1 |
On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote: |
2 |
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 09:59, Rich Freeman wrote: |
3 |
>> This will be a big challenge for a smaller distro like Gentoo. Obviously we |
4 |
>> can't just go write our own Wayland replacement, even if we did essentially |
5 |
>> make our own "systemd" of sorts. |
6 |
> |
7 |
> you're aware the ChromeOS is built on top of / with Gentoo right ? |
8 |
|
9 |
Sure - I'm typing this on my CR-48. :) |
10 |
|
11 |
However, I can't seem to find a chromeos-meta package in portage, and |
12 |
the fact that my chromeos laptop has some feature does me little good |
13 |
in getting my Gentoo desktop to do the same. At best ChromeOS is a |
14 |
fork of Gentoo, and the work that is done to highly integrate it |
15 |
doesn't really trickle back upstream. To be honest, I'm not sure it |
16 |
would be easy for them to do so. |
17 |
|
18 |
I think that the issue is that big companies are moving away from |
19 |
The-Unix-Way(TM), to some extent. Rather than having a bunch of |
20 |
modular components that you can mix and match, everybody is looking to |
21 |
vertically integrate. That often starts with existing components but |
22 |
then leads to various changes such that the components are no longer |
23 |
replaceable. |
24 |
|
25 |
Suppose you're a big integrator like Canonical. You employ 1000 linux |
26 |
devs, all paid to work 40 hours per week and who regularly meet and |
27 |
are competently managed/etc (let's assume for the sake of argument |
28 |
that this makes them more productive). You want to add feature X to |
29 |
your product. However, to accomplish this you need to get module A |
30 |
and module B to talk to each other in some way not allowed by their |
31 |
APIs. Module A is maintained by 3 volunteers, and module B is |
32 |
maintained by 100 people but they have a huge NIH chip on their |
33 |
shoulder and half of them work for competitors and they don't take |
34 |
module A seriously. You can spend hundreds of hours getting them to |
35 |
try them to play nicely with each other, or you can just fork A and B |
36 |
and patch them to do what you want them to do. Sure, that is a |
37 |
long-term maintenance burden, but your 1000 devs can surely handle |
38 |
that. Repeat this 100 times and you end up with a chromium tarball |
39 |
that consists of 90% redistributed 3rd-party libraries with subtle |
40 |
tweaks. However, can you really argue with Google's success with this |
41 |
approach. |
42 |
|
43 |
The FOSS world tends to be messy - lots of strong personalities and |
44 |
nobody really has a financial interest in doing much of anything that |
45 |
doesn't scratch a personal itch. There are alliances of convenience. |
46 |
Big companies are finding it less expensive to just do an end-run |
47 |
around the whole thing. |
48 |
|
49 |
I think there will be a balance, since fundamentally there are |
50 |
advantages to compatibility. However, I fear that the future will |
51 |
look more and more like a world where you pick one ecosystem and end |
52 |
up with first-rate apps that work nicely and 3rd-rate apps that don't. |
53 |
If you pick KDE, then you had better like amarok or whatever else |
54 |
comes with it, or be prepared to quit and restart the app anytime your |
55 |
laptop switches from your car's bluetooth stereo to internal speakers. |
56 |
|
57 |
Rich |