Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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The original comment I was replying to has an inaccurate mindset: Linux supporters generally still envision this as a community project, with community contributors, and they are so successful, that companies knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.

It's actually the other way around: This is a collaborative corporate project, with corporate employees contributing, but there are some random community members who can knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.

The community-first development model died about 2 decades ago. When the Linux Foundation talks about "community," they are talking about their corporate contributors and their communities, not us. This is also why I cringe at the excessive (not all, just excessive) hate for corporations in the online community. Without their work, rip out 80%-90% of the kernel commits every year for the last decade, and see how advanced Linux would be.

This same change is also underway at another open source project - Blender; which is now increasingly corporate funded and developed. When I see online forum posts arguing that Blender is a perfect example of how we can beat the corporations as a community, I just shake my head now.

I actually agree with you that Linux development has been captured by corporations. Except that I believe it's not sustainable. Eventually the Shareholders are going to come knocking and ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on some hippie-dippy Open Source junk and not returning value to them. It needs AI in it, or maybe a Linux Pro subscription with ads for the freeloaders. This is why I'm glad the kernel is tied to the GPL, so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours.

You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable, or can make a good long term project the size of a kernel, or a multimedia package, or anything larger than a tool or library.

In practice, I'm going to be honest and blunt, it's never worked.

3 decades of trying to replace Photoshop with GIMP (founded 1995)? Barely a dent.

3 decades of trying to unsettle Windows with the Linux desktop (KDE, 1998)? Barely a dent.

3 decades of trying to beat 3D packages with Blender (founded 1994)? Finally working now, ironically only because corporations started getting involved. Before then, Blender 2.7 was never going to do it.

2 decades of Apache trying to kill Skype with OpenMeetings (founded 2007)? Not even a dent.

2 decades of trying to kill proprietary CAD packages with FreeCAD (founded 2002)? Not even a dent.

4 decades of trying to beat Microsoft Office with what is now LibreOffice (roots in StarOffice, 1985, which was ironically a proprietary corporate project for the first decade and a half)? Barely a dent.

The Linux community, and FOSS communities, overestimate their strength without corporate interests. They have none.

Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice? I care which is the better product and has my interests as the user, and not the product, in mind. For example, and relevant to the article, I can use an ad blocker on Firefox without Big Brother Google stepping in and taking it away. Photoshop takes 30 seconds to open and illegally scrapes its users' private data for AI training. Windows has mass surveillance built in with Recall and shoves tabloid garbage and ads into the Start Menu. It means nothing to me that the worse products have more users, they are still worse products.

  > Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice?

Because people are going to send you documents in Word format, and expect you to be able to send them documents in Word format. Including embedded objects, RTL text, animations, and many other features that LibreOffice barely support and do not transfer well between its own native format and the Word format.

I'm sure it's a problem for some. But at my company we've been using open/libreoffice for about 20 years and I can count on one hand the times it has actually been a problem.

And all our customers often send us MS Office documents. They never use the fancy features.

> You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable

I'm confused. Is FOSS is something more than someone or some entity contributing their time and releasing the source for for free? Does it really matter if thing doing the development is a a person in a garage or a company?

There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference to me. Both a people in garages and a company have kept their pet projects going for decades, giving away their efforts over all that time. Both people in garages and and companies have lost interest in open source projects. As an example Debian is one of the longest lived open source projects on the planet. It is a community drive development. To me it looks likely it will outlast Ubuntu, which is a fork that isn't community driven.

The central tenants that make FOSS work don't seem to have much to do with whether it's community driven or not. Both can succeed. Yes, community driven efforts can fail. But so can corporate drive FOSS, as WordPress may well demonstrate.

> ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on [Linux]

Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that.

The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the product (except Red Hat, SuSe etc). Google, Facebook, etc, just need a good OS to run their billions of servers on.

> so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours

You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.

That is also fine from the perspecitve of Free Software. The 4 freedoms do not include "the program must be maintainable with little enough manpower for people to do it in their free time, free of independence on corporate interests":

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.

> You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.

Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? Why is more automatically treated as better than less?

> The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.

Indeed, I respect the wisdom and forethought of Stallman greatly in drafting the GPL.

I think it's a reasonable question to ask, and there's surely some churn that we could do without. But don't underestimate the effort that goes into device drivers.

A. How do you contribute to the kernel in a way that only benefits the contributing organization? That's quite literally impossible in this kind of project. Even the more niche stuff like virtualization support is used by homelab enthusiasts. It's also not like Linux has 100,000 APIs for every customer under the sun.

B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.

C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?

D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.

TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.

> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement;

Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.

That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.

In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.

Are other kernels that don't get the 1M hours per year as usable by end users as Linux?

I believe most of this is hardware support, followed by refactoring. The core kernel functionality certainly doesn't change to the tune of 1M hours/year.

I mean it's still a better model than, say, Adobe Photoshop. Even if corporations are contributing to it and making use of it, it still creates a useful tool for individuals that's less susceptible to many of the downsides of corporate products.

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