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Linux Foundation Chief: Businesses 'Will Fail' If They Don't Use Open Source Code (techrepublic.com)
The luminaries speaking at the Google Cloud Next conference had some strong words about the importance of openness, innovation, and a rich developer community. An anonymous reader writes:
First Vint Cert said there's a "thread of openness" that runs throughout the internet, adding that "the internet, itself, has open characteristics" and thrives on "permissionless innovation." And Eric Brewer, vice president of infrastructure at Google, touched on the same themes, according to Tech Republic. "Linux, Brewer said, won some of the early internet wars because it was open, but also because it was the most innovative of its time. He also said that companies should work with open source for the value of the ecosystem and community, not just the value of the code." Then Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told the audience that business models were already changing to include open source, and ultimately made the argument that organizations that "don't harvest the shared innovation" of open source "will fail."
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
"But the menu based metaphor systems are so... OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for not respecting user feedback about your choices as the dev team/designer.
The same same is true for things like Pottering's systemd.
"Script based inits, like found in sysv init, are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal.
If you are a developer/designer, and you disagree with my attestation that just because something is old does not mean you should remove it (or replace it with something else), take this to heart:
The air you breathe now is several MILLION years old. Why not replace that old, ancient air with something new, and edgy-- like ionized plasma freshly born from inside a star!? No, you don't like that idea, because your lungs aren't able to handle highly energetic plasma? Fancy that-- your end users have systems that are not able to handle having the init system changed willy-nilly either.
Or you are prepared to take over should that individual decide to retire from the project (not usually an option with proprietary software) or the software is sufficiently mature that further development is not needed (actually fairly common in business software). Again, advantage to Free software since licensing extra copies isn't an issue.