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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

I am only a casual user of Linux and have no axe to grind or sacred cows to protect. From my point of view, one of the biggest issues with Linux is fragmentation - which of the 2000 flavours of Linux do I choose for my home use and why. My perception of Canonical/ Ubuntu as an outsider, is they have come along and tried to make a one-stop shop for Linux for the masses. This is a good thing. If you are an expert you can still use one of the other flavours or even branch Ubuntu. They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus.

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I don't think you properly understood the article or FOSS in general. It is not about protecting a "sacred cow", it is about protecting the principles without which there will be no FOSS in the first place.

We FOSS devs rightly care less about market share because market share is not, and never has been, what sustains the FOSS ecosystem. What sustains it is the code content that attracts developers from all over the globe to look at it, learn from it, be interested and inspired by it, and the principles of freedom enables them to contribute to it and sustain this cycle.

(edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.)

> (edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.)

I didn't downvote your post, but your statement about downvoting isn't true. It's certainly not in the guidelines[0]. And if one needs an appeal to the HN operators, as others have pointed out on separate occasions where your claim has been made, pg has previously said downvoting for disagreement is fine[1]:

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I don't know what the effect was historically but right now if there's too many downvotes a comment gets greyed out. Furthermore you have to have over several hundred karma to be able to do it in the first place. In other words, the behaviour isn't symmetrical with upvoting, so I find it very uncomfortable, even for myself, to downvote merely for disagreement (i.e. the opposite of an upvote).

Same here. I reserve downvoting for unhelpful comments.

One litmus test for unhelpful commenting is, that the word 'you' is used. I try to keep it on topic, and the topic is never the other commenters.

There's gonna be tiny exceptions, but this is an excellent guideline for comments that I will try to follow in future

Well, I disagree with the guidelines. I beleive hiding text from others, just because you don't agree with it, is censorship.

It discourages open discussion.

I'm with you. History is filled with ideas, words that were originally laughed at/down-voted.

I have never felt the need to down-vote. I hope I never turn into that guy.

I inderstand moderation. I understand the up-vote. Why make a post unreadable? If needed--put a minus sign on the post, but don't make it difficult for people to read. These posts go onto Google forever. It's just un-American. That's been my only gripe with this site.

People quoting the guidelines won't change a thing. There'll always be threads like this one if downvoting is clearly abused.

And hardly anyone cares about pg's opinion, especially in a thread about FOSS, to which he has contributed fairly little.

Maybe that is what you value.

I use software from free software ecosystem for the no bullshit, high quality software that it delivers. People like me would benefit from free software being more mainstream.

> I use software from free software ecosystem for the no bullshit, high quality software that it delivers. People like me would benefit from free software being more mainstream.

It isn't obvious that you benefit from this, there certainly is a kind of "eternal september" effect which makes popular software worse.

For example, in the good old days googling for Linux driver related issues yielded useful posts explaining what's going on and how to make things work, but when Ubuntu gained popularity the results suddenly became flooded with posts by clueless Ubuntu noobs trying package up/downgrades, alternative repositories etc without any understanding what they are doing and why.

I think it's getting better now, mainly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but few years there was no way to get usable results without "-ubuntu".

> We FOSS devs rightly care less about market share because market share [does not] sustain the FOSS ecosystem

Here's a direct response.

Telling someone they don't 'understand' something is abrasive and mean-spirited. Your paragraph on FOSS is your opinion, you don't represent FOSS or "the community". Not everyone thinks the same as you, and people are entitled to have different opinions. Personally, I care lots about FOSS being widely used, think market share does sustain the FOSS ecosytem (who pays developers?) and I'm damm sure I understand FOSS just fine thank you: again that's just my personal opinion and I don't go round giving it some higher moral equivalence to other peoples.

As a FOSS developer what's not opinion is the license you use on your code. The license is real, the rest is heat and noise. By definition, people will take your code and use it (that was the point right), and sometimes that's going to mean they'll use it in ways you disagree with. Your entitled to have an opinion on how someone is using the license (as is anyone, all equally), but you either have to convince them to agree with you or take them to court.

> Telling someone they don't 'understand' something is abrasive and mean-spirited.

It is no more abrasive, than to dismiss someone's concerns as "protecting a sacred cow". I don't think either was abrasive, worthy of a downvote at any rate. I did not downvote the OP, I only wrote to disagree.

> I'm damm sure I understand FOSS just fine thank you

Great, then write some more specific things about why I'm wrong instead of complaining that I'm not polite enough, without actually applying the same standards to the comments coming from the same viewpoint that you happen to agree with.

> market share does sustain the FOSS ecosytem

Sometimes market share does sustain the FOSS ecosystem indirectly. Many other ways of increasing market share do not sustain it at all. So growing a large user base for its own sake should not be one's primary goal or strategy. I'm quite happy to elaborate more but it's probably more suitable for an essay.

> "It is no more abrasive, than to dismiss someone's concerns as "protecting a sacred cow". "

Since that comment is aimed at me I should probably chime in now and say that my comment about "sacred cows" has been misinterpreted. I was stating that I don't have any hidden agendas, I was not trying to imply that the author of the original article had any "sacred cows". In other words, I was emphasizing the fact that I am a reasonably independent outsider.

You've made two claims:

a. "[I] care less about market share because market share is not, and never has been, what sustains the FOSS ecosystem"

b. "Sometimes market share does sustain the FOSS ecosystem indirectly"

I disagreed with what you said the first time. The second response is different because you're accepting that sometimes market share does sustain FOSS. You're also saying that sometimes building market share does not improve the sustainability of FOSS: I can accept that as true easily.

If you accept that sometimes it does sustain FOSS, then the questions are what level of "sustaining" you want and what you precisely mean by the FOSS ecosystem

My definition of sustain would be quite simple, I want to see FOSS developing quickly and end-users receiving the benefit of using free software. Notice my definition of "FOSS ecosystem" includes users, and the variety of contributions from supporting FOSS, to working on documentation through to development.

Consequently, market share is important to me because more users means more contributors: both paid and unpaid. Without paid developers there would be no Intel graphics/networking for Linux, no Python, no Firefox or any of RedHat or Ubuntu. The larger your market share the more paid developers you can attract which speeds innovation overall. That is not to negate the work of unpaid developers who have done and do fantastic work in FOSS: if there were no commercial developers there would still be FOSS but it wouldn't be as developed or as mature. The capabilities and speed of innovation within FOSS without full time paid developers would be fundamentally different.

Your last point is that as "sometimes" market-share does not sustain the FOSS ecosystem then it should not be the "primary" goal "for it's own sake". You'd have to write a longer essay as I don't see how that point follows. I'm sure some market share increase for FOSS doesn't increase the number of contributors. But overall I perceive a positive spinning wheel where more market share (e.g users) means more contributors to FOSS both paid and unpaid. In fact, I think we already have fantastic FOSS, if there were 'units of effort' to spend on improving the FOSS ecosystem I would be all-in spending them all on increasing the number of users.

> If you accept that sometimes it does sustain FOSS [..] I don't see how that point [sometimes it does not] follows.

There are many different ways to achieve market share, and these different strategies have (a) many consequences beyond merely (b) getting more paid developers. Even though (b) can help the FOSS ecosystem, in many cases (a) includes effects that harm the FOSS ecosystem, that more than offsets (b). For example, this mjg59 article talks about Canonical's trademarks. This can be argued to "increase market share" but it undermines the principles of FOSS, and prevents other developers from building on top of much of Ubuntu et al. (edit: another thing is not bothering to spend money on core infrastructure products because they're less attractive to users; OpenSSL is one famous example but there are much better pieces of software out there that deserve similar if not more levels of funding.)

Another thing to consider long-term and short-term effects. Even if one big company really does FOSS genuinely well for a short time, if they capture 99% market share that is still an uncomfortable situation, because eventually there is a massive risk they will ditch the FOSS part and turn parts of their software ecosystem less free (now that everyone is locked in). The risk increases with churn as new executives are brought in, that don't care about the values of the previous executives. (edit: the risk is less with a product that is more easy to fork, e.g. software that does not used centralised services, and FOSS already carries this quality somewhat.)

I'd say that I have to agree with your core point. The article was about FOSS. You could replace Ubuntu with any other company that holds the same draconian ideals that they hold and the argument would still hold.

It's long established on HN that downvotes are for whatever the downvoter wants them to be. If you have a reference that says something different, I'd appreciate a link.

Exactly what are those principles?

Mine are to avoid enacting barriers to having my code used on systems where failures mean people could die. The GPL is not an ideal license for that, but there are worse licenses. One example of why the GPL is not an ideal license for that is that US federal law prohibits the GPLv3 in automobiles because it mandates tivoization. If choices are between good code under the GPLv3 and bad code under a license the law permits, the bad code is used and then we get things like Toyota vehicles' drive by wire being able to live up to the saying, "Always moving forward". In this example, this also affects people outside the US whenever the engineering is reused and I doubt any automaker would design 1 drive by wire for the US and another for everyone else using GPL code that is well known to be superior to their embedded garbage. This is far from the only example and not all examples involve federal law. However, if you write something good that could have a mission critical application, it is good enough that the alternative code is more likely to kill people and your principles are to exclude anyone who does not do exactly what you want them to do with it, you can have your principles, but people might die as a result. If deaths occur and those dying from it include the principled person who could have saved them, having those principles would be what killed that person. Having the developer die too in such situations is improbable, but it is something I consider when I ask myself "what do I want a software license to do?".

Have manufacturers previously added dedicated countermeasures to prevent physical car modding and were those countermeasures legally mandated? What made software especially highlighted for protection?

It seems like your counterexample simply highlights yet another discontinuity in US law.

> They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy.

In 2004, the entire Ubuntu distribution team fit into a small conference room and still managed to produce a new distribution that was significantly more compelling than any other available at the time. They were able to do this because Debian provided a convenient base and was released under a license that made this possible. If Canonical had been forced to modify every package in order to remove every reference to Debian, there would be no Ubuntu.

The same might happen again. There's no reason to believe that Ubuntu is the final stage in the evolution of desktop Linux, but right now it's probably the most credible. If someone wants to be able to experiment then they should be able to do so. We don't produce better software by stifling creativity for no reason other than brand protection.

There aren't 2000 flavors of Linux. I would guess there are about 10 GNU/Linux distributions that matter to most people.

Given that there are about 7+ billion people on earth, I have a very difficult time trying to understand what “linux fragmentation” is. If you think we should all use the same OS, does the same thought process applies to governments, shoes, food, etc?

Careful about oversimplification there. To put it another way: would you suggest that everyone build their own car? Perhaps people care less about operating system choice than you think. Remember, people within our domain of knowledge represent a very small minority of those seven billion people.

I missed the suggestion that everyone should build their own OS, and note that there are hundreds of largely incompatible models of car successfully sharing the road.

I don't think you understood what he meant. AFAICT he said that there is not that big fragmentation considering how big community is - and not that everyone should use different OS. Maybe people do care less about OS choice than car choice but that doesn't mean it is less important.

Btw, people from almost any domain represent small minority compared to seven billion people.

> would you suggest that everyone build their own car?

Not sure where are you going with that. There are several hundred different models of car for sale around the world. And still several hundred that count.

There are some tens of Linux distros that count. That is indeed evidence that people mostly don't care about them, and that's what the GP was arguing.

I think we are at the end of the Fragmentation Era. It use to be that different distros were so different that you would get only specific versions of software and you couldn't get the newest version of OpenOffice on X but with Y.

The main Desktop distros are all fairly equal now. Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE (My favorite), and Fedora are all fairly straight forward and ready to be used and abused.

Arch Linux goes out of their way to just make it hard but that has even stopped, heck their community has changed drastically over the past five years. I still use it on my ancient machines (32 bit is dying though).

I want to install just about anything I can do OpenSUSE's one click or the SUSE build service, go through the pain of PPA or Fedora's flavor of the year installer of outside packages. In Arch you have AUR. It is vastly different then the way it was just 8 years ago or the way Slackware currently is made.

Heck even the RPM vs DEB stupidity is mostly over. I think it has been over a year since someone said I don't do RPM based systems due to dependency hell which was just a issue from 10 years ago that got fixed but that stupid line kept getting repeated all the time!!!! I always told them build a DEB and an RPM and you will see why this is an non-issue.

It's not the end of fragmentation for me, since I'm completely uninterested in all those major distros ever since NixOS came along—I'm happily fragmenting along.

Well that is 100% my point. Your NixOS (Which I really LOVE the idea of their package manager) Still isn't as fragmented. You get your Linux packages differently but the software is still there. Also it uses systemd by default.

> they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus.

The entire point of free software is to allow it to be endlessly copied, modified, and distributed. This is why we have things like Android and WebKit and the firmware on your home router. They're all based on free software. It may not be "good branding" for there to be hundreds of Linux distros, but that's not what any of this is about.

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