Brief items

I am not (yet) in the habit of running rcutorture on my smartphone.

80% of the world runs Debian or kernel.org kernels.

We've now had several years of essentially declining to make a decision and trying to see if the project can muddle through, and while I feel somewhat vindicated by the fact that this didn't immediately fall apart and has sort of worked, I think it's becoming increasingly untenable. We now have contributors who are far-removed from the original debate and who may have only used a systemd-based Debian system and we do not have clear project consensus that sysvinit support is mandatory in new packages, so the support is starting to bitrot, and given the lack of clear project guidance, no one is clearly empowered to prevent it from bitrotting.

[...]

I think it was the right thing to do to refuse to make a clear long-term decision at the time, when the project had just gone through a bruising and awful argument. Now that we have some distance and have seen how the ecosystem has subsequently evolved, I think it's time to circle back and, hopefully with more accumulated wisdom, a bit of emotional distance, and a bit more calm, make the deferred decision.

To me, looking at the numbers I’ve tried to assemble above, the Linux Desktop is a niche, LibreOffice, Blender and Krita are not.

Ton has once told me he doesn’t feel connected in any way to the regular free software/open source crowd. Being Free Software is essential for Blender’s success. The GPL is core. But being part of the GNU/GNOME/KDE etc. world, he warned me, would be a drag on Krita becoming successful.

And you know what? Unless we can turn our own communities around, I’m beginning to think he’s right. To make a real difference, our communities have to cross boundaries and enter the wider world. To flourish, a free software project needs to have a budget to fund its core developers within the project, to implement the vision of the project.