[KirinDave]

GPSD was historically an important project, but I wouldn't call it "load bearing" in the same sense as core networking or service contributions.

It's also increasingly less important as the changes dropped in 4.19 are picked up by downstream software authors. Most software installations that care about gps are deployed in SBC configurations. A lot of other folks (e.g., hobbyists with external microcontrollers or arm SBCs) are parsing directly.

Folks most interested in linux attached hardware are either older school hardware hackers (who rely on this project) or folks using new LoRa radios (in which case that stuff is in the card and annoyingly locked down because it's part of some LoRa monetization schemes).

Sooooo yes. Not a bullshit project. But no, not a ILBS project.

[dfrage]

I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page:

> GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.

And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services".

You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.

[KirinDave]

Having hand built and written software for a lot of drones, gpsd is not mission critical in most drones and I dunno where they get that claim.

You only use gpsd for embedded hardware when you have no drivers OR you're in 2017.

As for Android... again that capability is not important to the internet. It's important to Google cheaply getting a feature launched. This seems to me to be specifically ignoring the anti-corporate-centric intent of ESR's post to elevate his importance.

This essay is important without these sub-discussions. I fully agree with ESR that capitalism fails to sustain the internet and ruthlessly rides the backs of maybe four dozen skilled individuals in the world who, when they're gone, will be sorely missed and the world will suddenly become more expensive if others don't take up the call.

I just don't think ESR is in that critical group. He might be in a group of people writing widely used software. And that's great and important. But it really doesn't seem like what he himself is discussing.

> You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.

Both of whom are well compensated for their work, no? Seems to me like we should look more critically at who is not being served by capitalism and help them since their work has value.