linuxaudio.org

Nick Copeland wrote:

quoted text
> > Paul Davis wrote:

> >

> > Its not politics. Its the lack of politics. There are no leaders with

> > any power to enforce any decisions. There is no police authority to

> > identify people who fail to comply with "joint decisions". There is no

> > justice system to punish or expel those who do. This is an anarchistic

> > meritocracy, and yes, its harder to get system infrastructure

> > developed in this environment than in a system like windows or OS X

> > where a single person can say "it shall be thus". thats good, and its

> > bad.

>

> This actually paints quite a good picture of the situation since the

> truth may be worse. The lack of a single leadership to direct

> developments is that Linux has become unbelievably segmented to the

> point where it is no longer a single operating system - it is several

> tens of them. They all position themselves under the same umbrella but

> the feature sets, libraries, maintenance capabilities are very, very

> diverse to the point where the only commonality is the name.

>

> As Paul says, roughly, its anarchy. 

IIUC true anarchists believe that we can only move forward by allowing

everyone the freedom to disagree. If everyone is free to disagree then

consensus can take a lot longer to be reached as everyone has to be

educated to the same or similar level about the topic of discussion.
One major issue with Linux and OSS development is that there are so many

people arguing, stepping on toes and egos that fragmentation is the only

way for many developers to move their ideas forward as it is the only

way they feel they can actually get anything done.
Funnily enough as the majority of developers are male and males

generally have difficulty communicating effectively it's kind of amazing

that Linux and OSS development has come as far as it has over the past

18 years.
One of the more positive things I have noticed is that often fragmented

projects will cause lively competition with results being feedback into

each project. However it takes time for the results to be integrated.
One of the sadder things is that often fragmented projects will cause

the demise of thriving projects they come from or the new code will be

unwanted by the original project managers so the split will result in

both projects dying.
Patrick Shirkey

Boost Hardware Ltd
> If you like that then work with it but don't expect things to be easy

quoted text
> for a long time, if ever. If you like it then accept having your

> computer right on the edge of stability since you will be mixing

> applications/drivers that work on one distribution and 'almost' work

> on another and some of these have to work together which is a very big

> demand/expectation. If you don't like that idea then there are other

> operating systems available, just put your money on the table. Life is

> full of choices and what goes into and out of your wallet is one of

> them but don't expect any of those choices to be correct. If it were

> that simple there would only be a single OS and it would probably not

> be called something as generic as Linux for the simple reason that

> Linux is no longer 'one' OS.

>

> Regards, and power to your debuging tools.

>

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>

>

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