Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix

Note that this isn't exclusive to FOSS, but it's just more transparent.

Over the last decade I've seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.

But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn't mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.

It's gotta change to true community, where we lift each other up, looking to the future, readying others to take our mantle when we retire. That's the only way FOSS will thrive and have a chance to compete with corpos.

Maybe we can put it on the open 2.4GHz spectrum and encrypt it with RC4.

Weird that’s what my girlfriend says.

The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.

For example, if AOL back in the day had made 'campus edition', then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the "modern" connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL's strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.

Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren't already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been "worth it".

So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been "contained" to the places where it's pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.

anyone working with FOSS should be celebrated much more. They are the people who make the world better for all of us while money grubbers are driving it to hell.

git gud.

And it's not that hard. Here's a primer:

• git clone - download a copy of a repo (do once)
• git checkout - change branches (-b to create a new branch); a branch is a set of changes (commits, state of the code) and you can easily jump between them
• git add - select files you want to commit (submit to the project)
• git commit - do the commit; etiquette for the message is one line brief summary of the change, then a blank line, then optional additional paragraphs with more explanation
• git push (-u origin <branch name> the first time for a new branch) - send the changes to your online repo

When you run into problems, ask for help. Each team does things a little differently, so you'll want to ask your lead before doing most other git operations.

I'm a lead and I'm happy to sit with new team members for a half hour and walk them through the basics and with their first few commits. Everyone seems to catch on pretty quickly.

being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science

Eh, let them try and fail at starting their own thing. It turns out, writing software is hard, and writing good software is even harder, especially when you need to build it from scratch. FOSS is a wealth of pretty good code that you can build off of to make cool stuff quickly.

But it doesn't build itself, FOSS needs people to maintain it, and at some point you'll need something nobody else wants to build. But maintaining that thing takes time, and people out there will help you with it once you build it. So build your thing in such a way that it can solve other use cases, and people will start using it, and some will contribute to it, solving their own use cases because it's easier than making their own thing.

That's what FOSS is, it's a community effort to share solutions to problems so others help you make it better. You benefit from their work, and they benefit from yours, and everyone is better off. Businesses are easier to build on FOSS, as are hobby projects, so share as much as you can so you don't have to maintain it yourself.

I honestly don't see a business case for not using and contributing to FOSS extensively. It's just too expensive to build or buy everything yourself.

You don't need to gate keep to only those with a quest to solve problems, just appeal to human nature and demonstrate that FOSS is good for selfish pursuits as well. It turns out that a rising tide (FOSS) lifts all boats.

It turns out people switch jobs, retire, or just burn out. Other maintainers can cover while they select a new one.

I always say the doom of humanity won’t be wars or something sudden. It’ll be something that’s been silently happening: the extinction of species and ecosystems one by one that’s been accelerating in the last 50 years. And now with global warming, it’ll only get worse because environments are changing and forcing species out of their homes.

And this is something I don’t see getting better at all. Social media just seems to have made people even more egocentric and selfish and actionless too, because ranting about problems online makes people feel like they did their part.

We’ll just witness the world falling apart one disaster after another and watch it as “entertainment” on TikTok and Reels, until it’s our turn.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to say, the reason the terminal is helpful in these types of scenarios is never communicated properly in my opinion.

The reason when you ask people for help or Google stuff and get terminal commands back is because they are clear, concise, and reproducible. It's really hard from the perspective of the people helping, to communicate, usually over text, how to navigate UIs that are ever changing and change depending on the users hardware and setup. This is true for windows too, and it's why getting any help beyond very simple troubleshooting will devolve into powershell commands.

As for this scenario, it's just inflammatory on purpose, would anyone mention or care if one person at Microsoft who was a project lead retired after decades of working? There are literally thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel, this is just one of them retiring. A maintainer is only one role in a project and can (and will) very easily be replaced. If not by a volunteer, then in a paid position from one of the many companies that pay developers to maintain the Linux kernel. Regardless, there is already people maintaining the the ath10k, ath11k, and ath12k drivers. This is really just a non issue of a temporary vacancy for one position, the same thing that happens at every single software organization every day.