Always sad when Capitalism/monetization creeps in and cripples/pollutes open and free movements/projects :-( There are many many examples of projects dying off, converting to proprietary, etc. Luckily people are forking and creating new FOSS software all the time. I'm going more and more full FOSS, de-google/meta/m$ and so on. I'm tired always spending time changing software/workflow because of monetization creep, I'm tired of closed drivers, telemetry/spying, bitcoin scams and all the other utter garbage the Capitalist religion brings in to my life.
I have chosen Guix as my new home partly for this reason. Here, the default is that if I doesn't compromise, I know that I won't suddenly see these yucky things creeping into my system. That gives me a safe space where I can plan/build long term without wasting my time fighting Capitalism and all the shit that automatically follows..
I hope the Nix community finds a solution.
From article:
Paying people to develop features or fixing bug is fine, but when a huge number of contributors are paid by companies, this lead to poor decisions and conflicts of interest.
I think this depends on the structure of the project though. The Linux kernel has a huge number of corporate contributors, but it seems to be doing ok.
Yes, indeed.But the Linux kernel is just the kernel, small compared to a Linux distribution user land with a massive amount of packages to choose from.
Unrelated but curious, why do people say that nixpkgs is the largest package repo? Debian unstable has over 200k packages.
It's based on the stats found here. https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total
They say that because https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total says so. Debian unstable has 38k packages according to that page.
Then that site is completely wrong. I'm not even sure where the 38k number comes from.
If you go to https://packages.debian.org/stable/, at the bottom of each branch page (selectable from the top list) is a link to a txt list of all packages for that branch.
If you run a quick
wc -lthrough them you get 234k packages for sid (unstable), 130k for testing and 121k for bookworm (stable).The wierd thing is that's also what repology links to, but I don't understand what they parse to arrive at that number.
The numbers are different because the site doesn't naively count every line but merges some as a single package. For example, at the very top of the Debian list we have 0ad, 0ad-data, 0ad-data-common. These are all counted as one single "package."
One might argue that doing the comparison in that way is more useful to an average user asking "which distribution has more software available."
I guess it depends how aggressively they merge packages... Some software has different versions which are all useful. Some software has multiple packages which are different things, for example a theming engine can have packages for various widget libraries and various versions (GTK3, GTK4, QT5, QT6) as well as an icon theme.
On the other hand, repos like the AUR (probably nix too) have outright duplicated packages, made by independent contributors.
