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The monoculture of meritocracyThe monoculture of meritocracyPosted Nov 14, 2012 0:58 UTC (Wed) by geofft (subscriber, #59789)In reply to: The monoculture of meritocracy by ssmith32 Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD
I don't know much about "stability" and how to quantify that. I thought about the focus on security, in particular because e.g. Capsicum landed in FreeBSD and not yet in Linux, but there's a ton of security research and security hardening happening in Linux, so as an academic researcher I still prefer to work on Linux, and as an academic researcher with hopes of his work being used by real people, working on Linux is even more compelling. By the sheer size of its community and the number of people caring about it, Linux attracts a number of interesting security efforts -- SELinux came before SEBSD, ASLR hit PaX first and was then ported to OpenBSD, yama is happening on Linux, etc. So OpenBSD doesn't seem to have a huge advantage here, in terms of attracting contributors.
I would, admittedly, like to know why Capsicum was done on FreeBSD, since it seems a textbook example of cool things being done somewhere other than the monoculture kernel.
Regarding PulseAudio, I am a little sad that a hardened and stripped-down PulseAudio for servers is not obvious. I'd like to run the network server on a machine in my apartment hooked up to the living room speakers, but it brings in a ton of dependencies I'd rather not put on a server.
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The monoculture of meritocracy Posted Nov 14, 2012 4:21 UTC (Wed) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
The security approaches that we know work--code and design simplification, rigorously applying basic security practices like privilege separation, etc--are the areas that Linux fares worst compared to the BSDs. If security could be assessed by name dropping (papers, projects, w'ever), then Windows and other commercial systems would be granite mountains.
The OpenBSD folks don't want to chase features. What they want is to chase minimalism while staying relevant and useful. That's obviously a difficult path. It's made harder because many in the Linux community openly challenge even the pretense of portability, and like evil companies of yore have begun co-opting the standardization process, i.e. POSIX, and adding whatever crap features already in their toolbox regardless of merit.
Also, the idea that the "the BSD folks screwed us in the 1990s with a lack of concern for portability, so it's okay if we screw them now" is a little silly. Regardless of the veracity, it's just plain evil. Linux is not sacred. Not all Linux features are perfect, or worthy of adoption. Innovations which are strong enough to be accepted by other operating systems are likely innovations with far more merit. When you write something which only _you_ think is awesome... that should give you pause.
Monoculture sucks because you lose positive feedback. The bad features soon begin multiplying just as much as the good features, and eventually you end up with a cancerous wreck.
The monoculture of meritocracy Posted Nov 15, 2012 15:16 UTC (Thu) by lacos (subscriber, #70616) [Link]
Thank you, William, great comment.
> chase minimalism while staying relevant and useful
This matches my ideals perfectly. Unfortunately, I can't run *BSD as a home user, because (as much as I ignore "modern desktops") I need my consumer electronics crap to work with my computer. For that I need user base behind my desktop OS. I must go with the gnome3-crazed crowd because they cause new drivers to be written too.
(The logical extrapolation would be to run Windows at home, of course, but I simply can't tolerate it.)
I'm already buying only years old (aka "antique") "consumer technology", both for low price and for better support, but Debian Stable *still* screws me regularly.
The monoculture of meritocracy Posted Nov 15, 2012 18:22 UTC (Thu) by wazoox (subscriber, #69624) [Link]
> Debian Stable *still* screws me regularly.
Slackware, man. Slackware is the way. Antique, battle proven technology (no stinky systemd! no friggin' pam! good ol' *BSD style rc files!) and modern enough stuff. And sbopkg. Even this stupid new phone with mtp storage mode works, thanks dog (new phones don't come with usb-storage anymore, noooo, would be too easy and practical).
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