# Openness makes diversity

Date: 2021-08-28 23:55:24 +08:00Date modified: 2021-08-29 01:02:47 +08:00

- from the nature of openness, there tends to be more options that offer the same thing

- at times, it also causes diversity by people who disagrees with the standard or wants to take it in a different direction

- it is good especially it lets other projects to stand on their vision; Tradeoffs lock yourself in a position

- as one or two progresses, it turns into a cooperative competition

- examples

  - Linux distros and How Linux distributions are technically their own operating system with their subtle (or major) differences to others

  - Nix package manager pioneered functional package management; then Guix package manager took it in a different direction with a stronger focus on Reproducible builds and roam:Bootstrapping

  - in terms of desktop landscape in Linux, both GNOME and KDE creates friendly competition to progress desktop standards; this rings true especially both are contributing to the Freedesktop repository to create more standards for the desktop

  - bits 128-255 that ASCII leave made a competition for other standards such as OEM by IBM-PC for graphical characters or simply used for non-English alphabets

  - the major members of the BSD family (i.e., NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD) all have different priorities; NetBSD focuses on compatibility, FreeBSD is on minimal system with the adequate amount of support, and OpenBSD in security

## Backlinks

- Free software
- Why wishing a unified Linux distro is a pointless task