11–20 of 133 posts
Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution…
AI can help with documentation. Simple tool can annotate all files and function using ChatGPP4 in few hours, then check it for correctness and completeness, then fix bugs, for few hundred dollars.
That wouldn’t help with the issues described in the article, I think. That is, license violations (LLMs happen to produce almost-verbatim copies of copyrighted works at times) and lack of volunteers (you’d need to hire a technical writer to ensure the generated documentation is actually correct and complete, and nobody is going to want to accept being hired for cheap for fixing AI-generated documentation).
I don't know much about the Kernel or testing it, but I submitted one fix years ago that I ended up testing it manually, and that was enough for it to be accepted. I think that's just the culture, which might seem odd to some, but also I imagine it would make coordination almost impossible if they were sticklers for testing. I've also known companies to run full integration tests instead of using stuff like unit test…
> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?
I hate having multiple conflicting ways to do the same thing. Even within something like Ubuntu I can think of eight ways I've installed software.
Steam regularly fails to open, and games compiled for Linux, not running through proton, regularly crash.
Hardware features randomly don't work. My laptop won't go to sleep when closed and runs full power while in my backpack. My extra mouse buttons that could be bound in windows without an issue didn't work on Linux.
Everything about Linux irritates me these days. I don't want to use other OSes for ideological reasons, but my problems have only increased since moving to Linux on my personal machine.
This echoes the problems we see in LLVM. Tooling is de-prioritized in several large corporation-funded open-source projects.
I once compared Linus Torvalds' net worth to Warren Buffett's net worth. I think they are both extremely capable individuals in their fields. Torvalds earns about 10 million per year. With that income, it would take Torvalds 12k years to reach the same net worth as Buffett (about 124 billion). Put differently, Buffett could personally fund 10k open source contributors 200k per year for their lifetime (60 years) if he…
I'm curious how he earns so much? That seems like a lot for someone who is associated with FOSS, even if they are so influential/skilled.
I once compared Linus Torvalds' net worth to Warren Buffett's net worth. I think they are both extremely capable individuals in their fields. Torvalds earns about 10 million per year. With that income, it would take Torvalds 12k years to reach the same net worth as Buffett (about 124 billion). Put differently, Buffett could personally fund 10k open source contributors 200k per year for their lifetime (60 years) if he…
"Torvalds earns about 10 million per year" I'm curious how he earns so much? That seems like a lot for someone who is associated with FOSS, even if they are so influential/skilled.
I don't know much about the Kernel or testing it, but I submitted one fix years ago that I ended up testing it manually, and that was enough for it to be accepted. I think that's just the culture, which might seem odd to some, but also I imagine it would make coordination almost impossible if they were sticklers for testing. I've also known companies to run full integration tests instead of using stuff like unit test…
Of the ones you listed, consistency is the big downside for me. It seems like there's multiple options for everything in the Linux ecosystem. From the beginner questions (e.g., which distro), to the nerdy questions (e.g., systemd vs sysvinit), to the ones in between (e.g., vim vs emacs). I sometimes wonder if GNU Herd would have been better at this, since everything would be designed by the GNU folks for one unified…
You just invented *BSD.
I don't know much about the Kernel or testing it, but I submitted one fix years ago that I ended up testing it manually, and that was enough for it to be accepted. I think that's just the culture, which might seem odd to some, but also I imagine it would make coordination almost impossible if they were sticklers for testing. I've also known companies to run full integration tests instead of using stuff like unit test…
> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?
It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive.
That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of bugs I submitted to KDE that they say are corrected in the new version. Unfortunately, it seems I'll have to wait a long time until that version is published and then reaches Debian stable.
- KDE look and feel customization is badly scattered in multiple menus. Some options are not accessible and need to be changed in scripts written in a KDE-specific language. There are a couple of very bad UX in the last category.
- Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications use completely different file dialogs with different conventions that I haven't found how to configure. Firefox is more difficult to configure than it seems. I started caring because it had tiny scrool bars. For some appearance configurations I had to look at Firefox source code.
- My Behringer external sound interface doesn't work with the default software. It works with Jack, but I've been unable to configure JackD to start automatically, so I need to start it manually every time I reboot. Mitigated because I always hibernate.
- Drag & drop works in a very weird fashion. When I drop something, a popup menu appears asking me if I want to copy, move or link the dragged item. There's no way to configure KDE to just move. I need to press shift before I start dragging and that conflicts with multiple selection... no way to move multiple files without the shitty menu.
What I found sad was the response to users' request in forums. Some users volunteered solutions and they were told that they won't be included because the fixes needed to be included in some config dialog, documented, translated to all languages... and noone will have time to do all that.
One thing that I had not thought about was the increasing complexity of code bases. I looked what I needed to compile a browser, not sure if it was Firefox or Chromium, 500 GB required. Firefox also needs Rust now.
I'm worried that the OSS projects have no enough volunteers and the barrier-to-entry is high enough to discourage more people helping.
First, I've taken to looking at the economics as shared infrastructure costs - companies look at the volunteer built pot and make a self-interested decision on participating.
Second, this observation - "commoditize your complements" - seems still as apposite as when it was published in 2002: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
I once compared Linus Torvalds' net worth to Warren Buffett's net worth. I think they are both extremely capable individuals in their fields. Torvalds earns about 10 million per year. With that income, it would take Torvalds 12k years to reach the same net worth as Buffett (about 124 billion). Put differently, Buffett could personally fund 10k open source contributors 200k per year for their lifetime (60 years) if he…