On May 7, 2014, at 2:17 PM, Anthony Sorace <a@9srv.net> wrote:

> What some folks are suggesting is that some coordination would yield better results; that we can do better than the "everyone going off and doing their own thing" part of the above scenarios.
> 
> I believe Erik's point about "falling into disrepair" is that if everyone is spending time fixing the same issues, each on their own without any coordination, is that the resulting system will increasingly fail to keep up with the evolution of the surrounding world. Even if the code for all the parts I need to drive exist, that's not the same as having a running system.

I do think there is an analogy to be made with the 4.x BSD releases.  They were few and far between, but they were also the prescriptive reference points for that UNIX fork.  There was a lot of development that branched off from the UCB code base.  But much of what was of benefit to all (device drivers, VM enhancements, apps) was folded back into the core.  The CSRG encouraged that.  And with the CSRG releases as a reference, it wasn't that difficult to share local modifications between sites.

But the Labs are not the CSRG.  There is no longer a central focus point for the code base.  Not in the community sense – the Labs are no longer interested.  We are losing the 'reference implementation' from which the branches can be compared.  Without an anchor we will drift off in many incompatible directions, to the point where code sharing will become so annoying it just won't happen (in the kernel at least, and in the /dev/* user space as a side effect).

--lyndon