critical mass of developers

[pocock]

Looking at my recent experiences with some packages such as Thunderbird sqlite, Gimp (linker), OBS Studio (can't remember what I tweaked but it builds a package now) and even making my own kernel and installer ISO with 4K page size, none of these things were too hard to resolve or work around but on the other hand, it becomes tedious if a developer encounters stuff like that every day.

With Thunderbird specifically, unless it is fixed upstream, I have to spend some time adapting my patch to each new version of the package.  It is not hard work, it may only take 30 minutes but it is tedious and takes energy away from new development.

Hopefully when Vikings make their products available in Europe, some more developers will decide to try the platform for their next workstation and this will distribute the burden more widely.

It is important to have some reach into other ecosystems, for example, if there were two or three developers in each big upstream community like Mozilla, GNOME and KDE/Qt using this platform, they would notice any issues much more quickly and issues would be fixed centrally, before anybody tries to release or package new versions of those products.  Does anybody already know about interest in any of those communities?

For OS level development it can be really useful for developers to have multiple workstations, for example, one as a stable workstation and a second machine that we can reboot multiple times per day to test kernels and hardware.  Only having one machine right now, I tend to avoid testing anything that might require a reboot because I don't want to close and re-open all the different applications that I'm using.

If anybody has any old hardware that they wanted to donate to developers or if anybody knows of any funding to subsidize hardware for developers in different projects that could help the platform gain critical mass.  As with Metcalfe's law in telecoms, each extra developer adds more value than their personal contribution.  Any other ideas would be welcome too.

[mparnaudeau]

We need to increase the community size. The critical enabler was to have machines to buy, Raptor CS did that (I don't see why IBM did not, as it is really correlated with the success of the architecture). There are some Linux distributions. Now the sell process might be easier, at least in Europe (but will that also mean cheaper?). Fixing and improving apps will help to bring this ecosystem at a user level.
I don't know about the big upstream communities but providing patches to other open source projects will make POWER more visible ... what may make it more attractive.

About old hardware, do you think about ppc64-le hardware only or not?

[ClassicHasClass]

I, personally, think about big-endian ppc64 a great deal, but the only systems with large distribution in that category are the G5s and they're quite old by current standards.

I like big-endian and I cannot lie but ppc64le is an easier lift.

[tle]

I hope RaptorCS could strike deals with distributors in Australia so users don't have to pay 10% to 20% extra for tax and shipping. That amount of money could be used to buy a new GPU or NVMe M2

[MPC7500]

Having RCS distributers all over the world would be a first step. But more important, in my opinion, would be to have a super cheap PPC64le (POWER8+ compatible) device to attract more developers to the platform.

Now this has nothing to do with PowerPC, but my dream would be if all Linux developers would join together to create one single LinuxOS. An OS that you can configure as you like during installation. Starting with the init system, package-management, one source pool etc..

On one side it is good that there are so many distributions, but in the end every distribution fights for itself. One and the same patch is made a thousand times. A waste of time. Microsoft and Apple certainly don't mind for sure.

If all developers would work together Linux would become the number one OS in every area overnight. Exotic hardware would automatically be better supported.

But it will probably remain for a long time that the Judean People' s Front is fighting against the People's Front of Judea.

[pocock]

The fighting inside organizations is often worse than the fighting between organizations.

The litmus test for a damaged culture is the almost total lack of women in many influential free software organizations, including the distributions.