Mastodawn

Kyle Rankin Oct 23, 2020

I'd love to see a history of FOSS in its "golden era" (early aughts) to the early teens. There was this great momentum at the time, giant advances in the Linux desktop and server, and a large focus worldwide on open standards (XMPP became, briefly, the standard chat protocol).

This progress stalled. My theory is that it's in large part due to OSX convincing FOSS developers "it's UNIX" and with FOSS devs on Macs, Linux desktop advances slowed down.

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Kyle Rankin Oct 23, 2020

The following era saw priority shift from "freedom" to "open" throughout FOSS. Linux webapp development was primarily done on Macs and that changed how FOSS development happened overall, as devs had to adapt to homebrew libraries instead of curated packages. Dev tools changed to solve the problem of inconsistent library versions between Mac and Linux distros, which ultimately led to docker. I believe the primary reason docker was created was to serve Linux webapp development on OSX.

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Kyle Rankin Oct 23, 2020

It's been long enough now that we are back to the pre-golden era world where people don't understand the risks of vendor lock-in and proprietary protocols. To me this means there's an opportunity for a new golden era, if we can get people to appreciate why the "freedom" part of FOSS is so important.

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Naming is hard

@kyle great points. i am willing to believe that #Linux devs neglecting the #Desktop by using Macs (and now, WSL) is the clinching factor for the stall on Stallman's path (couldn't resist the pun). on that criteria, the #OpenBSD and #HaikOS devs demonstrate great commitment to their desktops.

but it is a lot more difficult now. GAFAM has figured out that they can squeeze users quite a bit without getting squealed at, while they continue to provide bling unrivalled by FLOS s/w.