(Off Topic ) Open Source: The Model Is Broken ??

[Les Mikesell]

Les wrote:

>> There is a well known book publisher covering technical topics with a 
>> bazillion titles, but published books can't keep up with the rate of 
>> change in fedora.  What we need is a way to eliminate most of the need 
>> for local configuration in the same way open source eliminates most of 
>> the need for local programming for common tasks.  That is, have a way 
>> that a configuration that someone has expertly tuned for a particular 
>> purpose can be shared with anyone who needs to do the same kind of work. 
>> Fedora mostly just ships one config file for every program and might do 
>> a little tweaking to match hardware and user choices during 
>> installation.  If there were perhaps a hundred choices instead, 
>> pre-tuned to different usage models, the end user would only need to 
>> know what he wanted to accomplish, not the million variables he had to 
>> change to do it.

> But who would collect, setup the access, vet the operation of those 100
> setups, provide accurate information about how they are tuned, and so on
> and so on and so on....

It is definitely a missing piece but more a 'how' than a 'who'.  In my 
opinion it should be part of a distribution's infrastructure, needed 
just as much as the part that manages the source code.  People who have 
a configuration they want to share should be able to do it with an 
action as simple as committing to a version control system.  In fact 
with a distributed VC, it should be possible to have a system that could 
be used locally for farms of machines and also push a copy up to a 
public repository.

I can't imagine anyone today designing an operating system with 
thousands of lines of unversioned cruft spattered all over the place 
that actually control the way it works (or doesn't...).

"Vetting" should be like every other fedora item: let the users download 
it and if it is broken they get to keep both pieces.  Having a way to 
add comments and feedback would let you crowdsource the work of 
determining what works best in what situations, though.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com