Nick Copeland wrote:
> > 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.
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
> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. Check it out!
> <http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009>
>
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>
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Received on Mon May 25 16:15:02 2009
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