On 28 January 2014 07:42, Matthew Miller <mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

* General trend in Linux towards the base distribution being "boring" and
not mattering. I asked several dozen different people at a gigantic Amazon
conference why everyone was using the distribution they chose instead of
Fedora, and the answer was almost universally "oh, I don't care; that's
not really an interesting question because there's nothing important at
that level". Now, that might not be really _true_, but it's definitely an
increasing perception. How can we either fight that perception, or make
sure that Fedora expands to also do work in the "interesting" space?

I think it is a real item but even as a perception, it is not something that could be fought. Perceptions are like the tide and if you are lucky you might be able to build tons of dikes and stop the tide rolling in, but most likely you just have to wait til it goes out again in 8-16 years.

The big issues with it not being interesting anymore is that like every other technology it has to become more and more standardized to meet the scale of issues that people are trying to solve. Plumbing had to do this in the 1800's and electrical wiring had to do this in the 1900's and car parts had to do this in the 1950's [while all of these are very diversified, they are less so than they were and you can reasonably be assured that every car of a certain model has the same parts, etc.]

What that means is that you end up with more and more stop energy to 'fix', 'change', 'innovate' on the lower levels because it becomes harder and harder to get those parts to work with the rest of the industry. So either the innovation moves up the the chain, it becomes smaller and more specialized, or it goes to do something completely new that becomes interesting to loads of people again. [Or in 8-16 years people all of a sudden go, hey X is a really cool thing.. and everyone goes to do that again.]

So I expect the work we need to work on is higher up in the stack as that is where things are interesting. The cool kids don't want to work on the plumbing levels of a single computer (or even a cluster), they want to work on hundreds to thousands of computers and the distribution at that part is just like a 'kernel' to them.. so if we want to move up we need to work on the meta-distribution and how that works.

[Of course this could just be the rantings of a cough medicine dope fiend.. ]

Stephen J Smoogen.