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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

While I have a lot of respect for Ikey and think he's extremely talented, he tends to start a project and then either move to something else or disappear. Hey, life happens, and doing open source work for free is a grind, so it's not meant as an insult. But I'd see Serpent as a toy/POC rather than a long lived OS. I'm excited to try it, either way.

I -believe- I read that a lot of this work will be going into Solus, a previous Ikey project, which has a new team and small community now. So hopefully this is kinda best of both worlds if true for both sides.

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I don't know the author but it's worth keeping in mind that... Sometimes people end working on a project because

- it has no future, ran its course, proved wrong somehow

- cannot add more that others could do better

- an alternative makes more sense long term

It's true that many people end working on something because it gets too hard or they lack focus.

But in this case, seeing the breath of the projects, this is not the case.

Absolutely, thanks for pointing that out. I really hope it didn't come across as condescending, as I didn't intend it to be - because I have the same habit. Do something until it's not exciting anymore and move on. Though unlike myself more often, he tends to actually finish what he's working on initially.

I guess I was trying to paint a short historical picture and why I'm pretty excited about it as a Solus user - its package manager is a bit long in the tooth. I think could be a really great relationship having one team/person prototype and another adopt into something more stable.

I would add:

- it accomplished the task of teaching some technology/language/practice to the author, so that it becomes subjectively useless after that knowledge is absorbed.

Sometimes people start building a car because they need an incentive to practice making wheels.

Sometimes you start a project, more and more people start to collaborate, and eventually most of the project's contributors want to move it in a direction that doesn't interest you.

At that point you can either be a spoilsport, or step away amicably.

I was a Solus user back when Ikey left. It was highly unusual, maintainer team had no insight, and frankly as a user it left a fairly bad taste.

But, Ikey had his reasons, and as I've grown up a bit over the years, I realize it is okay. Other maintainers picked up the tab pretty well, and for all its worth, quite a few of those maintainers have joined Ikey on this new distro, which signals a reconciliation.

Combined with other comments, I'd say what happened at Solus was imperfect, could have been communicated better, but probably still couldn't be avoided. Such is life.

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