On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 12:02:52AM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:
> Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 11:52:18AM -0700, Stefan Kangas wrote:
> >> 
> >> Has anyone else thought about this?  Is it correct to say that such a
> >> "package first" culture has developed?  If yes, why has it developed,
> >> and is there anything we could do about it?
> >
> > I wonder if it's related to the way that a couple of years ago many of
> > the discussions on the Emacs reddit seemed to revolve around why the
> > Emacs maintainers hadn't yet fixed someone's pet bug, but nobody ever
> > thought to report it to us.
> Could it rather be that a "github" culture has evolved, together with
> social media it makes + melpa it makes it relatively easy to fork
> someone's work, change/fix what bother you and make your own package
> under other name.

This rhymes with one observation I made: Git makes branching easy.
Still, Github strongly encourages forking. Why is this so? My hunch
is that for Github, the number of repositories they host is /currency/
(actually to the tune of $7.5B, as it turned out by 2018). So there's
a strong motivation to multiply the number of repos.

That is, I think, the same mechanism as Twitter or Facebook
tolerating bots as legit accounts (up to a certain point),
because they inflate their market value. And not much different
as Microsoft tolerating pirated versions of Windows (remember
the end-90s where everyone knew that you could generate a valid
Windows license key by making sure that the middle part of
the number was divisible by 7?).

These are, of course, mechanisms which are totally alien to the
Free Software world [1]. But I guess it's standard corporate
fare. Something-something-strategy, I guess.

Cheers
[1] Although we're catching up :-/
-- t