OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns [LWN.net]

OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Aug 30, 2012 23:27 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns by peterj
Parent article: OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

> Anything that reduces diversity reduces the resilience of an ecosystem

I disagree with this. The ecosystem requires lots of experimentation, some of those experiments result in things that are _worse_ than what was there to start with.

failure of experiments is the flip side of being able to experiment.

some failures are small (how many people write perfect code the first time? how many people have never written a patch that broke something?)

some failures (distros, the OI project) are much larger. It's too bad that it took so much time and resources, but even in failure there are good things that happened

There were a lot of people who got involved in FOSS software who had not done so before. Yes, we will probably loose some of those people as the one project they were working on goes away, but I'll bet we don't loose them all. And even those who we loose as developers are probably now far more willing to use or recommend FOSS software than they were before getting involved.

> Alasdair is right that GNU/Linux is a monoculture

It's funny to read this at the same time I'm reading that the reason that we haven't had the "year of the Linux desktop" is because Linux is so fragmented :-)

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OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns

Posted Aug 31, 2012 11:04 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yeah. Everybody in 'linux land' is using the just about the same version of the same software as everybody else, but can't get along with each other enough to actually work out the niggling technical details of how they use the software in order to not make it hell for application developers.

The solution that has come up so far is to put a HUGE amount of effort in repackaging the same software a dozen different times to make up for those relatively tiny differences.

Meanwhile people that actually are trying to move things forward are always met with derision and are lambasted for not following a imaginary and continuously shifting unix methodology/ideology that is used to justify all sorts of weirdness in the system. The flip side of the coin is full of people whose main approach to deciding system design is simply to not decide anything at all and make users and developers deal with a thousand different possible combinations of this-or-that.

It is not so much a monoculture as a monodisfunction.

But in the end I still prefer it to the alternatives.