Wed Feb 10, 2016 17:31 in General Talk
Some level of fragmentation is good. There is no "one true distro", you just can't please everyone. I do wonder about some of the more...I don't even know what the word is. I mean, it's obvious why we need Debian, and Gentoo, and RedHat. It's less obvious why we need twenty three different versions of Ubuntu, with different people supporting each branch, when you can install the same desktop in any of them anyway. And yes, not giving things back upstream is bad, and Canonical are particularly bad for that.
But, that has limited impact on developer resources anyway. Packagers package distros. If you're a developer, you're using the development branch of whatever software you're developing, and that's not in any package manager.
Status is a huge problem. Calculating, manipulative, back stabbing Stallmans are everywhere. Straight talking Linus's and Dreppers get a bad reputation because they don't smile in your face while stabbing you in the back, but are actually the good guys.
There's more money in Linux than Windows - 45k salary average for Linux, 35k for Windows, in this country at least. But they're mostly support/management/sysadmin type roles, not developers.
But despite all that, it's a simple matter of code. We can fix most of this.