Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrem | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that having a single open source project to rule them all is an inherently bad thing. In proprietary software, if Banana corp says that the next version of their Cavendish OS drops x86 support, you might find yourself doomed. But if Debian decides to drop x86 tomorrow, you go "Cool, good luck, I'll just fork." The project itself is never a single point of failure.

View on HN

We need to disambiguate the word "you" here. When "you" = an IBM or Apple or Microsoft, then forking is a great option, and a great reason to pick a program with a license that allows it. When "you" = some guy sitting at home in his PJs on Sunday morning who reads that his favorite filesystem is moving in a direction he doesn't like, you're basically SOL unless you decide to devote your life to maintaining that FS now.

Maintaining an entire Debian architecture is probably not a one-person job.

But, because Debian has such a broad array of contributors, I'm extremely confident they won't drop x86 support unless/until basically everyone else in the world has already moved on, and quite possibly not even then.

Whereas Apple really could just up and drop x86 any day now, and I'll just be stuck.

A hegemonial free software project isn't just good because it opposes radical changes but it is also bad because it opposes radical changes.

For filesystems, it's a tough call. They are one of the most, if not the most, important parts of the system with respect to requiring absolute reliability. Being stable isn't necessarily a bad thing.

In the case of OpenZFS, where it's implemented by multiple operating systems with differing requirements, maybe the different priorities and goals of the different teams will result in cross-pollination of ideas and implementation details rather than it stagnating top-down. I.e. there's scope for some differences in features and details, while still adhering to the common design.

Systemd

> Systemd

I'm a bit confused by this. Irem wrote:

> But if Debian decides to drop x86 tomorrow, you go "Cool, good luck, I'll just fork."

When Systemd made its way into debian, debian _was_ forked by devuan (and possibly by others) to keep it out. So...is your point exactly?

edit: Maybe I misunderstood entirely and you were using Systemd as an example _supporting_ Irem's post...

Systemd, the ‘single open source project to rule them all’ which is not necessarily a good thing.

But also not necessarily a bad thing.

systemd isn't trying to rule everything.

There are areas where it just doesn't work, such as in the embedded space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com