On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 13:18 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > So there's no longer room for proof-of-concept implementations, and > that's all that Arch ever was to Tom Lord, at least that's what he > said when he was busking for (financial) contributions. He even > regrets many of the UI and feature concessions he made to the crew of > developers who later became the nucleus of the Bazaar project. Making > Arch into a contender again will require a genius (or, to be specific, > Tom). But Tom, too, has moved on I think. While there are many ideas > in Arch that haven't made it into other VCSes even today, the > value-add to implementing them in Yet Another DVCS probably isn't that > high.
I have not "moved on" I've been slain. I'm left with no career or career prospects, no savings, no resources to invest in much by way of software development and a damaged reputation as I enter my 44th year. 'Tis not so deep as a well nor wide as a church door but 'tis enough; 'twill serve. I spend a decent amount of time, these days, observing a couple of trees and some birds that live nearby. Oh, and, today I saw a cat do something surprising. This appears to be about what's left for me. Were it otherwise I might say: I don't care about the "GNU project" per se, anymore, because I don't think that there is any such project other than in name only. There is no coherently expressed organizing set of goals. There is no true strategy. There is no project there, no matter what it's called. I'd argue that there once was a GNU project and that it was killed deliberately by Cygnus and Cygnus' friends although I must also give due credit to RMS for folding like a house of cards under their pressure. I do care about the progress of software in society. I do think software freedom is important. I do think there is a social policy need for something worthy of the name "GNU project" but as I say: no such thing exists. It got killed and I would say it got killed to make way for the Open Source Industrial Complex. Were there a GNU project I think there is much from the Arch project that would be worth contemplating. For example, much in Arch is applicable to the challenge of developing a distributed, decentralized, transactional file system and I would also argue that such a bit of technology would help considerably to promote software freedom. But there is no GNU project or anything like it and so why go into such matters? I think that one thing that was and remains under-appreciated about Arch is that it was an attack on the business models of the GNU/Linux vendors and the "large, well funded, famous projects". It was a technological attack on the necessity of those firms in their present form. We, as a generally free-wheeling, crazy chaotic, catch-as-catch can community of free software developers *can* -- *without painful effort* -- displace the need for big, centralized, lock-in GNU/Linux vendors and create stable distributions and support that is *more reliable* than the current vendors. We can do all that and capture their revenue streams into a process that democratically distributes the money among contributors. We can do all of that in a decentralized way so that the arising of those replacement products is an emergent property of our community practices -- that is, we can "distribute control". Arch was *by design* a first step in that direction and so *naturally* it "had" to be rudely treated by capital. Had Arch succeeded, Canonical, Red Hat, Linus, Collabnet, et al. would all have had to radically change business models sooner rather than later. And so I am slain.... -t _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list Gnu-arch-users@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
