Linux After Dark – Episode 126

Something occurred to you recently, Chris, about technologies that are effectively dead.

Yeah, so recently I was helping my mother get a new internet provider and I realized that copper phone lines get switched off next January in the United Kingdom.

I decided to clear some things out and realized I had five Chromecasts in a drawer that I had not used.

And I suspect that Google, as they do, will kill them.

So I sold them all while they're still worth something.

And I just started thinking, I'm now old enough and ugly enough to be living through the death of tech paradigms as a grown adult.

And it's quite refreshing in a way that some of that stuff is enforced.

When people are losing VDSL, they're saying, I don't want that.

But it makes sense to have fiber optics that can carry more bandwidth and less cabling, for example.

But when it comes to Linux, free and open source, I feel like quite often the opposite tends to be true.

Does anything ever actually truly get deprecated?

I've been saying this for years and I've been waiting for it to catch on.

Software doesn't die.

It just gets donated to the Apache Foundation.

It

all just gets forked as the Trinity desktop or Marte or whatever.

The thing it makes me think is, is it good or is it bad? Does it help or is it not actually as good an idea as we think?

Well, you get into the question of churn in software, don't you? Developers always want to do new shit.

And it's the 80-20 rule, isn't it? To get 80% of the way there on a new project is relatively quite straightforward.

The last 20% is really difficult because that's all the hard details and the polishing of bugs and everything.

And software developers, especially those who are doing it as a hobby... are not really interested in finishing things necessarily when there's new exciting things that they could be making.

And so the result of that is you end up with, you know, new versions of stuff and new protocols and the old stuff with it being open source doesn't die as such.

It doesn't disappear, but it gets kind of abandoned almost.

It's tricky

because I hear people that espouse this as the main pillar of why they love free and open source software.

Something occurred to you recently, Chris, about technologies that are effectively dead.

Yeah, so recently I was helping my mother get a new internet provider and I realized that copper phone lines get switched off next January in the United Kingdom.

I decided to clear some things out and realized I had five Chromecasts in a drawer that I had not used.

And I suspect that Google, as they do, will kill them.

So I sold them all while they're still worth something.

And I just started thinking, I'm now old enough and ugly enough to be living through the death of tech paradigms as a grown adult.

And it's quite refreshing in a way that some of that stuff is enforced.

When people are losing VDSL, they're saying, I don't want that.

But it makes sense to have fiber optics that can carry more bandwidth and less cabling, for example.

But when it comes to Linux, free and open source, I feel like quite often the opposite tends to be true.

Does anything ever actually truly get deprecated?

I've been saying this for years and I've been waiting for it to catch on.

Software doesn't die.

It just gets donated to the Apache Foundation.

It

all just gets forked as the Trinity desktop or Marte or whatever.

The thing it makes me think is, is it good or is it bad? Does it help or is it not actually as good an idea as we think?

Well, you get into the question of churn in software, don't you? Developers always want to do new shit.

And it's the 80-20 rule, isn't it? To get 80% of the way there on a new project is relatively quite straightforward.

The last 20% is really difficult because that's all the hard details and the polishing of bugs and everything.

And software developers, especially those who are doing it as a hobby... are not really interested in finishing things necessarily when there's new exciting things that they could be making.

And so the result of that is you end up with, you know, new versions of stuff and new protocols and the old stuff with it being open source doesn't die as such.

It doesn't disappear, but it gets kind of abandoned almost.

It's tricky

because I hear people that espouse this as the main pillar of why they love free and open source software.