Incredibly Clueless
Posted Dec 7, 2004 12:02 UTC (Tue) by
ekj (subscriber, #1524)
Parent article:
The Linux Kernel's Fuzzy Future (InformationWeek)
This article is incredible clueless. Such articles used to be pretty common -- around the time Lwn was started, when basically no journalist understood what we're doing. Lately there are more clueful reporting, but as demonstrated here, there's still some journalists clinging to the stone-age.
- Having a plan does not help your customers in any way unless they can actually to some degree rely on the future reality bearing some sort of resemblance to the plan 3 years earlier.
- Linux is developed independently by a large group of people from different companies with different motivations. Each of them individually may have plans, but this doesn't mean that they all agree on one master plan.
- There are noone with the authority to say "This is what you should work on for the next 3 years", or anything similar. So whomever made the plan would only speak for himself, or atmost for the small subset of kernel-developers he employs.
- There are in fact fairly clear directions. It's been clear from Linux 2.0 until today, for example, that one area where the kernel will be developed is SMP and the issues associated with it, such as preemption, the death of the big-kernel-lock and so on.
- 90% or more of the things people say they want from "Linux" are actually user-space things. It's LITERALLY been years since I had *any* customer select something other than Linux for reasons to do with the kernel, with one important exception: hardware-support. And the plan there is clear: continue to improve it, continue to work with manufacturers to get open specs and drivers for as much hardware as possible.
- IT is a fast-changing field. Making a 3-year-plan migth not be such a good idea afterall, even if you could.
In short, he is complaining about a non-problem. There *are* real problems that needs to be solved to improve on Linux and free software in general, but a 3 year plan clearly isn't it.
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