I think that your example of GRUB though is the fault of the distributions not being willing to follow upstream closely enough (or more likely not yet trusting a relatively young project when it plays such a vital function). But I know that at least Fedora continued to patch GRUB1 as necessary, even adding GPT functionality. But I guess you are probably right that a company would have continued to at least maintain the old version while starting up on their new and improved version.

A bit OT, but I think GRUB2 is an atrociously monstrostic piece of code. Linux has definitely moved away from the unix philosophy of “do one thing well”, but I think that in the case of a bootloader, this should still stand. I think it just tries to do too much and have it all packed in to its single pacakge. I have long thought that it would make more sense to have GRUB2 simply boot the kernel, and then if you want other features (like the ability to read LVM for instance), then it could be extensible. But that is just my opinion.

In any case, I appreciated your response. May your blog continue as it will. Thanks again for teaching me how to use cookies with wget and curl!

My comments about “bugs and limitations” are generally directed to the way popular Free Software is managed and not to the software itself or its developers. You see, I find it a paradox that some pieces of FOSS are installed in millions of production boxes and the progress of their development is still limited by the amount of free time of their original developers. IMHO, this is what is really comical.

For instance, the development of GRUB 1 stopped because the original developers decided to invest their free time in the development of GRUB 2, while GRUB 1 was still the main boot loader in some major Linux distributions. A user that encountered a problem with GRUB 1 code had to go through the bug trackers of several major distributions to find a resolution. This is a waste of time as a result of bad management. However, no one can blame the developers, it’s their free time after all and it is them who decide how to spend it, but the argument of bad management still stands. Personally, I blame the FOSS community and its mentality, but I’ll try to explain my views more extensively in a new post.

Thanks for your feedback. I hope I managed to give you an idea about the angle I’m trying to examine such issues.

This article was very comical, though I am sorry to hear anyone wasting a full day on such trivial mishaps.

That said, your comment about “bugs and limitations” should (in this case) not be directed at the free software, but rather at the free software user. Both of these issues arose from human error. Time is something you don’t mess with in *nix without consequence, and with pvGRUB, you just forgot to RRTFM (re-read the f*cking manual). :)