Development process latency
Development process latency
Posted Dec 16, 2007 15:24 UTC (Sun) by mingo (guest, #31122)In reply to: Development process latency by man_ls
Parent article: Development process latency
The reality of the situation is that many of these "GNU" components (such as glibc and even gcc) are mainly maintained and developed by Linux distributors and other large Linux entities outside of GNU.
The real reason why these GNU projects have not been replaced yet, despite all the political fuss from Stallman is simply because silly politics is not yet causing enough problems on the technical side for people to care. There's far more action elsewhere, and why reinvent the wheel. The code quality is excellent as well - the best of the best have put their heart and soul into those projects.
I suspect this would change if someone on the GNU side tried to do some stupid political move, such as force-licensing them to GPLv3 only - a GPLv2 fork outside of gnu.org might happen in a heartbeat.
This happened in the past a couple of times: for example Stallman was so out of whack with reality regarding GNU Hurd that there was just not enough development power available to get a kernel off the ground. Linux just happened as a practical replacement - despite all the huffing and puffing from Stallman. A kernel has tons of parallelism and it's exposed to myriads of small details that the real world throws at us. Get it wrong and developers and users start flocking to other projects very quickly. (but as a kernel developer i could hardly be regarded as unbiased. ;-)
Contrast that with GCC, which is certainly complex (and beautiful) from the mathematics side, but is otherwise a single-threaded piece of code that connects to the real world only through a very thin interface. [and even that small exposure to harsh realities and ambiguities causes tons of problems that make GCC a PITA for the kernel. Just think of the silliness of GCC not having a clean frontend/backend splitup that people could use to experiment with.]
The developers are what make actual code (and maintenance) happen, not some political will or semi-religious umbrella. It's the people that matter.
Posted Dec 16, 2007 17:55 UTC (Sun)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
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I suspect you are just repeating Linux-land myths. When accusing people of such things please provide pointers so that others can verify them; otherwise it just becomes nonsensical mudslinging which does nothing to advance your points of view.
Ingo, I agree with the bulk of your comment, but you throw in a couple of petty accusations which are really out of place:
Development process latency
The real reason why these GNU projects have not been replaced yet, despite all the political fuss from Stallman is simply because silly politics is not yet causing enough problems on the technical side for people to care.
So there is not enough "political fuss" to matter? So it is not very important?
I suspect this would change if someone on the GNU side tried to do some stupid political move, such as force-licensing them to GPLv3 only - a GPLv2 fork outside of gnu.org might happen in a heartbeat.
I rather suspect that most people would not care a bit. Where is the GPLv2 fork of Samba or those other 1341 projects as of today?
Linux just happened as a practical replacement - despite all the huffing and puffing from Stallman.
All I have seen from Stallman is support to the Linux kernel. The only "huffing and puffing" I see is from Stallman detractors, witness the comments right here on this page ladies and gentlemen.