On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 9:15 PM, Frank Peters <frank.pet...@comcast.net> wrote: > > FOSS developers have to maintain an awareness that there is no One True > Way. A computer has always been and always will be a general purpose machine. > Therefore, the only rational philosophy for OS development is for an OS > to empower the user to apply this generality for his own needs. >
You're basically arguing that if somebody putting together an OS has a working solution for something, they should spend just as much effort maintaining 3 other solutions for that something, and ensure that none of the solutions becomes any better than the others. OpenRC and Portage should work just as well with only csh installed as it does with bash installed, etc. That just isn't realistic. Most distros would rather support 47 features that users want, and not 3 features implemented 5 different ways each in a manner that is completely interchangeable. If a distro did things the way you wanted, very few would bother to use it, and likely fewer would bother to maintain it. You'll always have alternative solutions in FOSS because volunteers will work on things that interest them. Even after 99% of everything supports systemd exclusively you'll still find people writing sysvinit implementations from scratch in Ruby, just for the fun of it. However, you'll never find those alternative solutions receiving mainstream support, unless one actually tips the scale to the point where it is considered an equal. Heck, look at postgres - most would say that it is superior to mysql in many ways and yet many packages still don't support it. Nothing is preventing you from starting a "Foundation for Redundant Solutions" - with the express aim of maintaining all the stuff nobody uses any longer. I can't imagine you'll get a lot of donations - even if people might agree with you philosophically at some level, they're going to want to spend their money investing in stuff they actually use. -- Rich
