Comment by dehrmann
2 years ago
The issue I've seen is OSS has rarely scaled to large projects, with the Linux kernel being the exception. Part of why desktop Linux never happened was people kept arguing over desktop environments and UI toolkits, and it led to an incomplete, glued-together product. There wasn't a holistic vision, leaving design arguments to go on for decades.
Another problem is software in the purest sense stopped being the hard part. Look at Twitter, but this applies to lot of products that got popular after ~2000. The community is its asset, a lot of effort goes into just keeping it running, and human intervention (moderation) is/was often needed to tend to the garden.
OSS can be a building block, but the challenges we see today are at a higher level.
on a side note: I would argue that Unix-on-the-desktop for non-nerds was basically always a pipe dream (excluding highly locked down things like a chromebook), and indeed the unix philosophy itself doomed it. Lots of tiny tools chained together doesn't really translate to a GUI paradigm.
It barely translates to a CLI. awk, cut, and sort all set the delimiter differently.
For sure. Figured that was too much of a sacred cow.
I wonder what a clean room user space might look like. Maybe the fish guys could write it. They clearly have some interesting ideas for dragging the shell into this millennium.
I would say most of it is stuff like TeX... not so much OSS as freeware that the author did not care to commercialize.