Comments on: Linux not ready for the mass market…why is this a bad thing? http://mewcetti.com/2009/11/12/mass-market-linu/ My Home\\A blog about programming, satire, and my experiences Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:22:44 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Rei http://mewcetti.com/2009/11/12/mass-market-linu/comment-page-1/#comment-153 Rei Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:17:29 +0000 http://mewcetti.com/?p=172#comment-153 Trust me, I know it'd be far from practical to fork glibc, but part of me just knows there'd be some dumb software company out there who'd rather fork development and put together their own hotch potched version rather than fix their dang code. But ultimately I don't think community will matter too much when the mass software industry invades. Its whatever is "profitable" and makes "business sense", not how to do things properly. Trust me, I know it’d be far from practical to fork glibc, but part of me just knows there’d be some dumb software company out there who’d rather fork development and put together their own hotch potched version rather than fix their dang code.

But ultimately I don’t think community will matter too much when the mass software industry invades. Its whatever is “profitable” and makes “business sense”, not how to do things properly.

]]> By: proidiot http://mewcetti.com/2009/11/12/mass-market-linu/comment-page-1/#comment-152 proidiot Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:51:29 +0000 http://mewcetti.com/?p=172#comment-152 Perhaps the answer to this potential problem is not to discourage other companies from developing for GNU/Linux, but instead to place even more emphasis in the community on the "worse is better" philosophy of doing only one thing and doing that right. Someone has said (I'm afraid I can't remember who right off, but I'll paraphrase) that if a project is big enough to fork, it should have already been split. On the one hand, glibc is one of those few projects that should be large and complex, but on the other hand, by the very nature of libc, not only should it not matter which version of libc you are using, but the potential for forking should be ridiculous since any additional features would belong in a different library, and any fewer features would necessitate a completely new code base. I realize that this in the real world, projects are always going to get bigger than they need to be, but I believe effort towards more common usage of "worse is better" will give better results and be better at achieving those results than efforts to try to slow the coming wave of GNU/Linux development by every warez house on the planet. Perhaps the answer to this potential problem is not to discourage other companies from developing for GNU/Linux, but instead to place even more emphasis in the community on the “worse is better” philosophy of doing only one thing and doing that right. Someone has said (I’m afraid I can’t remember who right off, but I’ll paraphrase) that if a project is big enough to fork, it should have already been split. On the one hand, glibc is one of those few projects that should be large and complex, but on the other hand, by the very nature of libc, not only should it not matter which version of libc you are using, but the potential for forking should be ridiculous since any additional features would belong in a different library, and any fewer features would necessitate a completely new code base. I realize that this in the real world, projects are always going to get bigger than they need to be, but I believe effort towards more common usage of “worse is better” will give better results and be better at achieving those results than efforts to try to slow the coming wave of GNU/Linux development by every warez house on the planet.

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