The root problem is simply the modern, old, OS++ concept, or the divide et impera commercial concept.
Classic systems was a single application, fully integrated. This design create a slow, incremental evolution and a plethora of small improvements, the commercial design of compartmentalized levels have created a Babel tower of dysfunctional crap mostly trying to punch holes between levels.
An example: a single NixOS home server can do on a very small system what a modern deploy with docker and co can do on an equivalent starship, a simple Emacs buffer, let's say a mail compose one, can allow quickly solving an ODE via Maxima, while a modern Office Suite can't without manual cut and paste and gazillion SLoC more, a Plan 9 mail system do not need to implement complex storage handling and network protocols, all it need is just in the system, mounting someone else remote mailbox, save a file there it's sending a message, reading a file from a mounted filesystem is reading one and the same is for viewing a website. In Gnus a mail, an RSS article and NNTP post are the same, because they are DAMN THE SAME, a damn text with optional extras consisting of a title and a body. That's the power of simplicity we lost to push walled gardens and keep users locked-in and powerless.
The modern commercial IT is simply untenable:
- even Alphabet can't scan the whole web, a distributed YaCy on gazzilion of homeservers can though, and with MUCH LESS iron and costs for the whole humanity;
- nobody can map as in an OSM model, since anybody doing it share everything on every other;
This is the power of FLOSS. It's time to admit that we can't afford a commerce/finance managed nervous system of our societies, simply.
Classic systems was a single application, fully integrated. This design create a slow, incremental evolution and a plethora of small improvements, the commercial design of compartmentalized levels have created a Babel tower of dysfunctional crap mostly trying to punch holes between levels.
An example: a single NixOS home server can do on a very small system what a modern deploy with docker and co can do on an equivalent starship, a simple Emacs buffer, let's say a mail compose one, can allow quickly solving an ODE via Maxima, while a modern Office Suite can't without manual cut and paste and gazillion SLoC more, a Plan 9 mail system do not need to implement complex storage handling and network protocols, all it need is just in the system, mounting someone else remote mailbox, save a file there it's sending a message, reading a file from a mounted filesystem is reading one and the same is for viewing a website. In Gnus a mail, an RSS article and NNTP post are the same, because they are DAMN THE SAME, a damn text with optional extras consisting of a title and a body. That's the power of simplicity we lost to push walled gardens and keep users locked-in and powerless.
The modern commercial IT is simply untenable:
- even Alphabet can't scan the whole web, a distributed YaCy on gazzilion of homeservers can though, and with MUCH LESS iron and costs for the whole humanity;
- nobody can map as in an OSM model, since anybody doing it share everything on every other;
This is the power of FLOSS. It's time to admit that we can't afford a commerce/finance managed nervous system of our societies, simply.