* On 2015 15 Feb 07:33 -0600, Vince Mulhollon wrote:
> Meanwhile the devs can't eat their own dogfood because they're not utter
> noobs, and nobody wants the featurelist marketing is pushing.

Indeed. I've followed Planet Debian for some time and do read LWN semi
regularly. It astonished me at first to read of $RANDOM_DEVELOPER using
a Apple laptop at a Linux development conference. Okay, fine, if
they're dual-booting and actually running a Linux based desktop, but,
sadly, they often are not and are instead running whatever Linux thing
they're demonstrating in a VM. This is a large crux of the problem as I
see it--developers unwilling to use what they write not only at work but
on their own time.

Down the road I would hope that when the Devuan project has developer
conferences that someone showing up with a proprietary OS running Devuan
in a VM would be kindly shown the door! ;-)

> Why FOSS projects feel the need to emulate this toxic corporate culture is
> a complete mystery, but they certainly do a good job of it.

I really give credence to the line of thought that a lot of these
developers have been poured in by the very corporate structures they're
bringing to our systems. They have been given projects as part of their
employment and probably do not understand nor care for the community as
it existed up to four or five years ago (c.f. comments that the
community is "harsh" or "difficult to work with). To me this is the
result of a major culture clash and this "modern" Linux is the result.

Prior to that point in time development was largely grassroots and
organic. We were told that such was a "problem" for Linux to go
"mainstream". Today we have this mess that looks to be expanding (do
the Debian developers even know what's in store once the Sid repository
opens up after the release of Jessie?) nearly exponentially and the
mantra is that everything that is "old" (read, mostly debugged and
stable) must be swept aside for "mainstream acceptance".

Now I need to go and get the valentine ISO and play in a VM (on my
Debian desktop, of course)! :-)

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

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