Why we need more, not less, GNU/Linux distributions.

When I announced Kongoni about two months ago – there were three basic responses. The first group of people didn’t care, the second group were excited and wanted to be part of it, the third were denigrating and saying it’s a bad idea.

Some of that third group was attacking my technical decisions – some of their points were valid and led me to change those decisions, others were irrelevant or so far removed from the vision I am trying to achieve that myself and the other contributors wholeheartedly rejected those criticisms. But there was another section of those critiques that focused on something else. I had expected one or two of them, but the amount I got was staggering… and to me as a old time GNU/Linux user scary.
The argument was simply this: “Why do we need yet another Linux distro ?”

Often paraphrased in forms like: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just make a custom ubuntu respin and change the things that annoy you about it ?” or even worse: “What are you planning to offer that Ubuntu/Gnewsense doesn’t already ?”

I was honestly shocked by the numbers of these questions – and since I hadn’t really expected them, I didn’t really have a well formulated answer ready. Oh I knew the answers, but I hadn’t had them well prepared. Today I came across a blog post that actually answers a lot of it.

I don’t agree with every single statement but the differences are minor matters of wording, the core concept is right. The very strength of GNU/Linux is it’s diversity. The fact that it allows people to explore new ideas, some ideas thrive, some die a quiet death – it’s the software version of natural ecology. Some ideas only survived in certain specialized cases (like some bacteria that can only survive around volcanic vents… but then again nothing else does survive there), some become useful and much beloved tools of large sections of the community and some just become memories of an idea that nobody else liked.

Survival of the fittest – or at least – the fittest for some purpose is core to the very reason GNU/Linux is actually good. It’s more than the many eyeballs effect. The freedom may be the most important reason to use it, but the most important technical reason it became good is that there are hundreds of thousands of programs that do similar jobs in different ways, and thousands of distro’s that approach the concept of putting together an OS from different angles. Some very similar, some clusters of related species (has Ubuntu-likes become the primates of FOSS ?) and some radically different.

Some develop niche’s where they thrive and grow, and some don’t survive. FOSS like species evolution, according to Stuart Kaufman, is exploring the realm of the adjacent possible. This makes it an emergent phenomenon (math-geek speak for – “it’s impossible to predict what will happen next but it will make perfect sense when it’s happened”) that will try absolutely everything – where that which works is kept and passed on to future generations and that which doesn’t is thrown away.

Natural evolution is a powerful system that has allowed life to survive enormous tragedies. Several comets, ice-ages and even the human race so far hasn’t been able (and probably cannot) wipe out life. Species come and go, but life goes on – there is always something else ready to fill the gap left or newly opened up.

And FOSS has brought that power to software development – with a bonus. Software can do things genes cannot. Genes have to follow generations – but ideas can jump from place to place without barrier.

RPM for example went from redhat to Suze to Mandrake – there very different distro’s with completely different origins. Dependency resolution went from apt for debian to rpm based systems, and even to others that have even less in common with deb as a packaging format.

Very often, even if a distro does not survive, it’s best ideas are already incorporated into other distro’s. Some of the best ideas I came up with when I did OpenLab are now common in most live-cd based distro’s. My distro didn’t make it, but the ideas I put in there survived (at least, the good ones did), a few others copied them (or came up with similar ideas on their own) and others copied from them. Very few people know that OpenLab was the first distro to have an installable LiveCD as it’s primary means of existence, I saw a gap between livecd’s used for demoing, and installable CD’s used for creating permanent systems (as it was at the time) and filled it. OpenLab’s greatest contribution to FOSS is that this method is now the standard for almost all distributions because it worked so well.
And to return to my point – this ability to cross-pollinate and the fact that generations are so fast makes FOSS able to grow at a rate unprecedented in nature. New ideas in natural ecology take milions of years to develop, in FOSS it takes a few months.

So why do Kongoni ? Why do we need another distro ? Because exploring the realm of the adjacent possible, discovering new ideas, finding other ways of doing it is how GNU/Linux gets better and better as a whole. Maybe none of the ideas in Kongoni will become mainstream, maybe several will – maybe Kongoni itself will – there is no way of predicting that (emergent phenomenon remember) but the important thing is to try them and give them a chance. Every idea that doesn’t get explored because somebody said “we already have too many text editors” (replace with any thing you can think of up to and including distributions) is a massive loss for the evolutionary ecology that is Free Software.
And like the ecology of nature, our ecology is under threat from forces that wish to see it destroyed for greed.

The ecology of nature has a resilience that will likely see it survive the threats (but if we don’t watch out, it will do so by getting rid of the threat – e.g. humans) but FOSS is young and the very speed of it’s adaptation which makes it such a wonderous way to create software can also be it’s curse. The biggest threat to us isn’t Windows 7 or MacOSX or any other proprietary program, it’s people trying to stifle the process of expansion and idea-exploration that drives us forward. It’s a threat that has become far worse than I ever imagined in recent years – and it’s one I agree with the cited blogposter about – we have to fight all-out.

We have to make people understand that the diversity they see is a good thing. Just like a piece of land with nothing on it but zebra’s will very soon have nothing on it at all – a FOSS world with only one distribution, will very soon not be there at all. Diversity of species drives nature forward, lets it survive whatever the universe throws at it. Diversity of ideas is what drives FOSS forward, and the one thing that could actually kill it would be to lose that diversity.