@dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard
Wayland and systemd are both symptoms of the same behaviour, as was PulseAudio:
- Observe that an existing system has flaws.
- Don't engage with users to identify use cases.
- Throw up some half-finished code (with incomplete or nonexistent backwards compatibility) that solves some of the problems of the old system but doesn't address all of its use cases and introduces more problems for other people.
- Declare that the old thing is deprecated and everyone needs to move to the new thing.
- Create a load of work in the rest of the ecosystem that other people have to do.
- Silence all criticism by pointing out that the old thing was imperfect.
And that's the kind of thing that you can only get away with if you're able to act as a monopoly, by employing maintainers at key points across the ecosystem.
The biggest problem with Microsoft was not that their monopoly allowed them to be evil, it was that it allowed them to be stupid. A lot of things in the MS ecosystem are actually bad for Microsoft, but they're pushed out because no one inside MS cares enough to do the right thing and no one outside is able to fix the problems. I, personally, don't want the F/OSS OS ecosystem to end up like that.
