Bitcoin is not a currency, it is a virtualized commodity.

Having done a bit of digging, and perhaps some soul searching, it seems that Poettering, and others, think that a tightly coupled system is the only way to build a OS.

This because they see generic distros, like Debian and Gentoo, have in effect dug themselves a hole thanks to the number of permutations involved in packaging (though with Gentoo being compiled by user/admin rather than distro maintainer it may not be fully correct to include them).

But to go from saying distros may have bitten over more than they can chew, to saying that everything between kernel and desktop needs to be a tightly coupled whole is quite the leap.

Yes, distros can be built to be highly specialized, and has been so since the early days. But that is not an excuse for making the software that goes into making a distro tightly coupled.

Also, way to much of what is happening above the kernel is happening from the desktop environment (Gnome in particular) down.

Take dbus for instance, it balks at talking across user accounts. But if it was amended to do so, user accounts become sandboxes.

But instead we get the whole rigmarole of cgroups and namespaces, managed by systemd.

And that is when we sit back, grab some popcorn, and watch the fireworks.

After having some adjustments done to fit alongside code that was already in there doing similar things.

Torvalds do maintain some ground rules for accepting patches though.

One of them is that they do not break userspace.

This involves making sure that any interfaces exposed to userspace processes behave the same across versions.

When a patch(-set) violates this, the developer(s) behind it will be at the receiving end of some nasty language. In particular if they refuse to acknowledge the breakage, and/or claim it is userspace that should be corrected.

There was point in time when Alan Cox stepped away from kernel development because Torvalds was having issues coping with the patch traffic and Cox's staging tree was bordering on turning into a de-facto release tree.

Yeah i have been wondering about GregKH lately.

He may have produced some excellent code over the years and done a nice job maintaining stable kernel releases. but as of late he seems to have gotten very "one true way"-ish.

Not only the snark regarding maintaining a independent udev, but also the pushing of kdbus into the kernel when the gains are at best questionable.

As best i can tell the forces in the background pushing to get kdbus accepted are the car manufacturers and others wanting to use Linux in commercial embedded hardware.

This because they are coming from other platforms where using a RPC for everything (including the likes of moving massive amounts of raw streaming media data around) was norm, and they latched onto dbus as being the same thing on Linux.

But dbus performance sucks compared to what they used to use, and rather than locate alternatives (like say netlink) they are pushing to get a dbus derivative into the kernel so they can continue their old ways in a new "land".

Frankly i am starting to regret my support for Nokia's Maemo project from years back, as more and more it seems like everything that is, well, crapifying Linux these days seems to have originated from that project.

More and more it feels like very heavy corporate and government interests wants to turn Linux into Windows, with little regard to the potency of *nix concepts.

Meh, he already have GregKH on a leash and Sievers in the wing.

Sticking his neck out directly would be silly, even for him.

Sorry for being late, but have a look at this:

https://gigaom.com/2008/10/08/...

Note that it has been going on for two years already when that article was published in 2008. Meaning that Apple was in the middle a legal wrangle about their DRM when Jobs essay was published.

So even with the latest Fedora they have yet to figure out network storage mounting.

And this is supposed to be the backbone of CoreOS...

Indeed. Apple didn't really turn "anti-DRM" until they got into trouble with market regulators...

The whole thing about gun regulations over there is to regulate without actually regulating, because they have this constitutional amendment that everyone is so hot and bothered about.

What things like this mill does is reveal that the emperor has no clothes. A fact that everyone with a bit of interest in the subject knew, but kept mum about to maintain appearance.

Sounds about right. More and more long running software is facing a changing of the guards, and the new ones approach software development as if it is website devops (you know the bottom has been reached when a ever changing site is being talked about as an "app").

I'm tempted to blame Google and Facebook for this, especially the likes of Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things" slogan.

Costing just as many dollars...

> USB C was something Apple gave the USB folks

Huh?!