Q: Is having so many distros a good or bad idea? Choice is fine, but one does not need to be pampered with choices. Instead of so many man hours being spent in building hundreds of distros, wouldn't it be easier to get into the enterprise and take on the MS challenge if people could come together and support fewer distros (1 for each use maybe)? What's your view on that?
Linus: I think having multiple distros is an inevitable part of open source. And can it be confusing? Sure. Can it be inefficient? Yes. But I'd just like to compare it to politics: 'democracy' has all those confusing choices, and often none of the choices is necessarily what you 'really' want either, and sometimes you might feel like things would be smoother and more efficient if you didn't have to worry about the whole confusion of voting, different parties, coalitions, etc.
But in the end, choice may be inefficient, but it's also what keeps everybody involved at least 'somewhat' honest. We all probably wish our politicians were more honest than they are, and we all probably wish that the different distros sometimes made other choices than they do, but without that choice, we'd be worse off.
# une autre:
Posté par liberforce (site web personnel, Mastodon) . En réponse au journal Interview de Linus dans Open Content. Évalué à 10.