The future of Foss is in corporate time donations for projects that are useful for them. Open software collaboration is one hell of an efficiency gain. Whenever me or my colleagues have dead time I ask them to work on improving open source projects. It’s just a few days every few months but it adds up. Also we like to fix bugs in Foss software that affects our customers as we usually fix and upstream them and can bill that to the customer. So the company gets played, the worker gets payed and open source gets funding. No more sole maintainers for life that don’t have money to heat their homes because nobody donates. :)
Perhaps not relevant to the conversation, but if you use and enjoy any FOSS product, donate money to the maintainers when you can
They were doing this all by themselves?!
Well, “maintainer” is usually a single person job. They didn’t write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.
So I mean, it’s not great nobody is stepping up, but it’s also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux’s wifi support single handed, either.
Other people stepped up like within a day.
That’s great! Any idea who?
Where did you read that? I only saw Johannes Berg saying he couldn’t maintain that stack too, after three days.
Ah cool, the one time I read the article it’s wrong and saying that there hadn’t been someone who had stepped up yet.
Well, I’ll go back to making uninformed comments based solely on the headline, because clearly the articles are not adding any value. (/s, etc.)
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Btw, you can embedd the image like that:
It will look like that:
Oddly xkcd’s image has no signature or other information identifying the creator.
Unless you get one of the day’s 10’000, it’ll be recognised by any tech people.
Post in addition to the link.
There’s lots of developers contributing to the wifi drivers, there’s just no “lead maintainer” now
The article isn’t entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I’d expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.
I’d like it if Valve steps up to do the job. They’re making hardware that needs WiFi, might as well go all in.
Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell
The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon. 😕
Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
Steve burned out a long time ago after all the free work he did on top of his day job.
It’s better if the titular Steve isn’t from US. Right now at least.
Unfortunately, relying on individuals is what caused the problen in the first place.
Did you try asking Steve? He won’t return my calls
And Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD. Or probably several others as well.
What is up with all the maintainers stepping down lately?
A number of them have written about their reasons- I can’t speak for the maintainer this article is about but the general sentiment I’ve seen from the ones I’ve been hearing about is that the culture around kernel development is dogwater. Lots of it surrounding refusal to make any space for R4L and shitting on devs working on it, but then also spinning out of that are maintainers likening their quality control responsibilities to being “the thin blue line”.
Ethernet cable intensifies
I hope they invent wireless ethernet
Maybe we can put it on the open 2.4GHz spectrum and encrypt it with RC4.
Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol. It can run on many different mediums and cable types.
But can it run over wet string, though?
I bet you can run 10base2 over it
I mean, probably someone at qualcomm will likely take his place? They need drivers for themselves anyway and will probably continue providing them. I have no idea who the contributors of similar drivers are but I’d imagine Intel makes drivers for their wifi chips themselves and contributes them to the kernel since they count as one of the biggest contributors.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/youngsters_in_foss/
Read this a few days ago and it feels pretty relevant here.
deleted by creator
anyone working with FOSS should be celebrated much more. They are the people who make the world better for all of us while money grubbers are driving it to hell.
The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.
For example, if AOL back in the day had made ‘campus edition’, then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the “modern” connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL’s strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.
Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren’t already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been “worth it”.
So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been “contained” to the places where it’s pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.
git gud.
And it’s not that hard. Here’s a primer:
- git clone - download a copy of a repo (do once)
- git checkout - change branches (-b to create a new branch); a branch is a set of changes (commits, state of the code) and you can easily jump between them
- git add - select files you want to commit (submit to the project)
- git commit - do the commit; etiquette for the message is one line brief summary of the change, then a blank line, then optional additional paragraphs with more explanation
- git push (
-u origin <branch name>the first time for a new branch) - send the changes to your online repo
When you run into problems, ask for help. Each team does things a little differently, so you’ll want to ask your lead before doing most other git operations.
I’m a lead and I’m happy to sit with new team members for a half hour and walk them through the basics and with their first few commits. Everyone seems to catch on pretty quickly.
being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science
Eh, let them try and fail at starting their own thing. It turns out, writing software is hard, and writing good software is even harder, especially when you need to build it from scratch. FOSS is a wealth of pretty good code that you can build off of to make cool stuff quickly.
But it doesn’t build itself, FOSS needs people to maintain it, and at some point you’ll need something nobody else wants to build. But maintaining that thing takes time, and people out there will help you with it once you build it. So build your thing in such a way that it can solve other use cases, and people will start using it, and some will contribute to it, solving their own use cases because it’s easier than making their own thing.
That’s what FOSS is, it’s a community effort to share solutions to problems so others help you make it better. You benefit from their work, and they benefit from yours, and everyone is better off. Businesses are easier to build on FOSS, as are hobby projects, so share as much as you can so you don’t have to maintain it yourself.
I honestly don’t see a business case for not using and contributing to FOSS extensively. It’s just too expensive to build or buy everything yourself.
You don’t need to gate keep to only those with a quest to solve problems, just appeal to human nature and demonstrate that FOSS is good for selfish pursuits as well. It turns out that a rising tide (FOSS) lifts all boats.
And this is how I see Linux quickly unravelling and planned insecurities creeping in over the next decade or so.
Jeeze. Not everything is doom. Someone else will step up. In fact, they already have started adjusting.
These things happen periodically.
It turns out people switch jobs, retire, or just burn out. Other maintainers can cover while they select a new one.
You’re being dramatic, the world will collapse before this becomes a problem
I always say the doom of humanity won’t be wars or something sudden. It’ll be something that’s been silently happening: the extinction of species and ecosystems one by one that’s been accelerating in the last 50 years. And now with global warming, it’ll only get worse because environments are changing and forcing species out of their homes.
And this is something I don’t see getting better at all. Social media just seems to have made people even more egocentric and selfish and actionless too, because ranting about problems online makes people feel like they did their part.
We’ll just witness the world falling apart one disaster after another and watch it as “entertainment” on TikTok and Reels, until it’s our turn.
how so?
Is it the new cool thing for Linux maintainers to step down?
Third time I’ve seen it recently…
It’s demographics. Linux contributors & maintainers skew heavily to the older end of the spectrum (and, although not relevant to this point, also skew heavily male).
People who can contribute time to a project for free tend to be older because they are financially and career settled by the time they hit 50s. Raising a family tends not to leave a lot of spare time.
Bingo.
Contributing and/or maintaining a FOSS project < not getting murdered by my wife for “playing on my computer instead of spending time with my family.”
It could be some of the most mission-critical work imaginable, but she’d still see it as goofing around because I’m not getting paid, and she requires attention. And I love the hell out of my wife, so happy wife indeed equals happy life.
Make linux your wife and then everyone will be happy.
Except OP.
Yeah but the issue with the guy leading Asahi Linux, which is probably the other one mentioned, has nothing to do with him being old.
That also happens. I’m honestly surprised they lasted that long, doing any OS work on Apple hardware sucks. You have a small user base and an even smaller contributor base, poor documentation, and zero support from the manufacturer. It’s the perfect storm of headwinds.
Should I be worried?
No.
I used to daily drive Ubuntu some years ago for work/personal use but have been back on Win 10 primarily for the last 4-5 years. I was considering trying to go back due to how much Windows sucks (despite some proprietary software only being available on it) but remembering the trouble I had with some networking/printer drivers and troubleshooting those issues and then seeing this article Is definitely making me reconsider…
I haven’t seen Wireless driver issues in years. Any non arcane devices have drivers and most distros enable most of them in their kernel.
Wireless drivers are in a lot better state than they used to be, printer drivers are very dependent on the brand you have.
IME (YMMV) Brother printers seem to consistently work quite well and Epson printers seem to consistently be shit.
Literally have the opposite experience. Fought with my old Brother printer constantly. My Epson Ecotank is rock-solid.
It astounds me that people who support linux get personally offended if you say you’re not sure linux is for you.
I watched a video where a guy installed linux, and then installed a new desktop environment that caters to touchscreen. He got a bunch of errors. So he said “Ah, that’s alright! I’ll just bring up terminal”
And then he types
sudo add do willywop bojanga -l -r ♧¿¤☆▪︎●
And I’m like “ok, hold on. How the fuck does he just KNOW that exact string is what will fix it???”
If you don’t speak terminal, that shits confusing as hell.
And now this story is like smokey the bear. “Only YOU can maintain wifi protocols. Seriously. I’m done. It’s just you now. The professionals are sick of this shit.”
So it’s reasonable that non-techies are like “I had some issues before, but now I’ll have MORE issues if I comd back…I better stick with what I kjow works.”
Meanwhile lemmy users are like “BOOO WINDOWS!!! BOOOO I SAY!!! WHY DON’T YOU JUST UNDERSTAND THE THINGS YOU DON’T GET???”
And thus…you have downvotes for saying logically reasonable things that piss off obsessive types who would downvote each other over which distro is best.
I’m not disagreeing with you, I just want to say, the reason the terminal is helpful in these types of scenarios is never communicated properly in my opinion.
The reason when you ask people for help or Google stuff and get terminal commands back is because they are clear, concise, and reproducible. It’s really hard from the perspective of the people helping, to communicate, usually over text, how to navigate UIs that are ever changing and change depending on the users hardware and setup. This is true for windows too, and it’s why getting any help beyond very simple troubleshooting will devolve into powershell commands.
As for this scenario, it’s just inflammatory on purpose, would anyone mention or care if one person at Microsoft who was a project lead retired after decades of working? There are literally thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel, this is just one of them retiring. A maintainer is only one role in a project and can (and will) very easily be replaced. If not by a volunteer, then in a paid position from one of the many companies that pay developers to maintain the Linux kernel. Regardless, there is already people maintaining the the ath10k, ath11k, and ath12k drivers. This is really just a non issue of a temporary vacancy for one position, the same thing that happens at every single software organization every day.
They’re even defending their decision to because it somehow isn’t relevant to the article enough for them. Its a cult.
But…your comment LITERALLY is based in the fact that switch back to linux would frustrate you BECAUSE OF THE WIFI SITUATION THE ARTICLE IS ABOUT!!!
clearly getting aggitated at life
Humans are stupid.
What boggles my mind is they WANT more people to join them them obliterate anyone who may try to and wonder why no one wants to bother. Like an OS where I’m going to need to learn things is one thing, but one where I need to learn from people like them . . . yeah I see why they don’t have success with people outside comp sci fields.
They have already adjusted the team.
Lmfao ‘how dare you have an expirence other than Linux is great!’
This fucking site man.
Based on this article? Yeah, the downvotes are appropriate.
This article: Oh no, someone might have to step up and solve this problem in a year or two.
That guy: This is why I can’t use Linux now.
Maybe Id buy that if yall didn’t do the same thing to someone else explaining they have problems too once one of you tried to explain to the previous commenter that his expirence was wrong. You just hate seeing things that dont fit your penguin superiority complex. No matter the context.
Great! FreeBSD needs help with WiFi!
So two thousands and ten eleven
twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twentyone twentytwo twentythree twentyfour twentyfivetwentynine is the year of Linux on desktop!
