The root issue (I think I mentioned that before) is that we humans are an ultra-social species and, apart from exceptions, we need conformity to "fit in". Probably because conformity has helped the species as a whole to survive and build "consistent" cultures. Social animal species everywhere have shown that, beyond us, this appears to be a working model.
I believe a large part of humanity is evolving towards
eusociality, possibly as a way to avoid the behavioural sink (also known as the fate of
Universe 25).
Interestingly, this has direct implications to (and, to some degree, explanations as to how) open source development.
(Do not get bogged down by the eusocial insect biology, i.e. one "queen" (or "queen" and "king" pair as with termites) birthing every member of a hive. That is just a biological detail of how insects arrived at eusociality. Human biologists are well aware of that "queen" naming being inaccurate, because the proper name would be "god"; it's just that using the proper name would not fly in human societies. Also, instead of a single hive, consider a multitude of co-operating and competing hives, with the "gods" forming a separate class, a
pantheon.)
The relevant human castes here are
toolmakers and
engineers and
scientists. Technically speaking, they do not share tools per se, but the knowledge and plans of said tools. (This is an important distinction to remember, as otherwise one may confuse open source tool development with communism. The two are orthogonal, and not related in any way other than word games and bad analogies.) Also note that humans have always been and always will be toolmaking species. In fact, we evolved from a toolmaking species, so one could say we evolved into a toolmaking species even before we became humans.
We learned long ago that to become better caste members, those who
know need to
teach the young ones. It looks like this too is as old as our species is, because at least some of even the oldest cave and rock paintings and carvings were used as a teaching tool (in hunts and ecology).
Open source software is the natural continuation of this in relation to software tools. We seem to be hard-headed and not understand this, because we keep failing. For example, some cryptographic knowledge has been re-discovered relatively recently, because the original discoveries were done during the second world war and were kept secret for political reasons. The battlefield medicine of ancient Romans, especially amputations, was so advanced in terms of survivability rates of comparable wounds, that we managed to lose it for a millenium, and did not regain the same survivability rates until 1800s.
For science and engineering, it seems that
Antikythera mechanism indicates the same has happened there too.
Because software tools suddenly became ubiquitous instead of just specialist devices, they have become
trade goods for the general population.
The current situation is a result of the conflict between the
trader caste and the
toolmaker caste, with everybody else caught in the crossfire, often seeing the situation from a single viewpoint and not understanding the other at all. Even the copyright/copyleft licenses and their differences are easily described in terms of this conflict: GNU GPL shields toolmakers and tool-users against the trader caste by making it impossible for a pure trader to make a profit off such tools, while letting toolmakers sell their wares and designs, and co-operating traders to recoup their reasonable costs. MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses avoid the conflict by capitulating to the trader caste by noting that they don't really "take" anything, as they just "copy"; and thus whatever the traders do is not directly off from the toolmakers. Essentially, that the cost of the trader caste making a profit without contributing anything is not worth the conflict.
End users only interacting with traders demand the same service from toolmakers and engineers, and this causes a severe conflict between them.
For example, I've tried a couple of times to explain why the number of end users is nonpositive (i.e., either zero value or negative value) for most open source software developers. Telling Linux developers that "until you do X, you won't be as popular as Windows" is as sensible as telling a heavy arms manufacturer that unless they convert their long range heavy rifle into a small hand weapon suitable for target practice they won't become as popular as cheese is. It is pure nonsense. For open source development, for the toolmaker caste,
contributions is what matters, not the number of users.
The lack of support for open source is a direct result of this conflict between
traders and
toolmakers, with end users desiring support being the civilians caught in the crossfire.
If we look at history, for a hundred years back into mains voltages, it really took legislative standardization effort to rein in the traders.
Here, we are not talking about standardization into a single operating system or any single software suite –– that would be dictatorship, and lose all the benefits we get from open competition; and competition between projects is really what keeps software projects evolving instead of stagnating ––, but about
interoperability (and thus also
interfaces and
format standards). Currently, the trader caste is exploiting walled gardens and
vendor lock-in to
capture their clients. While that benefits them, it really hinders competition and end-user choice;
this is what we need legislation to quash. Perhaps then we might be able to educate the end users and let an ecosystem of support services for open source software projects sprout into life. As it is right now, the trader caste is not willing to interact with such a new niche at all – and not just with respect to open source software, but also hardware repairs (see
right to repair for details).
Please ignore that. coppice could have written his comment months ago..
I was asking about FreeRTOS plus TCP.
No.
Even though it looked like out of the scope of the ongoing thread, it was actually all very much on point: about trying to understand how and why the current situation came to be, and how to change it.
Once again, the most useful information is not just simple answers to the stated questions, but in understanding the situation and reasons underlying the situation and the reasons why things are the way they are, because only then can we escape the inertia of human culture/history and do better.
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