Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles.
Alice “psykose” who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages.
This could be a massive hit to Alpine Linux. This distribution is definitely quite popular in its niche, and it always has way better package support than you’d expect from a small distribution like this. I wish Alice all the best, though, and hope for the project itself that the workload can be spread out among other maintainers.
Hm, isn’t it generally enough to have the base system + a lightweight desktop + flatpak or snap + distrobox?
The often “unspoken” reality of the open source “community” is the heavy demands placed on a small number of individuals. OSS workloads are Very poorly distributed and that level of disparity and the user base’s, often unreasonable, level of expectation burn people out. Most of this goes unreported, because, as users, we only judge the result, not the work that went into it, and as volunteers, there is no HR department.
I know Redhat have been a little… lets say “insensitive”… in how they expressed their frustrations. But commercial backing is more than just money on the table, its job security and people management for a small group that do most of the heavy lifting we rely on.
@Thom, i’d be really interested if you explored the topic of OSS working conditions more deeply as I (and maybe others?) think its an aspect that doesn’t get the attention it probably deserves.
Adurbe,
It’s old, but I think you’d appreciate this article…
https://nerdvittles.com/some-asterisk-resolutions-for-the-new-year/
Thanks for that! Really interesting insight