Title: Dear open source developers | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 09 September 2021 | |
Tags: life | |
Description: | |
Dear open source and libre software developers, I would like to share | |
thoughts with you. This could be considered as an open letter but I'm | |
not sure to know what an open letter is, and I don't want to give | |
instructions to anyone. I have feelings I want to share about my | |
beloved hobby: computers and open source. | |
Computers are amazing, they do stuff, lot of stuff, at hardware and | |
software level. We can use them for anything, they are a great tool | |
and we can program our tools to match our expectations, wishes and | |
needs, it's not easy, it's an art but also a science, we do it together | |
because it's a huge task requiring more than one brain time to achieve. | |
We are currently facing supply chain issues at many levels in the | |
electronic industry, making modern high end computers is always more | |
complicated, we also face pollution concerns and limited resources that | |
will prevent an infinity of computers. | |
I would like to see my hobby affordable for anyone. There are many | |
many computers already built and most of their parts can be replaced | |
which is a crazy opportunity when you compare this to the smartphone | |
industry where no parts can be changed. | |
As people writing software used by others, it is absolutely important | |
to keep old computers useful. They were useful when they were built, | |
they should still be useful in the future to some extent. | |
Nowadays, a computer without network access would be considered useless | |
but it's not. But if you want to connect a computer to the Internet, | |
facing continuously increase of network attacks, one should only use an | |
up to date operating system and latest software version, unfortunately | |
it's not always easy on old computers. | |
Some cryptography may require regularly increased minimum requirements, | |
this is acceptable. What is not is that doing the same task on a | |
computer requires more resources over the years as software grows and | |
evolves. | |
Nowadays, regularly, more operating systems are dropping support for | |
older architectures to only focus on amd64. This is understandable, | |
volunteer work is limited and it's important to focus on the hardware | |
found in most of the users computers. But then, by doing so they are | |
making old hardware obsolete which is not acceptable. | |
I understand this is a huge dilemma and I have no solution, maybe we | |
should need less operating systems to gather the volunteers to maintain | |
older but still relevant architectures. It is not possible obviously, | |
volunteers work on what they want because they like it, you can't | |
assign contributors to some task against their will. | |
The issue is at a higher scale and every person working in the IT field | |
is part of the problem. | |
# More ? | |
Some are dropping old architectures because there are no users. There | |
are no users because they have to replace their hardware with a more | |
powerful new hardware to cope with software becoming more and more | |
hungry of resources. They become so because of people writing | |
software, because companies want to do unoptimized code to release the | |
product with less development time implying a cheaper cost, with the | |
trade-off of asking customers to use a more powerful computer. | |
The web become unusable on old hardware, you can't use the world wide | |
web anymore on old hardware because of lack of memory, lack of | |
javascript support or too much animations using the CPU that you can't | |
disable. | |
When you think about open source systems, many think "Linux", and most | |
people think "amd64". A big part of the open source ecosystem is now | |
driven toward Linux/amd64 target, at the cost of all the OS / | |
architectures that are still in use, existing, not dead. | |
We could argue that technology is evolving and that those should make | |
the work to stay in the race with the holy Linux/amd64 combo, this is a | |
receivable argument as open source can be used / forked by everyone. | |
But it would work so much better if we worked as a whole team. | |
# Thoughts | |
I just wanted to express my feelings with this blog post. I don't want | |
to tell anyone what to do, we are the open source community, we do what | |
we enjoy. | |
I own old computers, from 15 years old to 8 years old, I still like to | |
use them. Why would they be "old"? because of their date of | |
manufacture, this is a fact. But because of the software ecosystem, | |
they are becoming more obsolete every year and I definitely don't | |
understand why it must be this way. | |
If you can give a thought to my old computers when writing code, | |
thinking about them and make a three lines changes to improve your | |
software for them, I would be absolutely grateful for the extra work. | |
We don't really need more computers, we need to dig out the old | |
computers to make them useful again. | |
Thank you very much dear community <3 |