2 Sep
2012
2 Sep
'12
3:29 p.m.
Seriously: the great Reddit horde has no idea how bad
things were
before GNU shook it up.
The great Reddit horde has no idea how bad things are now, either.
Bad in completely different ways, mind you. But anyone who lived
through the net with Jon Postel at the top of its governance pyramid
will have some idea. (They won't all agree with me that today is
worse. But I think they'll all agree that today is drastically
different and that many aspects of today's setup are bad.)
It was hard to dream in 1985 that gcc would supplant
just about every
vendor compiler, and when RMS said he hoped this would happen, many
said he was nuts (we have Usenet archives to prove it).
I'm not sure he wasn't nuts.
But it did eventually happen. :)
It did. And now we're scarily close to having a compiler monoculture.
I don't consider that cure worse than the disease...but I do consider
it relatively close. I dislike - and deeply distrust - monocultures of
any sort.
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