You need a price. If you say, we need this infrastructure or technology and it costs x dollars, that can be justified, approved, and budgeted.
In most places I have worked, “my department uses something we get for free but they really want us to contribute what we can” would go exactly nowhere. Pushing too hard may actually even lead up a directive to switch to something less problematic, maybe even something commercial (that has a definitive price).
You are right.
This is all going to backfire on the detractors when it turns out the Rust versions are fast, secure, and rock solid.
Streisand Effect.
Agreed. Also, some of these “bugs” will just be differences in interpretation.
For example, the dd problem that prompted all this noise is that uutils was enforcing the full block parameter in slow pipe writes while GNU was not.
So, now uutils matches GNU and the “bug” is gone.
There will only be a limited number of these kinds of issues and they will be quickly harmonized. Mountains out of mole hills.
So what you are saying is that a lot gets done on those days.
Anyway, I agree that hybrid is the best model.
You don’t have to spin it as a business to say that evolving it to reflect reality makes sense. It is not exactly radical to say everybody should get the same level of service that the majority of us get today.
Fewer than 25% of Canadians have door to door delivery. Almost everybody gets delivery to a private mailbox very close to their house. Door to door delivery is down to under 4 million addresses. This is a 10 year plan to finish that transition. Not exactly aggressive.
You can still get delivery to your door if you are disabled.
Regardless of if it is a a business or an essential service, we should be honest about it. We used to send 5 times as much mail when we were fewer people. Why do we have to ignore that?
If 75% of us (like me) are totally fine with super mailboxes, I think the rest can handle it. I know that I could get away with delivery 3 times a week as well. In 2030, how time sensitive is something coming through regular mail. Let’s be real. I could wait one more day.
The founder of the Ladybird project is quite good at getting attention for his projects. He used it first to build community around his SerenityOS project. He is using it now to build awareness around Ladybird and, in particular, to attract financial sponsors.
My assumption is that the level of promotion triggers distrust in the commenter.
In my view, it should be a model for Open Source projects in general. He managed to get enough Patreon support to go full-time on SerenityOS. Many devs provide absolutely crucial software used by everyone while struggling to also work ful-time and pay the bills. He was able to use that full-time freedom to start something as ambitious as a ground-up browser project within SerenityOS. And he attracted many collaborators to his cause. Progress was rapid enough that he split off into the dedicated Ladybird browser project for which he now has an impressive list of financial sponsors. This has allowed his to hire full-time staff. There are still volunteers.
If every Open Source project followed his lead, the world would be a difference place.
It is worth noting how much more slowly SerenityOS is evolving now that he is gone. And what is happening is largely invisible to the wider world.
In my mind, the effective community engagement has allowed the Ladybird project to advance with less corporate oversight, not more. There is less risk of this becoming Google or Mozilla. Of course, time will tell.
Look at everyday things that occasionally improve. We have probably not found the optimal way for almost anything.
Most of us just are not smart enough to find a better way.
It is absurd that getting robbed electronically could cost your life. I cannot imagine living in a country where you get cancer and your biggest problem is money.
Linux Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux. They start with a recent Ubuntu LTS and sprinkle their magic on it to create a release of Linux Mint.
Ubuntu itself is a derivative of Debian Linux though obviously they have diverged significantly.
Some people have become concerned about the direction of Ubuntu.
As a hedge over having to possibly switch away from Ubuntu as their base, the Linux Mint project provides LMDE. For LMDE, they start with a recent version of Debian Stable and then sprinkle the same Linux Mint magic on it as they do for Ubuntu.
LMDE is not the “main” Linux Mint distro but some people prefer it and, as the comment above, many people see cutting out the Ubuntu middle-man as a good thing.
Linux Mint just had a major release recently. This brings the same “Mint” bits featured there to the Debian edition.
I think some are getting used actually, particularly COBOL. I think Modula-2 still gets used in some embedded contexts. But these languages are not exactly pushing the state-of-the-art.
Algol 68 is interesting. It is for sure just for academic and academic enthusiast purposes. Historical and educational value only as you say.
In my opinion, if they want this to work, they need to create a shared infrastructure for delivery that they can all use. This infrastructure needs to be a paid service for users with published pricing sorted into service tiers.
The base tier can be free with no support or “community” support. This tier can have a generous but finite usage ceiling. For higher volume users, there is a cost but also some level of “support”. That is, you can call somebody if the infrastructure is not working, performance sucks, there has been a security issue, accounts need to be segmented or merged, etc. You could also charge for performance. Why not both?
This service would operate as an independent company. It would be a service provider to the “foundations” or projects that use it. This means having payroll, legal, accounts receivable, support, and operations (eg. vetting the material they host). It would be a real company (non-profit ideally). However, instead of costing money, the service would distribute some of the fees it collects back to the projects it serves. At the very least, it would make the cost of distribution zero.
The most important part of the above is that there is definitive pricing for high-volume and/or high-need consumers. This can be budgeted and funded just like any other software or service purchase.
Problem solved.