It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it will be taken over by ghouls.
Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom behaviour and it becoming too complex.
There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.
No project or development style is perfect and they all come with their own set of upsides and downsides. PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years from now will be a different type of project with different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will be worse. I'm not so worried about this.
Linux is a trademark of Linus. Which is why Linux Foundation which is run by corporates like Microsoft, Google etc is staying aside. After Linus, it would like corporate board memebers changing CEOs at their wish.
The Linux Foundation also runs several other projects, none of which do I see being ran terribly poorly from a corporate meddling point. I can only hope that is a strong signal of things to come.
Did I say anything is run poorly? Or good for that matter? The difference is intent. Run for community and run for corporate are both different. Currenlty Linus is the only thing standing in the way of LF pulling another Rust Foundation. Cos it's run by corporates as well. Time will tell.
Rust foundation has not been very community friendly. That's cos corporates run it. There was a fork of the language called crab or something cos of this at one point. Take Linus out of the scenario, it's the same thing that's probable about Linux Foundation.
I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates for important roles in the future. This [2] interview from 2020 touches the subject as well.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
GHOULS doesn't even begin to describe the people who take over these foundations. They are parasites who seek out nonprofits to infiltrate, and once they gain a position of power they bring in their pals and set up shop. Suddenly the CoC is weaponized to crush dissent, the decisions are made behind closed doors, and the organization starts contributing to political organizations that help their class of parasites spread. And there are WAY more of them than there are good-hearted honest people starting foundations. When a new foundation is created, these parasites line up to see who can corrupt it first.
No. It was a revolution against a regime where the rich paid NO taxes.
Article 9 of the august decree – Fiscal privileges in the payment of taxes were abolished forever. Taxes were to be collected from all the citizens, in exactly the same manner, and plans were to be considered to set up a new method of tax collection. [0]
Can't you improve a compression algorithm and still produce a still valid decompression input? PNG is based on zip, there's certainly ways to improve zip without breaking backwards compatibility.
That being said, they also can do dumb things however, right at the end of the sentence you quote they say:
> Can't you improve a compression algorithm and still produce a still valid decompression input? PNG is based on zip, there's certainly ways to improve zip without breaking backwards compatibility.
That's just changing an implementation detail of the encoder, and you don't need spec changes for that e.g. there are PNG compressors which support zopfli for extra gains on the DEFLATE (at a non-insignificant cost). This is transparent to the client as the output is still just a DEFLATE stream.
Maybe with the new x86 backend we might see some performance differences between C and Zig that could definitely be attributed solely to the Zig project.
So would the Zig team. AFAIK, they don't plan to (and have said this in interviews). The plan is for super fast compilation and incremental compilation. I think the homegrown backend is mainly for debug builds.
The backends do already have some simple optimizations. Of course focus is debug builds and speed, but long term goal is for them to be competitive as well.
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