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by ken
2686 days ago
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Note that this position is mutually exclusive with "It's open source so you can just fix it yourself when it breaks". I can go fix it myself, sure, but then it is my wasted time, that there are 8 or 10 major distros. We shouldn't have to fix the same bug so many times. I don't want 8 or 10 distros. I only want one. I don't even care which one it is. I haven't contributed to that OS in 10 years because so much of my time ended up being wasted. Or, if you take the position that "Developers don't owe you anything", then that's fair on its own, but it means that it's not an OS that I can depend on for anything. It's true there's no literal debt to be repaid but project maintainers are supposed to be good stewards. They can be replaced, but it's a slow and rare process. I can count on my fingers how many successful open source forks I've seen. Most projects will die before they'll change maintainers. > If existing solutions met people's needs the alternatives wouldn't have been created. That doesn't follow at all. There are plenty of reasons for starting an alternative software project which have nothing to do with meeting any user need. "Ego" is a common one -- it serves only one person's interest. |
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They seem to be complimentary ideas. I might refuse to fix your bug or add the feature you want, but you're free to take my code and do it yourself. It's no more a waste of your time than it would be of the other dev's.
I also don't see what you're saying about fixing the same bug 10 times. That's not how it works. Each distro is responsible for itself. If you submit a fix to zsh, for example, it's up to each distro to go upstream and get that fix themselves. Same goes for bugs fixed by distro maintainers - it's awesome if they submit the fix to the upstream, but they're not obligated.
> Or, if you take the position that "Developers don't owe you anything", then that's fair on its own, but it means that it's not an OS that I can depend on for anything.
And maybe you shouldn't. "Buyer beware" should apply double when you're getting something for free.
Paid Linux distros exist for a reason. If you're depending on it for something important it's worth paying for Ubuntu or RHEL.
> That doesn't follow at all. There are plenty of reasons for starting an alternative software project which have nothing to do with meeting any user need. "Ego" is a common one -- it serves only one person's interest.
Exactly, there are plenty of reasons. Just because you think they're bad reasons doesn't mean they are, or that anybody has to listen to you.