Open source can't coordinate?

https://matklad.github.io/2025/05/20/open-source-cant-coordinate.html

by LorenDB • 1 year ago

185 251 1 year ago

matklad.github.io

TechPlasma2• 1 year ago

This feels very right. The problem is there are few entities invested enough in Linux as a consumer platform, that have the motivation to push things forward. To make the decisions on what their "Reference" system is.

Valve is maybe the closest?

hackyhacky8• 1 year ago

Ubuntu, for all their faults, were the first to make Linux really easy to install and made it "just work." That counts for a lot. Since then, their output has been disappointing.

Part of the problem, is that "Linux/Unix culture" is very averse to coordination. When someone does try to establish a common baseline, there is inevitable pushback. The classic example is systemd, which fills a desperately needed hole in the Linux ecosystem, but is to this day criticized for being antithetical to the ethos of, I guess, gluing together an operating system with chewing gum and bits of string. The fact is that many users would rather have a pile of software that can be hand-assembled into an OS, instead of an actual cohesive, consistent platform.

So I can't blame people too much for not trying to establish standards. If OSS had created LSP, there would be 20 different incompatible variations, and they would insist "We like it this way."

EDIT: averse, not adverse

Joel_Mckay• 1 year ago

Indeed, "good" doesn't matter if the OS is a pain to use.

The Driver support issues are essentially a theological war between FOSS ideals, and mystery OEM binaries.

Most of the linux kernel code is still the driver modules, and board support packages.

The desktop options have always been a mess of forks and bodged applets to make it useful.

Ubuntu balances the purity of Debian with practical user experience (we could all write a book about UEFI shenanigans.) RedHat focuses more on hardened server use-cases.

Is it worse than Win11 ? depends what you are doing, and what people consider is the low bar for messing with users. =3

clipsy• 1 year ago

The classic example is systemd, which fills a desperately needed hole in the Linux ecosystem

If the hole is desperately needed, why would you want to fill it?

linguae• 1 year ago

There is another factor at play: different users value different things. For example, there are some people who don't like systemd, not because they are enamored with classic startup scripts, but because they take issue with systemd's design. It's not that they dislike coherent, consistent platforms: they just take disagreement with the design decisions of that particular platform. For example, I like the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, but I don't like GNOME. All of these are coherent platforms, but they have different philosophies.

The difference between open source software versus proprietary software is that if users don't like the changes made to proprietary software, there choices are limited to the following:

1. Dealing with the changes even though they don't like it.

2. Sticking to an older version of the software before the changes took place (which can be difficult due to needing to deal with a changing environment and thus is only delaying the inevitable).

3. Switching to an alternative product, if available.

4. Writing an alternative product (which can be a massive undertaking).

Open source software provides additional options:

5. Fork the older version of the software. If enough people maintain this fork, then this becomes a viable alternative to the changed software.

6. Use the new version of the software, but modify it to one's liking.

This is the blessing and the curse of open source software; we have the power to make our own environments, but some software is quite labor-intensive to write, and we need to rely on other people's libraries, systems, and tools to avoid reinventing wheels, but sometimes those dependencies change in ways that we disagree with.

I think the best way to mitigate this is making software easier to develop and more modular, though inevitably there are always going to be disagreements when using dependencies that we don't directly control.

charcircuit6• 1 year ago

Google is the closest with Android. They were even able to get Adobe to port photoshop which other Linux operating systems have failed to have happen.

Despite Android's success the rest of the consumer Linux distributions chose to ignore it and continue on with what they were already doing. Trying to have them coordinate around what is succeeding is seemingly impossible.

hackyhacky8• 1 year ago

Despite Android's success the rest of the consumer Linux distributions chose to ignore it and continue on with what they were already doing. Trying to have them coordinate around what is succeeding is seemingly impossible.

I'm not sure I understand you here. What do you think other Linux distros should have done?

TechPlasma2• 1 year ago

Android is the most Pervasive yes, but I would consider it too focused on a specific type of platform, and one that is becoming more and more closed off. ChromeOS might be a better example, but much like android, it is also very closed off from the rest of the ecosystem.

pxc• 1 year ago

Android doesn't succeed at what free software developers (or users) care about. The present-day reality of Android is a huge, depressing disappointment to anyone who gives a shit about software freedom.

It's a TiVo-ized spyware delivery platform, absolute riddled with (often non-removeable, often installed by entities other than the user) badware.

Android is an abject, dismal failure when it comes to very basic things like empowering users.

keyringlight• 1 year ago

Valve doesn't seem interested in doing much on the desktop, they seem to have constrained themselves (probably wisely) to working on areas directly related to their business and products.

mongol• 1 year ago

But there was no one to coordinate Linux on desktop.

Freedesktop.org?

wmf• 1 year ago

I get the impression that some people don't want to participate in FreeDesktop. Maybe they see it as bloated or too aligned with GNOME.

freeone30002• 1 year ago

I’m still mad they stole the scriptable, composable DCOP and put it all behind a binary format.

LtWorf10• 1 year ago

whatever happened with kdbus btw?

dwheeler• 1 year ago

Yes. GNOME and KDE at least coordinate via freedesktop.org. At least they did!

j16sdiz2• 1 year ago

Those are for DEs.

For end-user application, it's a mess. You can't compile once and run everywhere.

LSB (Linux Standard Base) tried to that and failed.

flatpak/Snap/AppImage all tried to that, each have its own set of problems.

LtWorf10• 1 year ago

Can you compile on windows11 and run it on windows xp? Yeah didn't think so

const_cast3• 1 year ago

For end-user application, it's a mess. You can't compile once and run everywhere.

Yes you can, you said it yourself: flatpak, snap, and appimage.

Okay okay, those technologies have problems. But all technologies do. That's why Microsoft has half a dozen GUI frameworks and then they build their own in-house applications in Electron :P

taeric• 1 year ago

I'm not entirely clear why/how this is an open source issue?

My assertion: Inertia of user base is by far the largest predictor of what will stick in a market. If you can create a critical mass of users, then you will get a more uniform set of solutions.

For fun, look into bicycles and how standardized (or, increasingly not) they are. Is there a solid technical reason for multiple ways to make shoes that connect to pedals? Why are there several ways to shift from your handlebars? With the popularity of disk brakes, why don't we have a standard size for pads?

I think there are a lot of things that we tell ourselves won from some sort of technical reasoning. The more you learn of things, the less this seems true, though.

Not, btw, that there aren't some things that die due to technical progress.

dkkergoog• 1 year ago

All those things have s price point

skydhash7• 1 year ago

I'm not entirely clear why/how this is an open source issue?

I think it's not even an issue. Most open source projects are implementations (maybe flawed), and few are new propositions. If something was not fully defined in the standard/protocol/interface, the implementation may come up with its own extensions that are incompatible with others. But that's how you choose implementations, you're supposed to commit to one and not use a mismatch.

So if you're using GNOME, try not to depend on something that depends on having the whole KDE installed. If you're using OpenRC, anything systemd is prohibited. All projects are consistent within themselves, the only thing you need to do is to avoid conflicts by having two things doing the same job and to ollow the installed system guidelines.

I don't mind fragmentation. What I mind is dependency due to laziness and not a real need (like using a couple of glibc specific library for no real reason just because you're working on Debian) or taking the time to support windows and macos, but tying yourself to glibc on Linux because reasons.

graemep4• 1 year ago

So if you're using GNOME, try not to depend on something that depends on having the whole KDE installed.

I disagree with this bit. When i used a Gtk desktop I still used KDE applications so I had lots of KDE libraries installed. I use KDE now and I still have lots of Gtk applications installed.

Its slightly wasteful of storage and memory but is still a lot less resource hungry than Windows.

LtWorf10• 1 year ago

In my experience most people who want to avoid the glibc do so because they disagree with the values of free software.

After this premise, can you explain to me why I should waste my time to help them? Let's not forget that we are talking about open source software and they could fix it themselves if they so desire.

pixl97• 1 year ago

why don't we have a standard size for pads?

Because each manufacturer can't put a premium on their pads that way.

FridgeSeal• 1 year ago

For fun, look into bicycles and how standardized (or, increasingly not) they are.

Because triangles are a fantastic, high-strength shape, that suits the loads a bicycle is subject to. For the vast majority of cases, it’s a very solid choice. We deviate when specific UX requirements are required (city bikes having a battery and a low stepover to suit a variety of clothing, and the motor makes up for additional weight required.

Is there a solid technical reason for multiple ways to make shoes that connect to pedals?

All of them attempt to address the same requirement, and make different tradeoffs depending on use-case and environment.

Why are there several ways to shift from your handlebars?

Price points, performance reqs, handlebar setup, environmental (is it expected to be subject to mud rocks and trees constantly?) and weight.

With the popularity of disk brakes, why don't we have a standard size for pads?

Same as for shifters: the braking compound and design for a race road bike will be really different to what a DH race bike requires.

prmoustache2• 1 year ago

All of them attempt to address the same requirement, and make different tradeoffs depending on use-case and environment.

All road shoes/pedals interface have the same requirements. All XC ones have the same ones, All Dh ones, same.

Same as for shifters: the braking compound and design for a race road bike will be really different to what a DH race bike requires.

Regardless if we are talking shifters, breaks or pedals interface among a specific line (road, gravel, xc, DH) the requirements stay the same and more importantly those formats/shapes/interface almost never vary accross price point:

All mtb shifters from a given manufacturer and amount of gears available are usually interchangeable. A deore shifter can operate an XTR derailleur. Same SPD cleats accross all MTB pedals from Shimano. Same brake pad shape is used accross all lines for a given number of pistons. More importantly pads and calipers are usually interchangeable between road and mtb for a given manufacturer. Conpound, requirements and price point as little to do with it as manufacturers release pads with different compound but same shape.

What makes all these formats not standards is because every manufacturer wants to have its own for 2 reasons: 1) think it knows better 2) aim to capture a market and become a monopoly (through cleats format)

Only rarely they discuss between each others or release a standard and don't ask for royalties. Same as proprietary software vendors.

The open source fragmentation only really comes from reason 1.

ClumsyPilot2• 1 year ago

> With the popularity of disk brakes, why don't we have a standard size for pads? Same as for shifters: the braking compound and design for a race road bike will be really different to what a DH race bike requires

I really don’t understand how this mentality Uk survives.

for the past 100 years companies have been working to get unfair advantage over each other by creating user lock-in, patent trolling each-other, DRM in games, changing their design to break compatibility with generic products etc.

surely you must realise that many motivations for product difference have no bearing on user benefit, or we would never have region-locking on DVDs or proprietary media formats.

Bicycle market is not a healthy competitive market. Shimano makes almost all gears for all bikes in Europe. For the price of an electric cargo bike that goes 15 mph and has 0.6 kWh battery I can buy an electric motorbike that goes 70 mph and has 6 kWh battery.

They are both about £4,000

bloppe4• 1 year ago

It's really not an open source issue. It's a more general issue than that. The author provides as counterexamples MacOS and Windows, but that's a silly comparison. Apple nor Microsoft never coordinated with anybody else on their APIs. Closed source developers are never as good at coordinating with others as OSS developers are. Sure, they can invest more in their own products, but that's a different issue.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of standard this author is pining for. We have Wayland and freedesktop.org. Pretty much any Linux app can already run on pretty much any DE

mbreese2• 1 year ago

I don’t think of it as a coordination issue. OSS can coordinate well. What it can’t do is make decisions. Most times there are at least two possible implementations for a given task (with different legitimate trade-offs). The OSS approach isn’t to pick the implementation that works for the most people, but rather support both implementations. Many times the only decision is to not to decide.

The best projects have someone who will make unilateral decisions. They might be right or wrong, but it’s done and decided. Companies with an organizational hierarchy do that much better than a decentralized group of OSS developers.

FinnKuhn• 1 year ago

In recent years it appears that at least for Microsoft different teams working on Windows also aren't really coordinating with each other resulting in a scattered OS with duplicated implementations of similar features and a dozen different UI styles.

tbrownaw2• 1 year ago

The author provides as counterexamples MacOS and Windows, but that's a silly comparison. Apple nor Microsoft never coordinated with anybody else on their APIs.

No, but each of those two systems is ruled by one dictator and has one blessed way to do things. For example in the Windows / .NET world, it's WinForms, er I mean WPF, er I mean...

Also, I'm not sure what kind of standard this author is pining for.

It sounds like a wish for the clarity of a cathedral rather than the chaos of a bazaar.

jowea• 1 year ago

Maybe it's a bunch of volunteers vs large hierarchical for profit organizations? Even through there are some of the latter working on FOSS.

em3rgent0rdr• 1 year ago

not entirely clear why/how this is an open source issue?

Was going to say this too, cause competing proprietary software companies generally don't coordinate. Macs don't easily run Windows programs and vice versa. Unless an alliance or some agreement to adhere to some standards body is made, the collaboration issue is part of both worlds.

Bouncingsoul1• 1 year ago

I'm not sure which point you are trying to make with the bikes. For road racing the UCI quite famously sets quite strict standards. For "normal" use, if you live within the US or EU will also have some standards (mostly conserning road saftey). Of course you may cherry pick some exceptions, but IMO this doesn't drive the point.

prmoustache2• 1 year ago

UCI only has power on formats [1] used in race. It definitely influences the market but it has no say on which width of handlebar can I use on my own bike as long as I don't pin a number in a UCI sanctionnd race.

[1] I prefer using that word because most aren't really standardised.

skywhopper2• 1 year ago

It’s not at all. As a counter-example, in the 00s, open source rapidly coalesced to using git, which has been so incredibly successful that it has now been adopted for many private corporate proprietary software repositories as well.

I don’t think you can take a general lesson from any particular example here. Coordination of complex systems among thousands of competing and cooperative components is very hard and unpredictable, and why things happen depends on random events and personalities in ways that are not generalizable.

ClumsyPilot2• 1 year ago

Inertia of user base is by far the largest predictor of what will stick in a market

Why are you calling open source of market?

These appear to be feuds and battle of ideas fought between contributors, with minimal input from end users. There is no price signal at all

Re. Bicycles, it’s not a healthy market. Shimano dominates with 70% share in gears and brakes. Top 3 manufacturers have what, 95%+? Also look at how cargo bikes cost 3x what a normal bike does, but have same components.

With that structure, users have zero input on size of breakpads.

thewebguyd• 1 year ago

There's still an agreement on what's beneficial, even if the how isn't standardized. TO use your bicycle analogy, it's widely accepted that clipping into pedals is beneficial, we've found it improves power transfer and efficiency - the idea of clipping in is standardized, but the implementation (cleat design) is still open for interpretation.

We see this in open source too - we can coordinate and all agree on a core idea or problem that needs solving, but still end up with different, competing implementations. It's not a bad thing, choice is good and often leads to innovation as different approaches compete and evolve.

I do think you are right on your first point - that inertia of user base is the predictor of what will stick. Even Linux, stuck around due to licensing and availability (and then user inertia from that) rather than any technical superiority.

AcaciaSkier• 1 year ago

Is there a solid technical reason for multiple ways to make shoes that connect to pedals?

Yes!

- Toe clips give you more power than just flat pedals. You can use regular shoes with them.

- Straps (similar to toe clips) can and be used with regular shoes / trainers and allow you to control the pedal stroke up and down. Fixed gear riders use them a lot.

- MTB style cleats are easier to unclip and re-clip than Road style cleats as you are more likely to need to clip / unclip quickly.

- Road style cleats provide better power transfer, the shoes are far stiffer as well.

Why are there several ways to shift from your handlebars?

Two reasons. The first is that the technology has improved over time. I have ridden old racing bikes where the shifter was not on the handlebar and on the downtube. You had to feel the position of the next gear while steering with the other hand. It is difficult for people that haven't ridden a road bike before to get used to.

Secondly the different types of bikes have the rider in different positions and thus their hands will be in a different position. Thus the different shifter types.

The moral of the story is that different requirements, require different solutions.

BTW almost everything else around the pedal and the shifter is standardised. The hub are normally one of a few sizes, wheel sizes have a few standard sizes, bottom brackets are almost all the same sizes, headsets have a few standard sizes. I have a mountain bike from 1995 that I've put a brand new stem on because the headsets are the same size as they were in 1995.

xpe• 1 year ago

Apple coordinates internally, since macOS works with Apple hardware. Windows can drive coordination among hardware vendors. In the Linux world, many organizations and projects share power; there is not the same focal power on having a consistent end user OS (dependencies, configuration). Declarative and deterministic build systems at the OS level allow different groups to package their subcomponents reliably. As various configurations get socialized, it gives choice to tradeoff between customization and popularity/vetting.

dkdcio• 1 year ago

https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/58623

dcreater2• 1 year ago

Solving the coordination problem in FOSS is one of the grand challenges of humanity. If we solve it, I think it will effect a tectonic shift with far reaching implications and fixes major socioeconomic problems like wealth concentration. Eg: a FOSS alternative to Visa, and of course Windows/MS Office.

yencabulator7• 1 year ago

FOSS alternative to Visa

Software, or lack there of, is not the reason for Visa/Mastercard ruling the marketplace.

dcreater2• 1 year ago

What is? I agree that there is a lot more to this industry than software but that is the first foundational/enabling piece.

They may have a duopoly currently but its a matter of when, not if, that it is broken

muglug• 1 year ago

Ehh I don't buy that the market was ready 10 years earlier (in 2006) for open-source LSP implementations.

You gotta have someone write those language servers for free, and the language servers have to be performant. In 2006 that meant writing in a compiled language, which meant that anyone creating a language server for an interpreted language would need to be an expert in two languages. That was already a small pool of people.

And big multiplayer OSS platforms like GitHub didn't exist until 2008.

skydhash7• 1 year ago

And the fact is that anyone working professionally was using an IDE, and anyone else was fine with grepping and using ctags.

I think LSP is only truly useful in two contexts, global symbols (even with namespacing) and confusing imports. In language like C, you mostly have a few structs and functions, and for the ones in libraries, you only need to include a single header. With Python, the imports are concise and a good references gives you the symbol identifier. But with languages that needs an IDE or LSP, you find yourself dealing with many imports and many identifiers to write a few lines of code and it becomes quickly unmanageable if you don't have completion or autoimports.

autarch• 1 year ago

And big multiplayer OSS platforms like GitHub didn't exist until 2008.

SourceForge launched in 1999. I think GitHub is better in many ways, but the basic building blocks of hosted repo, issue tracking, and discussions (via email lists) on Sourceforge. I collaborated with folks on a number of projects on SourceForge way back when.

initramfs• 1 year ago

I think the definition of linux is much broader than what is considered today a platform for the IDE. It's kind of like the IDE is the cart, and the kernel is the horse, but 30 years later, linux is an engine with a cabin virtual machine, rather than a desktop per se. the parts interact at a different level now.

tbrownaw2• 1 year ago

The underlying force there is the absence of one unified baseline set of APIs for writing desktop programs.

It's called the Common Desktop Environment.

skydhash7• 1 year ago

Most desktop programs don't need to rely on a DE (apart from some utilities). If Emacs can run anywhere, your programs can too. GTK or QT is more than enough. For anything else, you go with components on a needed basis, and they should preferably be desktop independent.

hackyhacky8• 1 year ago

If Emacs can run anywhere

Any desktop program needs to be programmed against some API. In the case of Emacs, it's probably raw Xlib or a wrapper library on top of it.

The problem with that is that (a) your dependency on X11, which is obsolete and has many documented inadequacies, (b) the lack of a modern widget library and toolkit makes extra, unnecessary work for the programmer, and (c) the lack of a cohesive visual language between programs makes the experience worse for the user.

Toolkits like GTK and Qt solve all these problems. By avoiding them, you're just reinventing the wheel, poorly, every time.

dragochat2• 1 year ago

nah, we all know the "real-life CDE" is called either OpenGL (see ImGui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, egui https://github.com/emilk/egui etc) or... HTML/CSS/JS (see Electron, Tauri etc)

hulitu• 1 year ago

or ... or ... or...

UltraSane3• 1 year ago

I was truly shocked at how bad the experience is when you are using and RPM based distribution and a program is only available as a DEB

udev40963• 1 year ago

There is rpm-to-deb converter which works sometimes. Most of the modern projects include an AppImage these days, which is distro agnostic and only requires fuse to be installed

mroche2• 1 year ago

Tools like Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, Toolbox, and Distrobox can go a long way on relieving the end-user of the burden of trying to get things playing nice in those situations. Not always a silver bullet, but a useful tool to keep in the back pocket.

If it's FOSS, at least you have the option of trying to repackage it for your distribution. You're SOL if it's a proprietary application distributed in binary format. , though.

UltraSane3• 1 year ago

It was the Termius SSH Client

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

Something I don't yet understand about flatpak et al: isn't using that for every app in the core OS experience going to chew through storage because shared libraries can't be shared across images? Or does the containerization solve that problem?

RossBencina2• 1 year ago

Who is being incentivised to reduce the friction of interoperation?

Coordination is hard. People who are good at coordinating are not necessarily the same people who are happy to contribute their time to FOSS. And FOSS may need to coordinate in ways that vertically integrated companies do not.

Coordinating between loosely aggregated volunteer projects is not the same as coordinating between vested stakeholders either. I would guess that most FOSS projects are more invested in their own survival than in some larger objective. Teams within a company are (presumably) by definition invested in seeing the company mission succeed.

The GNOME / KDE example mentioned elsewhere in this thread is interesting because these are two somewhat equivalent co-existing projects. Any coordination between them is surely not their highest priority. Same with all of the different distros. The each exist to solve a problem, as the fine article says.

I wonder how much the problem is actually "open source can't standardise on a single solution." Let one thousand flowers bloom, sure. But don't expect a homogeneous user experience. The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. xkcd 927. etc.

colesantiago• 1 year ago

I would love to tell people about linux for their desktops, but the main issue I have with it is the fact that people who are interested in it ask me one question regarding Linux distributions:

“Which one?”

This is pretty much the cause of a 90% drop off of interest in Linux on the desktop.

I could say use Ubuntu (and I do) to some of the people who I’m close with that are interested in Linux, but they discover Lubuntu, or Linux Mint and Debian, then they get easily confused and give up.

And that is not even getting into the updates and the packaging and heaven forbid anything breaks.

udev40963• 1 year ago

There aren't that many to ponder over the idea of recommending someone for a daily use. For beginners, Fedora is the perfect choice. For people with programming background, Arch. Ubuntu was sane sometime ago, not anymore because of the bloat it ships by default

int_19h3• 1 year ago

For beginners, Fedora is the perfect choice.

Last time I tried another round of "let's install the most recent versions of popular distros on random laptops I have", Fedora was the most finicky about hardware. As in literally wouldn't even boot into live CD on one of said laptops, and had troubles with graphics on others.

The thing that worked every time? For the past decade or so, it had consistently been Linux Mint for me.

Milpotel2• 1 year ago

And that is not even getting into the updates and the packaging and heaven forbid anything breaks.

How to spot the Ubuntu user...

imp0cat2• 1 year ago

And lead him to Nix? :)

And then watch his eyes glaze over as he realizes that he's bitten off a lot more than he can chew. :D

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

I am reminded of someone I read recently decrying as a loss GNOME adopting systemd components as a critical dependency because they want alternatives to systemd.

... and this a layer of open source flexibility I never wanted. I don't want alternatives to core system management; I want one correct answer that is rugged, robust, well-tested, and standardized so that I don't have to play the "How is this service configured atop this service manager" game.

rjsw• 1 year ago

GNOME started out being able to run on more than just Linux.

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

That makes sense and I can see how it'd be frustrating to someone if it can't anymore. But how relevant is that today when there are enough flavors of Linux that you can install it on anything from space probes to toaster ovens?

udev40963• 1 year ago

What? How is this even at top? Some no-name program is not getting an update or is not perfectly installable and suddenly it's an open source problem? Stop being an entitled prick

fr4nkr2• 1 year ago

The OP defeats his own argument. LSP was a collaborative effort that benefited from a degree of coordination that only hierarchical organizations can provide, yet it still sucks ass.

OP blames FOSS for not providing an IDE protocol a decade earlier, but doesn't ask the rather obvious question of why language-specific tooling is not only still around, but as market-viable as ever. I'd argue it's because what LSP tries to do is just stupid to begin with, or at least exceptionally hard to get right. All of the best language tooling I've used is ad-hoc and tailored to the specific strengths of a single language. LSP makes the same mistake Microsoft made with UWP: trying to cram the same peg into every hole.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still develops their proprietary Intellisense stuff because it actually works. They competed with themselves and won.

(Minor edit: I forgot that MS alone didn't standardize LSP.)

diegoperini• 1 year ago

yet the end result was complete shit

Could you elaborate why? It looks like a useful protocol.

fr4nkr2• 1 year ago

I elaborated a bit when I edited my post, but to be more specific, I think LSP is a protocol that fails at its stated goals. Every server is buggy as hell and has its own quirks and behaviors, so editors that implement LSP have to add workarounds for every server, which renders the point of LSP moot. It's the worst of both worlds: editors are still duplicating effort, but with fewer, if any of the benefits of tools tailor-made for a specific editor-language combination. And that's not even touching on the protocol's severe performance issues.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of servers work much better with VSCode than other editors. Whether this was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to EEE their own product, or simply a convenient result of their own incompetence, is ambiguous.

mike_hearn2• 1 year ago

The original blog post links to a critique.

oaiey• 1 year ago

He also overlooks that the central stable projects, like the Linux kernel/systems/... also have a very strict hierarchy / dictatorship ongoing.

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

OP blames FOSS for not providing an IDE protocol a decade earlier

Everybody standardized on Eclipse plugins almost 2 decades earlier anyway. It got replaced because the standard sucked. The new one is better, but by how much is still a question.

shadowgovt7• 1 year ago

Maybe I don't ask too much from LSP, but it has enabled autocomplete on arbitrary languages across two or three IDEs I have to use regularly, so it satisfied my goals in a way the previous solutions did not.

ninjin• 1 year ago

"The reason why we have Linux, and BSDs, and XNU is that they all provide the same baseline API, which was defined from the outside [by POSIX]. The coordination problem was pre-solved, and what remained is just filling-in the implementation."

But that is not at all how Posix operates or has operated. Posix standardises common denominators between existing implementations. The fact that we now have strlcpy(3) and strlcat(3) in Posix 2024, is not because Posix designed and stipulated them. Rather, they appeared in OpenBSD in 1998, were found useful by other *nix-es over time, spread, and were finally taken aboard by Posix that standardised what was already out there and being used! This to me is the very opposite of the point the author is trying to make!

maccard2• 1 year ago

Actually I think this is exactly the point.

BSD got them in 1998, it took 17 years for it to go to posix and another 8 years before they made their way to glibc. 25 years to add a clear improvement

geysersam• 1 year ago

Guess not everybody though it was a clear improvement then? It's not like it made everyone adopt BSD instead of Linux. If it was easy to make all the right decisions someone would have made them and sold it as a product instead

dale_huevo• 1 year ago

Linux would have had strlcpy/strlcat 25 years ago but the glibc maintainer was famously being a giant chode and refused to allow "horribly inefficient BSD crap" into his precious code, and this fight went on for years:

https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/libc-alpha/2000-08/msg00053...

So it wasn't for lack of trying. Yes, Open Source can't coordinate and this is why we can't have nice things.

oersted3• 1 year ago

It's surprising how we ended up with such a robust open-source OS ecosystem (pretty much every server running Linux) with such emotional people at the helm.

He is clearly not being rational there, but I could see how his aesthetic tastes might correlate pretty well with robust software. I suppose that saying no to new features is a good default heuristic, these additions could have easily added more problems than they solve, and then you have more surface area to maintain.

That being said, this old-school ideology of maintainers dumping the full responsibility on the user for applying the API "properly" is rather unreasonable. It often sounds like they enjoy having all these footguns they refuse to fix, so they can feel superior and differentiate their club of greybeards who have memorised all the esoteric pitfalls, simply because they were along for the journey, from the masses.

pif3• 1 year ago

The problem with strlcat and strlcpy is that they assume that it's okay to arbitrarily discard data for the sake of preventing a buffer overflow. The buffer overflow may be prevented, but because data may have been discarded, the program is still incorrect. This is roughly analogous to clamping floating point overflow to DBL_MAX and merrily continuing in the calculation.

He was not that wrong!

culopatin• 1 year ago

Well, sounds like no one else stepped up with a fork, the commitment to maintain something better, and the networking effort, so the community had to put up with whoever was doing the work. Like if you didn’t cook and just sat on the couch you can’t be picky about you’re served.

dragochat2• 1 year ago

exactly, you can't standardize on a solution before any good one exists in the first place

Kranar3• 1 year ago

Tell that to the C++ Standard Committee. They have no problem standardizing things that don't even exist and may even be impossible to implement.

a-dub• 1 year ago

idk. i don't really follow the argument. large projects in open source coordinate internally and engage externally when they need to- i suspect that isn't all that different from what you'd see in a large megacompany like apple or microsoft.

open source people create reusable interfaces. i'd argue they go one step further and create open and public internet communities with standards, practices and distribution/release channels.

bobajeff• 1 year ago

Maybe open source doesn't need to coordinate. Perhaps users and developers should demand standards and interoperability from their platforms. Perhaps that's why we have things like Electron, Unreal Engine and Unity. One way or another we'll coordinate on something.

antonok• 1 year ago

Open source has the best kind of coordination. If there's a real use-case for two things to work together, you or someone else can implement it and share it without anyone's permission. Meanwhile in proprietary land, people sometimes build things that nobody wanted, and also leave out features with high demand. Proprietary optimizes for the profit of some individuals; open source optimizes for maximum utility.

Thus far, open source has optimized for maximum utility for individuals who can write code... but AI may be changing that soon enough.

illiac786• 1 year ago

I am a fan of open source, but it’s definitely not for the coordination part.

Proprietary, money driven development, is top down and has coordination in general. In very large software, it starts failing sometimes (I’m looking at you Oracle)

Open source handles conflict by forking. I wouldn’t call that good coordination.

But, at the same time, I don’t see a better (or less worse) solution so I shut up and I take their code =)

latchup2• 1 year ago

Open source handles conflict by forking. I wouldn’t call that good coordination.

Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down. In other words, the worst outcome is that people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, which is arguably as good a solution as is possible.

In the corporate world, coordination mostly exists within companies through top-down decision-making, as you said. Between them, however, things look much grimmer. Legal action is often taken lightly, and more often than not, a core business goal is to not just dominate, but to annihilate the competition by driving them out of business.

Coordination between corporations, such as through consortia, is only ever found if everyone involved stands to profit significantly and risks are low. And ironically, when it does happen, it often takes the form of shared development of an open-source project, to eliminate the perceived risk of being shafted.

IshKebab6• 1 year ago

Often there's a great use case for two things to work together but you have a chicken and egg situation. You need a top-down edict to get everyone on the same page.

yencabulator7• 1 year ago

You, the singular you as a person, can simultaneously improve both of those two things. With proprietary software, uhh, enjoy the ride.

throwaway2037• 1 year ago

    > But then, how can Linux exist? How does that square with “never break the user space?”

Hot take: This catch phrase is out of date. For Linux desktop normies like me who don't really care about the stability of the Linux user space API, user space does break when GUI libraries (and the myriad of libraries dependencies) change their APIs. For example, I mostly use KDE, which depends upon Qt libraries for its GUI. Qt regularly introduces breaking changes to their API during each version increment: 4->5->6, etc. (I don't hate them for it; it is normally carefully done and well-documented.)

vhantz• 1 year ago

"don't break user space" is about the Linux kernel not breaking user space. Qt is user space as well as any desktop environment or GUI framework.

Introducing breaking changes with major version releases is standard software development practice. Very few projects go out of their way to always keep backwards compatibility.

LtWorf10• 1 year ago

Kernel breaks API all the time too. It applies only if something that linus personally uses stops working.

LtWorf10• 1 year ago

Funny that I'm getting downvoted after having spent hours investigating a failure due to kernel breaking API a couple of weeks ago :)

I guess y'all know better :)

pacoxu2025• 1 year ago

but open source foundation provide some guides/events/programs to coordinate.

bronlund2• 1 year ago

This is kind of the same reason I gave up on the Linux desktop and went for macOS. When I first learned about Linux I was thinking "Sweet!. This is going to kick Microsoft's ass!", but this was 30 years ago and instead of a kickass desktop OS, we got 1000 mediocre ones.

happymellon3• 1 year ago

looks at Windows Vista, 8, 10, 11

I don't think its the mediocre interface thats holding Linux back...

Whether its the abomination thats Windows 11, having to fight against an ad ridden interface in 10 or otherwise. Teams hasn't dominated because of a coherent interface, or even because anyone actually wants to use it.

Besides, you say 1000 desktops, but there is really only 2 (well 1 since Gnome is the primary interface for the big 3 distros) along with couple of hobby ones that you have to seek out to even learn they exist and a lot of toys that no one outside HN has even heard of.

IshKebab6• 1 year ago

Windows 10 and 11 have great desktops. Definitely still ahead of anything Linux can offer.

But I agree it's only partly because of that. The bigger issues are poor hardware support (especially for laptops) and over reliance on the CLI and config files.

mixmastamyk• 1 year ago

I’d say Mint Cinnamon is better than mediocre.

Further try Little Snitch on macos to see how completely out of control it is. Since they implemented the sealed volume it is also a lot harder to configure permanently, so fixing it is less feasible.

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

To me it's about how low-bandwidth communication channels limit collaboration.

Linux and FOSS grew up (congrats!) and the important work got super big and complex.

Unfortunately, online communication - typically the channel preferred by FOSS projects - has much lower bandwidth than teams working full time in an office. Thus limiting the "depth" of collaboration.

It's not all bad. FOSS does have some profound success to be proud of. For small and well-defined projects "benevolent dictator for life" works! Anything one person can lead - a desktop tool or a library - FOSS produces really good outcomes. But above say, a package manager or a distro.. things get wonky.

Again it's not all bad. FOSS is rolling up its sleeves. Folks are organically doing the "go down every avenue people are motivated to go down" thing. You could call it Darwinism. But many motivated communities lack resources to go far enough to reach value. Motivation stalls during projects (we're human!), and FOSS rarely comes with a motivation-boosting paycheck. Plenty of valiant efforts don't reach value and it's never malicious. It's OK!

So is there a way to better concentrate efforts?

If the paths are long, it follows that the community should tackle fewer paths. The path(s) taken should be well defined, charted in advance as much as possible, and not uncovered bit by bit - or the work will take decades.

Growing an entire ecosystem around one path forward (or a few) requires alignment. Can enough trust be fostered in leaders to get people to work on a shared vision?

A vision of what Linux on the desktop should/could converge to is the kind of problem that, if Linux were a company, would be bet-the-company strategic. A company can't afford to go down two paths. So it might lock its smartest people in a room to hash out one true strategy. Or have one smart person dictate one vision and align everyone on it.

Can that be done for FOSS?

In the bounds of a single project it has been proven that it can. But what about an entire ecosystem?

nottorp• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, online communication - typically the channel preferred by FOSS projects - has much lower bandwidth than teams working full time in an office.

I wonder if that's why open source projects get so much done and at such a high quality with so few people.

Instead of 75% "communication" and 25% work, 90% of the time donated to FOSS is actual work :)

candiddevmike• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, online communication - typically the channel preferred by FOSS projects - has much lower bandwidth than teams working full time in an office. Thus limiting the "depth" of collaboration.

Source on this? There are tons of collaborative, 100% remote companies out there (and they release open source software). I think your assertion may be more the folks aren't as dedicated to open source as contributing is a part time or hobby thing.

mnahkies• 1 year ago

I often submit minor bug fixes or features to fairly popular projects, and as an outside contributor the communication can be very async. It's typically limited to GitHub PR/issue discussions, and sometimes the latency is measured in weeks/months.

I think it's probably quite different if you're a "core contributor" and likely using additional channels like slack and scheduled meetings, more akin to a company operating.

ashoeafoot• 1 year ago

The selection and standardisation comitee for open source is the usage data. Make public what is used where under what circumstances, standards emerge .

scrapheap• 1 year ago

Alternative view - Open Source projects have the freedom to do what they want to do. Which in turn gives me the freedom to choose how I set up my desktop environment. How many changes have been pushed on Windows users over the last 15 years with the only option being to change and get security updates or stay on an old insecure version?

And while there are lots of desktop environments for Linux you can usually run applications targeting one in any of them (I use Gnome's file manager in Enlightenment as it supports accessing CIFS shares directly).

reactcore• 1 year ago

Agreed. I have been thinking about this since the announcement of iOS and macOS 26. I really dislike the UI changes made and will not upgrade until my devices become obsolete. On my openSUSE PC, my desktop still looks almost the same as it did in 2006, which I love so much.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Yet most closed source stuff depends heavily on open source.

amelius2• 1 year ago

We need more people writing RFC style documents.

mike_hearn2• 1 year ago

Many moons ago Scott Alexander wrote a critique of Marx. It starts by arguing that if capitalists can be said to produce anything, it's coordination. Coordination, Scott argues, is a thing every bit as real as coal or food or legal services. People need to manufacture it, and we call them executives/investors/marketing staff, and others want to buy it. When we buy coordination we call it brand value or similar. Open source has a notable absence of coordinators, because producing coordination is hard and non-fun, so without a capitalist market there's not much incentive to do it. Same reason desktop Linux historically struggled with anything that wasn't hobby programming (art, UI design, etc... eventually Red Hat and others hired such people using server profits).

The Linux kernel and GNU in general are projects that hacked around that problem by just copying the decisions of other people who were coordinated by capitalists (UNIX vendors), which worked long enough to bootstrap the ecosystem until some of the key people could be coordinated by Red Hat and others who monetized indirectly. But at every stage, the coordination was being produced by capitalists even though it was hard to see.

In other places where the mimic-and-support model didn't work, open source really struggled. This is most obvious on the desktop. Even there, ultimately this approach has been adopted for large chunks of it. If you play games on Linux today it's because people copied the Win32 API i.e. the coordination was produced by capitalists like Bill Gates.

Now Alex mentions LSP and JetBrains. The reason JetBrains didn't do the LSP isn't because of value capture. After all, IntelliJ has been open source for a long time. Other IDEs could easily have embedded it and used its plugins. The reason JetBrains use a Java API is because it's a lot more productive and effective to design in-process APIs than network protocols. As long as you aren't crossing runtime boundaries they're easier to write, easier to test, easier to reason about statically (especially w.r.t. concurrency), and much more performant. You can exchange complex object graphs in a shared address space and coordinate them using locks. All this is a highly effective way to extend an IDE.

Microsoft did the LSP because they took a bunch of energetic developers who only wanted to do web development, so they used Electron. Also for reasons of sticking with the crowd, .NET being pretty useless for cross-platform desktop stuff... it's not just that experience with desktop programming is fading away. But browsers were never designed for the challenges of large scale desktop programming, in fact they weren't designed for building apps at all. So they don't let you use threads, static typing via TypeScript is an aftermarket hack, V8 has very low maximum heap sizes, and there are many other challenges with doing a clean JetBrains style architecture. To their credit, the VS Code team leaned into the architectural limits of the browser and did their best to turn it into advantages. They introduced this notion of a backend that could run independently of the frontend using a 'standard' protocol. This is technically not really different to the IntelliJ API being open source, but people like the idea of protocols more than embedding a JVM and using stuff in a company-specific namespace, so that created a lot of community good will and excitement for them at the cost of many technical challenges.

Those challenges are why JetBrains only use the LSP style approach for one of their IDEs, which due to historical reasons doesn't share the same architectural approach as all the others. And it's also why, if you look at the Rider protocol, it's some fairly advanced state sync protocol thing, it's not a plain old HTTP RPC style protocol.

Given that both are open source and both are produced by teams of paid developers working in an office coordinated by capitalists, it's probably not right to identify this as an open source vs proprietary difference. It's purely a technical one to do with JVM vs web as foundational platforms.

simonebrunozzi• 1 year ago

Key sentence here:

But it is also clear why JetBrains didn’t do LSP — why would they? While the right solution on the technical grounds, you aren’t going to get paid for being technically right.

fergie• 1 year ago

There was a decade of opportunity for OSS to coordinate around an IDE protocol, but that didn’t happen, because OSS is bad at coordination.

Its also because a lot of the key people in Open Source, and senior hackers generally, don't actually use IDEs.

We should encourage more of the younger generation over to powerful configurable editors such as Emacs, rather than locking everybody into VSCode/JetBrains/etc.

tasuki• 1 year ago

We should encourage more of the younger generation over to powerful configurable editors such as Emacs, rather than locking everybody into VSCode/JetBrains/etc.

Isn't that precisely what LSP facilitates? I was using IDEs for like four years. Now I'm back to (neo)vim and couldn't be happier! There is no substitute for "jump to definition".

yencabulator7• 1 year ago

Jump to definition was a common feature across editors in the early 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags

alganet• 1 year ago

Must... make... cathedral... at... all... costs... why... no... cathedral... halp...

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

nixpulvis• 1 year ago

This somewhat reminds me of arguments I've heard about waterfall vs agile over the years. Planning for ways to plan, and everything falling apart when faced with hard decisions and thick skulls.

agumonkey4• 1 year ago

It's an important question. Paid enterprise enforce a certain level of coordination (supposedly overcoming the pain of dealing with people and ideas you don't necessary like). Open source imposes no such things, so efforts grow when and where they want..

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

Look at Microsoft Windows. You can still run Access '97 because all the DLLs with the GUI widgets from Win '95 are still there. Until 2012 or so, Microsoft would regularly come out with a whole new widget set every few years. You can see this most notably in the settings UI for Windows where there are some screens in the "modern" UI and plenty of dialogs that still come from the '95/NT 4 era.

Since then Microsoft has had no real answer for "how do I write desktop applications for Windows?" other than "use Electron".

(If they were still introducing new widget sets they'd be converting the 'modern' dialogs to something 'postmodern' while still having Win '95 dialogs in there)

Kranar3• 1 year ago

I decided to verify this and came up short. I went through the installation procedure which did work but required changing some workgroup settings and running the application as administrator... not ideal but understandable. However, when I tried to run it, no good. I get an error about missing files. I then went through the process of finding some of these missing files and installing them but ultimately ran up against the final fatal error that will not allow me to proceed.

Access 97 depends on some Internet Explorer components and Microsoft has made it all but impossible to install Internet Explorer on the most recent Windows 10 and Window 11.

Apart from that I also tried getting Minesweeper and SkiFree to work on Windows 10 and Windows 10 just straight up refuses to run them with the message "This app can't run on your PC."

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

I installed Office ‘97 for work I think two summers ago. We had an old access database that I had to import into a new postgres-based system and it installed just fine on Windows 10. It was hilarious that clippy still tries to take over the desktop but it looks a little funny because borderless windows don’t work quite the same as they used to.

kragen2• 1 year ago

You can run Access '97 on Linux under WINE. I'm not sure you can install it on current Microsoft Windows, even if it would hypothetically run.

hgs3• 1 year ago

Since then Microsoft has had no real answer for "how do I write desktop applications for Windows?" other than "use Electron".

Microsoft has been pushing WinUI the past few years, with WinUI 3 being the latest recommended UI toolkit [1]. I think what's interesting about WinUI 3 is it's not built into Windows - you have to ship the whole toolkit with your app, just as you would GTK or Qt on Windows. I find that a perplexing direction for a "native" toolkit.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/

LtWorf10• 1 year ago

None of my games from 15 years ago work.

bjourne• 1 year ago

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356

21 years old bug. XDG is such an obvious improvement, yet getting all projects on board is taking forever.

jrm4• 1 year ago

I think that that two of our more instructive examples here might be Wayland and late stage GNOME -- namely, how did these two projects get as big as they did, despite being both 1) past compatibility breaking and 2) not obviously good?

pif3• 1 year ago

There’s no single entity that can coordinate the API, in contrast to Windows and MacOS. But then, how can Linux exist? How does that square with “never break the user space?”

The “never break the user space” philosophy is limited to the kernel, and the single entity coordinating that realm is called Linus.

pif3• 1 year ago

This post displays the same ignorance as that joke about Kissinger complaining that Europe didn't have a phone number.

Open source is a movement: it's neither an individual nor a committee. And people join it because it is a movement with no central authority.

IshKebab6• 1 year ago

That doesn't really refute the article's point though does it?

margarina72• 1 year ago

Seems to be a pattern - take a general then apply to open-source. You know what else can't coordinate - most of the corporate world.

The article doesn't bring up any critical issue that the world world opensource should suddenly deal with - feels more like a morning rant after his shower - which is also how the post starts - it's basically on the front-page because its title is trying to be provocative.

AmazingTurtle• 1 year ago

Whats wrong with LSP?

nyrikki2• 1 year ago

I use NixOS. And NixOS isn’t a problem — it’s a solution.
The past ten years saw a big shift in how we are writing software: baseline level of “interactive static analysis"

While I am making no judgement on what is 'better', the author's choices have impacts, and sometimes not all projects can work within the costs imposed by static analysis.

For example, remember that Rice's theorm generalizes HALT, and that you always have to under or overestimate with SA. Either introducing over constraints or missing things.

It is horses for courses, sometimes the added friction is worth it, other times it is damaging.

The question of if Nix is a problem is a context specific question.

Be careful about making default assumptions and patterns more than what they are, no matter how sensible they are as a default.

badsectoracula• 1 year ago

I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can’t just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS.

KDE (not to be confused with the Plasma desktop) is just a bunch of C++ libraries that can work on a variety of desktop environments and even OSes (though Hotspot being a perf report alternative is clearly meant for use with Linux).

I just went and downloaded the latest CI build from[0] and it ran just fine on my openSUSE Tumbleweed, running Xorg with Window Maker. I do have a bunch of KDE apps installed, like Kate (my currently preferred text editor), Dolphin (the file manager i use whenever i want thumbnails, usually for videos and images), Spectacle (for screenshots), Falkon (i use it as a "clean" browser to test out things), etc so i also do have the KDE libraries on my system, but that is just a `zypper install` away. Or an `apt-get install` or `pacman -S` or whatever package manager your distro uses, i've used a bunch of them and they all pretty much behaved the same. I'd expect Hotspot to be installable in the same way in any of them (and i'd expect the AppImage to have these libraries bundled in anyway so you probably wont need them[1]).

If there are issues with NixOS (i don't know, i haven't tried it) i think it might actually be a NixOS issue and not a KDE issue.

[0] https://github.com/KDAB/hotspot/releases/tag/continuous

[1] EDIT: i checked with --appimage-extract, it contains pretty much everything

ozim• 1 year ago

It is a feature not a bug.

What author describes is about dominance.

Most OSS is fragmented because of different ideas and different people.

People nag about .NET not having much outside OSS because .NET devs (I am one of them) will not use stuff that doesn’t have MSFT badge.

You don’t want such power in general OSS. Lack of coordination is sign of no dominant entity and that is the feature.

tester756• 1 year ago

On the other hand how much time is wasted on reimplementing same/similar software X times.

notepad0x90• 1 year ago

I wonder if the author has seen codebases for enterprise apps that are a behemoth, designed by a committee with low developer retention.

In contrast, open source software led by the same handful (typically just one guy) of people over years/decades are well coordinated by the BDFL(s) and have a clear direction.

I think the term the author is looking for is "opinionated". The mantra is "if you don't like it fork it". The apparent lack of coordination is a feature of open source,not a bug.

Successful and popular projects rarely seem uncoordinated. The Linux kernel coordinates thousands of devs over mailing lists. Git was created to facilitate that, and now everyone uses to coordinate development.I would even dare say modern dev coordination is spearheaded by open source projects.

kragen2• 1 year ago

Open source, like private property, markets, science, and Satoshi consensus, enables people to benefit from the work of others that they don't have a means of coordinating with—for example, because they're dead, or they don't trust you, or they're hard to get along with. If you already have a way of coming to terms with somebody, you don't need open source. Different engineers inside Google can benefit from each other's work without making it open source because they're coordinated by Google's management. It's people who aren't coordinating with Google who benefit from them making it open source.

jalapenos• 1 year ago

Something uncoordinated struggles to co-ordinate. More news at ten

dTal• 1 year ago

@dang

Why editorialize a question mark into titles like this? What does it signify? We are not talking about a factual assertion of debatable veracity, but a statement of opinion along the lines of "considered harmful". Disagreement and debate is the obvious expected result of such a statement. HN admin using special mod powers to editorialize a title which is neither misleading nor clickbait, simply to indicate skepticism, comes across as petty and not a little hypocritical in light of the "don't editorialize titles" site guideline.

dang• 1 year ago

We add a question mark to titles that some commenters find questionable, in the hope that it will lead to fewer complaints about the title.

Comments that react purely to titles are shallow, so we don't much want them here. I suppose the goal of nearly all the title edits we do, including this one, is to minimize them.

davidgerard• 1 year ago

Fake title - original does not contain a question mark

Open source can't coordinate?

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