And other times it occurs very quickly and for no good reason. Linux gleefully deletes functionality like hardware accelerated framebuffer scrolling, because the devs can't be bothered to decouple code or maintain existing work. It is interesting because 15 years ago I'd have assumed it to be a byproduct of a free software virality strategy - making the use of outside code as painful as possible by providing no stability beyond exported GPL symbols. But now, with the wildly successful corporate push in Open™ Source©, I'm starting to wonder if it is just a happy accident that software-defined planned obsolescence is now a thing. All those GPL vs BSD licensed code debates... funny how things work out.
Apple chose its logo well, it is well documented that they've crippled functional hardware through software updates - turning hardware into a perishable good. But Android might provide the best example of grotesquely wasteful consumerism - only made possible by the ever dependable, and yet somehow still plausibly deniable, software bit rot.
patches are welcome, I guess
> which really sucks for anyone who actually subscribes to the ideals originally espoused by free software proponents.
the ideals of free software is for software to be free (according to the four fundamental freedoms) and not to work on all and every hardware and to maintain software indefinitely. anything besides the four foundamental freedoms is BS.
No, it is to ensure that people are free - as software doesn't know the difference. Would you deny the existence of business strategies that endeavor to curtail such freedom, or do you view those as okeydokey 'cause SaaS wasn't explicitly mentioned by the FSF in the 80s?
Sometimes it takes very long for things to die definitively.
"The BSDs are dieing" is definitely a (false) meme but there's some truth to that.
On a lot of things the BSD are either cut out or lagging behind by a lot.
Example for both things:
Being cut out: containers and kubernetes. Heck, you can even have MS-Windows-based kubernetes workers, whereas just yesterday some random guy released an experimental oci-compliant, jail-based container runtime (IIRC). And that's for FreeBSD, does not even apply to Net/Open/Dragonfly/whatever.
Lagging behind: wayland. Mostly working on GNU/Linux, what's the status on the various BSDs? Not pretty.
So to wrap up: it kinda depends on your point of view.
If your use case falls within what's supported and what the developers develop for, then the BSDs are alive and doing well.
Otherwise, the BSDs appear to be dieing very slowly.