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> why Dropbox when you can rsync I've been thinking about this attitude a lot recently, and realising how much it's holding back open source - - since everybody said "rsync is good enough", we stopped innovating file sync tools in the 90's; and it was only when dropbox came along that we realised what we were missing, and now open-source is playing catch-up and is still behind (I'm using syncthing myself, but I still recommend dropbox to non-technical friends & family as it's easier to set up) - everybody said "IRC is good enough", and so chat protocol innovation stopped in the 80's (except for XMPP, which was a better protocol that never really took off because the implementations of that protocol were a mess); and now Slack & Discord have come along and eaten IRC's lunch, and again open-source is trying to clone those - "Mobile chat apps are dumb, don't bother creating one of those; you can just set up IRC on your phone, with ZNC as a bouncer on your server"... now closed-source closed-protocol whatsapp has literally billions of users, and no open-source open-protocol chat app has even 1% of that - VNC got made the standard remote-desktop tool, and has recieved only incremental improvements since the 90's. Last week I discovered Parsec, which is simpler, faster, lower latency, higher quality, and includes sound - which are all objectively useful traits for a remote desktop system. Why did the open source community never come up with a tool that's "similar to VNC except simpler, faster, lower latency, higher quality, and with sound"? There's no technical reason that we couldn't have created that in a free and open source way a decade ago - but we chose not to, because VNC was "good enough" Alas, I have no idea what can actually be done about this situation; and I have a minor fear that I'd be crucified for even suggesting "let's stop incrementally polishing all our 80's software, and use 30 years of hindsight to create something better" (witness all the resistence to wayland / pulseaudio / etc), but I'm open to suggestions... |
You can kill of Slack, no one will be less productive, have a worse work day.
Shut down something old like shell scripting, and almost every IT company on this planet will be down for months if not years.
If you want to improve, you have to start where it begins. Tech starts with small things, but not with Electron apps.
Innovate for all tech people, and thus enable fancy stuff. Make shell scripting as good as writing shell tools in go.
I am with you in terms of iteration and improvements but I get the feeling you have never had to deal with scenarios where guarantees needed to be given for life or death situations. And those are usually the reasons for things you find antiquated or odd. It's worth investigating, I promise.