Re:Free Software Is More Reliable (2011)
by wegs on Monday October 19, 2020 @08:59PM
(#24832954)
My experience is that commercial software has teams of programmers rewarded for velocity. Velocity doesn't encourage good architectural decisions. It rewards building stuff quickly. Most commercial systems I see become rats nests very quickly.
With free software, if I waste a year tweaking something to figure out how to Do Things Right, that's okay. If I'm a downright a-hole about accepting commits (Hi Linus!), that's okay too.
It's different incentive structures.
From my perspective, Linux circa 1995 was just fine. If anything, Linux 2020 is a modest step backwards. I'd rather have long timelines and high reliability. That's not something commercial teams can sustain. People need to keep externally signalling productivity.
Ubuntu and Red Hat are a bit of a wildcard, since they take a hybrid model which seems to be dragging Linux down the path to look a lot like Windows 95, with layers of hairballs upon layers of hairballs. I'm not thrilled about that.
With free software, if I waste a year tweaking something to figure out how to Do Things Right, that's okay. If I'm a downright a-hole about accepting commits (Hi Linus!), that's okay too.
It's different incentive structures.
From my perspective, Linux circa 1995 was just fine. If anything, Linux 2020 is a modest step backwards. I'd rather have long timelines and high reliability. That's not something commercial teams can sustain. People need to keep externally signalling productivity.
Ubuntu and Red Hat are a bit of a wildcard, since they take a hybrid model which seems to be dragging Linux down the path to look a lot like Windows 95, with layers of hairballs upon layers of hairballs. I'm not thrilled about that.