25 May
2009
25 May
'09
7:47 a.m.
Nick Copeland wrote:
IIUC true anarchists believe that we can only move forward by allowing
everyone the freedom to disagree. If everyone is free to disagree then
consensus can take a lot longer to be reached as everyone has to be
educated to the same or similar level about the topic of discussion.
One major issue with Linux and OSS development is that there are so many
people arguing, stepping on toes and egos that fragmentation is the only
way for many developers to move their ideas forward as it is the only
way they feel they can actually get anything done.
Funnily enough as the majority of developers are male and males
generally have difficulty communicating effectively it's kind of amazing
that Linux and OSS development has come as far as it has over the past
18 years.
One of the more positive things I have noticed is that often fragmented
projects will cause lively competition with results being feedback into
each project. However it takes time for the results to be integrated.
One of the sadder things is that often fragmented projects will cause
the demise of thriving projects they come from or the new code will be
unwanted by the original project managers so the split will result in
both projects dying.
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
Paul Davis
wrote:
Its not politics. Its the lack of politics. There are no leaders with
any power to enforce any decisions. There is no police authority to
identify people who fail to comply with "joint decisions". There is no
justice system to punish or expel those who do. This is an anarchistic
meritocracy, and yes, its harder to get system infrastructure
developed in this environment than in a system like windows or OS X
where a single person can say "it shall be thus". thats good, and its
bad.
This actually paints quite a good picture of the situation since the
truth may be worse. The lack of a single leadership to direct
developments is that Linux has become unbelievably segmented to the
point where it is no longer a single operating system - it is several
tens of them. They all position themselves under the same umbrella but
the feature sets, libraries, maintenance capabilities are very, very
diverse to the point where the only commonality is the name.
As Paul says, roughly, its anarchy. If you like that then work with it but don't
expect things to be easy
for a long time, if ever. If you like it then accept having your
computer right on the edge of stability since you will be mixing
applications/drivers that work on one distribution and 'almost' work
on another and some of these have to work together which is a very big
demand/expectation. If you don't like that idea then there are other
operating systems available, just put your money on the table. Life is
full of choices and what goes into and out of your wallet is one of
them but don't expect any of those choices to be correct. If it were
that simple there would only be a single OS and it would probably not
be called something as generic as Linux for the simple reason that
Linux is no longer 'one' OS.
Regards, and power to your debuging tools.
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