[jacob019]

Developer time is not a finite resource. People contribute to projects that they are passionate about. Fragmentation can encourage engagement. It's not like unpaid xfce and kde developers would start kernel hacking if everyone converged on gnome, even if it would benefit the ecosystem. Many would pursue other hobbies.

[quadrangle]

Developer time is finite. Fact. There's no basis to question this. There's limited numbers of people on the planet and they have limited time. Sure, the number of contributors can grow (we haven't reached peak-developer numbers), but it actually grows more with success than with failure. Fragmentation is fine if there's actually enough resources for at least one project to really succeed. In most cases, and probably in the case of community-centered free/libre/open Android variants, there's a shortage of developer time and a real worry about it being fragmented into multiple projects instead of being more cooperative.

[sangnoir]

Volunteer open source developers are not interchangeable cogs ('resources') to be redeployed across projects at will by anyone except themselves - they are volunteers and work on stuff they are passionate about.

The F/OSS 'community' has some of the most entitled folk on this blue planet - I'm yet to hear anyone suggest pet shelter volunteers work together on a mega-shelter instead of "wasting effort on duplicate roles".

[XorNot]

That's a false equivalency. No one suggests IT staff deploying hardware are B duplicating effort because there's a physical correlation between results and resources.

But 10 different desktop environments are each solving the same problem 10 different ways, consuming 10 developers time, when a collaborative project would be able to reduce that by a huge factor and benefit everyone.

I would also suggest it's naive to think charity's don't have opinions about the duplication of effort. 10 storage animal shelters might very well waste funding and resources which could otherwise support 2 or 3 better equipped ones.

[dispose13432]

>But 10 different desktop environments are each solving the same problem 10 different ways, consuming 10 developers time, when a collaborative project would be able to reduce that by a huge factor and benefit everyone.

Most of the time, they don't merge because they don't want to.

For example, the guys working on Gnome3 wouldn't want to work on LXDE and vice versa. People want to scratch their itch. If I have a light computer (or have heavy tasks), I cannot run Gnome3. If LXDE didn't exist, I would go without a window-manager or would switch back to Windows.

And many who would look at an "ugly" DE like LXDE would switch back to Windows if they didn't have Gnome3.

[syshum]

>> when a collaborative project would be able to reduce that by a huge factor and benefit everyone.

Or benefit no one because you create a Desktop that no one likes because it is developed in a way to pisses everyone off

Gnome users do not like the KDE Experience

Awesome Users do not like the Gnome Experience

XFCE users do not like the Awesome Experiance

This is the reason these products exisit, and no it is not "duplicating efforts" any more than have different models of Cars is "duplicating efforts"

Do you really believe the automotive industry would be better off is all the Auto Manufacturers did away with all Models and simply made 1 car.

[quadrangle]

> Do you really believe the automotive industry would be better off is all the Auto Manufacturers did away with all Models and simply made 1 car.

Nope, nobody believes that. Which is why any argument attacking that sort of thinking is nothing more than straw-man arguing.

What people believe is that some situations exist where fragmentation of effort produces far inferior results to coordinated efforts. The different factors that determine this are numerous and complex. Suffice to say, this sort of situation where fragmentation is indeed bad is common but far from universal in software.

The comments in this thread show some people insisting that this type of issue exists (and they are right) and some other people insisting on some dogma that fragmentation and competition are always fine (or something that sounds like that) and are arguing with straw men who think that coordination is always good and fragmentation is always bad.