Maintenance of GRUB 1

Posted Jun 27, 2009 19:52 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

In my opinion, instead of complaining that GRUB 1 has been abandoned, one of the distros should have taken over the maintenance.

But what they're complaining about is that it's too much work to maintain even for their own use. Maintaining it for everybody would be even more work, so how is that an alternative to complaining?

This just looks to me like a classic case of open source users exploiting the free work of others (original maintainers of GRUB 1), then being sorry when those folks choose to stop providing. So they complain (nothing wrong with that), and look around for the next best free offering to exploit, which in this case may be GRUB 2.

The GRUB story was something of a shock because the GRUB 1 developers abandonned it (to the point of branding it "legacy," effectively discouraging people from using it) so they could work on something newer, but did so long before the new thing was at least as good as the old one (missing documentation was the biggest regression I saw). It doesn't usually happen that way.