| Connect lewiscowles
Essex, UK
I work at a fintech startup in London. I Really like pair programming, cognition and education, and repeatability. Talk to me about testing, automation, or whatever you are passionate about.
Lewis Cowles (He/Him, They,Them,Theirs)
Authored Comments
I'm not sure that in-house means not on cloud. At the scale of 40,000 servers if in-house wasn't at some level synonymous with cloud in 2018 I'd be worried.
There are of course predictable workloads that might leverage mainframes or workstations, most companies don't want or need to get rid of that, but just from a risk management perspective being able to rapidly deploy (even if it's just re-deploy onto HW you already own) is going to be important.
Alternative description for Fork. A Fork is like a split in the road. Getting to the same place if you take different directions will be harder though not impossible. You just have to work out how to get to the same place, and if it's worth not following a single route.
Distribution is hard though. I'm pretty sure most distro's do maintain their own patches as well as benefiting from pulling from mainline, they also contribute to it. I don't believe they follow the group by default as much as work out if they agree with the group.
More worryingly though distributions often struggle to keep up with mainline projects, which for some users creates problems. It's kind of a catch 22. If you're not using a distribution you probably need lots of support, which is expensive in time and financially.
If you use the distribution they won't support non-distro features, so you lose control. This is why some large companies seem like their technology is light-years behind. They have come to the decision paying for more than distribution is prohibitive and doesn't align with their goals. By doing this they do leave themselves vulnerable to whatever the buy-in to that distro is.
For Desktop & general-consumer users this model has been problematic since the beginning.
I remember in the 90's asking someone how to make a splash screen and they berated me about how I should watch the init process and be grateful to the tux graphic in the corner.
Hardware often wouldn't work for months. Fast-forward and device vendors are doing great work with OpenSource communities to push out drivers ensuring support (and sales). It's a fragile balance though. You might get a device like an ARM SBC that runs on a sunxi fork of Linux, or a smartphone you cannot flash or control.
Often those are abandoned a few months in and never again updated. Companies like hardkernel, sparkfun, even Raspberry Pi foundation release hardware that cannot fully be supported without their involvement.