Hi,

~Stack~ <[log in to unmask]> writes:

> I'm curious about your thoughts on what it means to have that
> sustainable footing going forward.

A little bit pontificating but here is my take: "sustainable computing"
must be "community all the way down".  We must reject attempts by
flighty (or other) corporations to inject profit-motivated gatekeeping.
Embrace DIY and do-in-house expertise and reject outsourcing and brain
drain.  Prefer GPL and the AGPL licenses over MIT/BSD and certainly not
proprietary for our own software and the software we base it on.
Embrace decentralized distribution patterns for code, data and
human-to-human information and reject centralized "cloud" services.
Keep discussions (like these) on open mailing lists and out of locked up
web forums.

Of course, we may soften from this hard stance and still obtain some
measure of sustainability but must then accept an increased risk of
eventual upheaval.  The fact that we got as far as we did with RH shows
this trade off in action.  Maybe Rocky gives us another decade or so
until the cycle that CentOS started repeats.  Or, maybe its future
leadership never allow themselves to be bought out and the project
perverted.  But, even so, Rocky is not based on the effort of a
community but that of a corporation and that corporation can do other
things to strangle Rocky.  As good intentions as Rocky may have, it
isn't Debian in this regard.

> [Singularity]

Singularity and container technology in general have many benefits but
on the scale of decades, I don't see that it solves "sustainability".

It does have at least two things to offer in that direction:

A container can provide an important ingredient in a "data preservation"
effort to archive the run time environment associated with some past
data/results.

Post-2024, one may consider to run SL7 guest on a, say, CentOS 8 Stream
host.  This would give app-level stability while (maybe) still
satisfying host-level security requirements.  As time goes by, this
"solution" gets more and more insecure.


Of course, Singularity also has many other benefits and the lack of
addressing sustainability doesn't stop me from making good use of it for
other purposes.

> [Kubernetes]

I still fail to grok kubernetes so have no comment.

-Brett.