On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Mike Frysinger <vap...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 09:59, Rich Freeman wrote: >> This will be a big challenge for a smaller distro like Gentoo. Obviously we >> can't just go write our own Wayland replacement, even if we did essentially >> make our own "systemd" of sorts. > > you're aware the ChromeOS is built on top of / with Gentoo right ?
Sure - I'm typing this on my CR-48. :) However, I can't seem to find a chromeos-meta package in portage, and the fact that my chromeos laptop has some feature does me little good in getting my Gentoo desktop to do the same. At best ChromeOS is a fork of Gentoo, and the work that is done to highly integrate it doesn't really trickle back upstream. To be honest, I'm not sure it would be easy for them to do so. I think that the issue is that big companies are moving away from The-Unix-Way(TM), to some extent. Rather than having a bunch of modular components that you can mix and match, everybody is looking to vertically integrate. That often starts with existing components but then leads to various changes such that the components are no longer replaceable. Suppose you're a big integrator like Canonical. You employ 1000 linux devs, all paid to work 40 hours per week and who regularly meet and are competently managed/etc (let's assume for the sake of argument that this makes them more productive). You want to add feature X to your product. However, to accomplish this you need to get module A and module B to talk to each other in some way not allowed by their APIs. Module A is maintained by 3 volunteers, and module B is maintained by 100 people but they have a huge NIH chip on their shoulder and half of them work for competitors and they don't take module A seriously. You can spend hundreds of hours getting them to try them to play nicely with each other, or you can just fork A and B and patch them to do what you want them to do. Sure, that is a long-term maintenance burden, but your 1000 devs can surely handle that. Repeat this 100 times and you end up with a chromium tarball that consists of 90% redistributed 3rd-party libraries with subtle tweaks. However, can you really argue with Google's success with this approach. The FOSS world tends to be messy - lots of strong personalities and nobody really has a financial interest in doing much of anything that doesn't scratch a personal itch. There are alliances of convenience. Big companies are finding it less expensive to just do an end-run around the whole thing. I think there will be a balance, since fundamentally there are advantages to compatibility. However, I fear that the future will look more and more like a world where you pick one ecosystem and end up with first-rate apps that work nicely and 3rd-rate apps that don't. If you pick KDE, then you had better like amarok or whatever else comes with it, or be prepared to quit and restart the app anytime your laptop switches from your car's bluetooth stereo to internal speakers. Rich
