I'd love to see a history of FOSS in its "golden era" (early aughts) to the early teens. There was this great momentum at the time, giant advances in the Linux desktop and server, and a large focus worldwide on open standards (XMPP became, briefly, the standard chat protocol).

This progress stalled. My theory is that it's in large part due to OSX convincing FOSS developers "it's UNIX" and with FOSS devs on Macs, Linux desktop advances slowed down.

@kyle I wonder if some of the stall wasn't also from the constant forking and fracturing of core areas different FOSS contributors couldn't agree on. That may also tie into your theory though as OSX said "you want to make sounds? do it this way", but early aughts Linux said "you want to make sounds? there are 6.02E23 ways to do that. 0 of them work together".

@ajmartinez @kyle It wasn't as much the variety of options as it was the variety of versions:

"Dependency X broke your app in their version V? Fine, just freeze it on V-1 and if Debian can't package it like that who cares, your dev env is in a venv/bundle/docker on Mac and your DebOps/SRE will have to deal with that."

That's where most of incompatibilities originated: the distros were supposed to make it all work together, but were instead mired in the dependency hell.

@angdraug @kyle A good chunk of the pain 20yrs ago, IMO, was from finding one application that was great for the task you needed it to do only... it was then the ONLY app you could use that made sounds (to call back the pain of having 9000 different sound layers possible at the turn of the century). Things are much better now, and I seldom find myself deep in /proc trying to figure anything out anymore. I'm glad I had that experience for when truly outstanding problems do crop up today.