas. Then you have smaller projects that have compatibility layers, for example Haiku can run some Linux and FreeBSD systems. ReactOS and Windows driver support. But even if you exclude them in favour of larger, more stable projects, there’s still plenty of options out there. I do also think you’re placing far too much emphasis on the kernel here. For example some platforms don’t guarantee ABI compatibility between releases, instead requiring their standard libraries being used as the kernel entry point (eg Darwin instead of XNU, or libc on some UNIXes). This is why people often talk about GNU/Linux, Darwin or NT as more than just a kernel. And that’s before we address the massive elephant in the room that is all the abstractions that sit on top of the userland. For example how so many applications these days are basically running inside a virtual machine called a “web browser”. These days a modern browser is almost like an OS in its own right. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking anything away from Linux nor the Linux kernel. But its main strength is its momentum rather than it being unique.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  All of us aren't going to stay forever on the planet, and whoever replaces Linus and the core committee has their own set of values, and goals for the project, there are zero garantees that everything stays the same no matter what.

vednig 2y ago

> Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.

llm_trw 2y ago
Linus isn't a renewable resource unfortunately.
- znpy 2y ago
  > Linus isn't a renewable resource unfortunately. The main issue i see is that we aren't really "cultivating" the next Linuses
hnlmorg 2y ago
The kernel is only a small part of the overall Linux ecosystem. These days even GNU is a small part. systemd, Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio, CUPS, KDE, Gnome, etc are all maintained outside of Linus and GNUs governance. What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant. So I wouldn’t say Linux is immune to having its “well poisoned” because if Linus.
- II2II 2y ago
  > What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant. True. On the other hand, Linux (the kernel) does provide the foundation. You can replace most of components above it and you will still have hardware support for a wide range of hardware. Even if you were to develop an entirely new kernel, the Linux kernel can serve as a proxy for documentation for undocumented or poorly documented hardware. I realize that places a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the device drivers when the kernel offers so much more and an incredible amount of effort goes into the ecosystem outside of the kernel, but the reality is that most alternative operating systems grow beyond the academic toy phase. Part of the reason is the difficulty in attracting potential users, including developers, if those users have to use said operating system in a virtual machine.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    Linux isn’t a unicorn here. Sure FreeBSD has pretty good driver support. In fact back in the 00s I had fewer problems with FreeBSD WiFi drivers than Linux. I don’t know what the driver story is like for all of the other main BSDs but DragonflyBSD is a really interesting platform with some real innovations in the kernel. Technically XNU, the macOS kernel, is open source too. Though there doesn’t seem to be much community effort behind that. There’s also OpenIndiana. Which itself has some really novel ideas. Then you have smaller projects that have compatibility layers, for example Haiku can run some Linux and FreeBSD systems. ReactOS and Windows driver support. But even if you exclude them in favour of larger, more stable projects, there’s still plenty of options out there. I do also think you’re placing far too much emphasis on the kernel here. For example some platforms don’t guarantee ABI compatibility between releases, instead requiring their standard libraries being used as the kernel entry point (eg Darwin instead of XNU, or libc on some UNIXes). This is why people often talk about GNU/Linux, Darwin or NT as more than just a kernel. And that’s before we address the massive elephant in the room that is all the abstractions that sit on top of the userland. For example how so many applications these days are basically running inside a virtual machine called a “web browser”. These days a modern browser is almost like an OS in its own right. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking anything away from Linux nor the Linux kernel. But its main strength is its momentum rather than it being unique.
pjmlp 2y ago
All of us aren't going to stay forever on the planet, and whoever replaces Linus and the core committee has their own set of values, and goals for the project, there are zero garantees that everything stays the same no matter what.