Hacker News Reader

Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

I wish people who ship crappy software didn't ship it and would let someone else ship something better instead.

It really sucks when the first mover / incumbent is some crappy half assed solution.

But unfortunately we live in a world where quality is largely irrelevant and other USPs are more important. For example these little weekend projects that become successful despite their distinct lack of quality

Linux kernel - free Unix.

JavaScript - scripting in browser

Python - sane "perl"

Today on GitHub alone you can probably find 100 more featured and higher quality projects than any of these were when they launched but nobody cares.

View on HN

While we're wishing for things that are never going to happen, I wish users would stop adopting crappy half-assed first-mover software, causing them to gain momentum and become the defacto/dominant solution.

That's the other side of the value added coin. Users sometimes find value even in the half assed software.

Someone was once talking about the "solving the right problem wrong" vs "solving the wrong problem right".

> "solving the right problem wrong" vs "solving the wrong problem right".

That's a really useful framing!

WRT Linux. Sure, 1991 or really even mid-90s Linux was clearly immature. But Wall Street was adopting it instead of Solaris by the turn of the century. Plus "open source" so it wasn't the case of a new proprietary Unix just emerging from the sea foam which no one wanted anyway but Linux becoming the good enough Unix standard which is what people did want.

existing is better than not existing and those who move fast and ship crappy software first will win. learn the lesson :)

how does the Linux kernel lack quality?

It did in the early days, especially up until 2.4 which was generally considered the first enterprise-ready kernel version. (You can argue about whether the old "enterprise-capable" definitions still applied but they were a benchmark for a lot of people.) Of course, lots of ancillary stuff too in userspace and outside the kernel related to filesystems and the like.

Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history#O...) tells me that version 2.4 was released in early 2001. That is a long time ago. Most of the commercial world was running SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX. So is it fair to say that the Linux kernel has been "quality" for 25 years now?

2001 was immediately post dotcom crash and so all the people that had bought into the Sun "the network is the computer" were tossing out expensive E4Ks, and getting cheap intel servers to survive.

HP-UX and AIX were already legacy.

Linux 2.4 was when it hit critical mass because of the publicity of the dotcom boom and it was like what was left after the "tide went out and the market found out who was swimming naked".

Certainly. The 2.4 kernel and IBM embracing Linux at around that time pretty much made all proprietary Unix legacy.

The desktop took longer with less well-defined transition points and, arguably, MacOS with its BSD foundations (and command line option) ended up being a good alternative for a lot of the non-Windows crowd--though Windows is still dominant as a desktop/laptop OS. (Windows/Azure are, of course, still major in backend corporate environments as well.)

Quality by the standards at the time or at least a good value for most purposes. Yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com