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Comment by achikin | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the main issues of open source - people tend to work on what seems fun/interesting/rewarding. As a result a lot of people work on different implementations of the same things instead of coming up with one good solution and creating new things on top of it.

Moreover, while some people work on the endless clones of the same thing, the completely different set of contributors is wasting their time cleaning up / fixing bugs / writing documentation for those endless clones.

Examples are: a lot of Linux distros, which are almost the same but not one of them comes even close to MacOSX as a desktop OS. Javascript frameworks which solve the same rendering problem again and again.

On the other side, there is Spacemacs, which tries to provide solid modern IDE-like experience on top of existing Emacs solution, leaving low-level stuff to emacs core team.

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This is not something intrinsic in the nature of open source, but in how humans like to spend their free time. Of course we could all be much more efficient if we all had the same goals, but that's not how things work in a free society.

As a society we win big by collaboration in the first place. Not by diversity, disagreeing with other people and doing everything "your way". Imagine 1000 independent people trying to build Boeing in an opensource way.

What a bizarre argument. 1,000+ independent people trying their hand in the business world is ultimately how a Boeing is conceived. That is the extreme diversity that benefits society.

I didn't quite get it. Do you mean that Boeing is built by independent people who work on whatever they want to and then a plane is assembled of that independently built parts and no one takes the responsibility of the result? Or you mean that Boeing is subcontracting particular work to independent firms serving as architect, coordinator, and sponsor and taking all the responsibility?

> "Do you mean that Boeing is built by independent people who work on whatever they want to and then a plane is assembled of that independently built parts and no one takes the responsibility of the result?"

Somewhere in the middle. If you consider the work that goes into making a plane, you'll see quite a bit of it happens outside Boeing. To give one example, think of the aluminium that goes into the plane. Boeing doesn't have to mine bauxite, extract the aluminium from the bauxite, transport it to the place where its sold, etc...

A classic example of this ground-up view was this example given by Milton Friedman about the pencil. I don't agree with many of his views, but I think he makes a good point in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

EDIT: Turns out the source of this example may have been Leonard Read:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

Great video, thank you! Yes, most of the work is done outside of Boeing, but it is done specially for Boeing, not that people work on whatever sort of aluminum they want but they know Boeing demand and supply them with the particular sort. On the other side Boeing pay them money so they can proceed to mine. This is what I mean under the collaboration.

Glad you liked the video.

Regarding...

"On the other side Boeing pay them money so they can proceed to mine."

Perhaps you know more about Boeing's business arrangements than me, but I certainly couldn't verify that that's true. From what little I know, it's possible Boeing's aluminium suppliers work exclusively for Boeing, but it's also possible these same aluminium suppliers have multiple customers. The point being, there could be people who work as part of the chain to produce and transport the aluminium who have no idea who will eventually use it.

Labor has negative utility. You have to compensate if you want people do labor.

In a business setting, you pay people.

In a hobby setting like that, people compensate by having fun.

Either approach is compatible with producing open-source software; I suspect most LOC of open-source projects are written by salaried contributors at large corporations.

>> This is one of the main issues of open source - people tend to work on what seems fun/interesting/rewarding. As a result a lot of people work on different implementations of the same things instead of coming up with one good solution and creating new things on top of it.

You could say the same thing about commercial software (and other) development. They just call it competition. In business they claim it is efficient and drives innovation. In open source it's said to be inefficient and a waste of time.

I think it's incomplete analysis. I partly agree but what makes the Desktop Environment problem is more an issue of culture and education. People creating distro are implementing what they saw and it's often recent similar efforts. If people knew how OS2, Xerox, BeOS worked they'd have a different desires and goals.

> This is one of the main issues of open source - people tend to work on what seems fun/interesting/rewarding. As a result a lot of people work on different implementations of the same things instead of coming up with one good solution and creating new things on top of it.

Creating new things is better than sitting on a sofa watching TV or playing video games all day. Furthermore, it often opens the door to possible new, unforeseen use cases, concepts, and success. Open source has a natural evolutionary path. Survival of the fittest, rather than survival of the richest.

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