On Jan 1, 2015, at 2:15 PM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote: > On Wed, December 31, 2014 12:03, Warren Young wrote: >> >> So, cope with change. > > Is one to infer from your mantra 'cope with change' that one is not supposed > to express any opinion whatsoever, ever, on any forum No, it’s a reaction to those who apparently want nothing to change ever again. A lot of people are constitutionally unwilling to cope with the removal of their cheese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F Well, tough. Either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the precipitate. Or something like that. > on the externalised > cost of changes made to software with no evident technical justification? Yelling about it on the CentOS mailing list isn’t going to affect *anything*. If you want to effect change, go join the Fedora development community. I did not say go yell over the wall *at* the Fedora development community, I said go *join them*. Get involved. Put your code out into the marketplace of ideas as an alternative to the ideas currently being offered. If you’ve truly got the best solution, you’ll start to move things in the direction you want them to go. It’s not going to happen immediately, but in a do-ocracy, those who do things accrete ruling powers. Or, you can go fork EL6 or whatever other “classic” distro that makes you happier. That’s a lot more work and just adds to the fractiousness that’s part of the problem here, but if your ideas really are hot, you’ll cause another of the occasional shifts that happen in the Unix/Linux landscape. > We all cope with change until we die. That is not a philosophy or program. It is an observation on the state of existence; and is no more useful than the observation that, eventually, we all die. The conservative mindset (small “c”) doesn’t want to cope. A lot of social progress happens only through generational turn-over. I’d prefer that Linux keeps moving forward faster than generational speed. That means we cannot allow change to be delayed until those currently using the existing tech get done with their careers in tech. Technology is a field for unabashed neophiles. My definition of “technology” is the set of things that don’t work reliably yet. Once a thing has been perfected, it stops being tech. *Pencils* were once high-tech. Computers? We’re still working on that one.