Chapter 19: Open Source

This chapter emphasize what it means to develop in the "open" and some
of the practices that developped around this.

Quote:Release early, release often. A rapid release tempo means quick and
effective feedback. When each incremental release is small, changing
course in response to real-world feedback is easier.

Some people have taken this religiously today. A lot of the new languages upgrade often, every months, sometimes breaking backward compatibility. Mort shared on IRC this zero ver, which is relevant.

Quote:Reward contribution with praise. If you can't give your co-developers
material rewards, give psychological ones. Even if you can, remember that
people will often work harder for reputation than they would for gold.

That one has weirdly gone in the reverse direction...

The patch section is great, but a lot of the issues are now fixed with git.

And the autotools tutorial I
was looking for in the previous sections.
On that, I recently started learning the meson build system.

That whole page is definitely a must read if you want to start a serious
open source project. It covers a lot of aspects that aren't obvious.

Chapter 20: Future


The future of Unix, I think it's something we've discussed multiple
times on the forums, from the interface perspective, to new tools and
other new software.

We can't miss the chapter on Plan9. It discusses some features that
inspired other OS, such as union filesystems in this case.

Quote:The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase
that is just good enough.

Quote:These are economic problems. We have other problems of a more political
nature, because success makes enemies.

This is so true.

On the future cultural aspect of Unix, I think we're seeing the change
happening in real time today. New thinking/software always grinds with people.

Quote:The raucous energy, naïvete and gleeful zealotry of the Linux kids
sometimes grates on elders who have been around since the 1970s and
(often rightly) consider themselves wiser. It's only exacerbated by the
fact that the kids are succeeding where the elders failed.

And that concludes this book.
It was a pretty good one, I had read it in the past but a lot of ideas
still hold and are nice to revisit.