Valve is maybe the closest?

Freedesktop.org?

My assertion: Inertia of user base is by far the largest predictor of what will stick in a market. If you can create a critical mass of users, then you will get a more uniform set of solutions.

For fun, look into bicycles and how standardized (or, increasingly not) they are. Is there a solid technical reason for multiple ways to make shoes that connect to pedals? Why are there several ways to shift from your handlebars? With the popularity of disk brakes, why don't we have a standard size for pads?

I think there are a lot of things that we tell ourselves won from some sort of technical reasoning. The more you learn of things, the less this seems true, though.

Not, btw, that there aren't some things that die due to technical progress.

You gotta have someone write those language servers for free, and the language servers have to be performant. In 2006 that meant writing in a compiled language, which meant that anyone creating a language server for an interpreted language would need to be an expert in two languages. That was already a small pool of people.

And big multiplayer OSS platforms like GitHub didn't exist until 2008.

It's called the Common Desktop Environment.

Coordination is hard. People who are good at coordinating are not necessarily the same people who are happy to contribute their time to FOSS. And FOSS may need to coordinate in ways that vertically integrated companies do not.

Coordinating between loosely aggregated volunteer projects is not the same as coordinating between vested stakeholders either. I would guess that most FOSS projects are more invested in their own survival than in some larger objective. Teams within a company are (presumably) by definition invested in seeing the company mission succeed.

The GNOME / KDE example mentioned elsewhere in this thread is interesting because these are two somewhat equivalent co-existing projects. Any coordination between them is surely not their highest priority. Same with all of the different distros. The each exist to solve a problem, as the fine article says.

I wonder how much the problem is actually "open source can't standardise on a single solution." Let one thousand flowers bloom, sure. But don't expect a homogeneous user experience. The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. xkcd 927. etc.

“Which one?”

This is pretty much the cause of a 90% drop off of interest in Linux on the desktop.

I could say use Ubuntu (and I do) to some of the people who I’m close with that are interested in Linux, but they discover Lubuntu, or Linux Mint and Debian, then they get easily confused and give up.

And that is not even getting into the updates and the packaging and heaven forbid anything breaks.

... and this a layer of open source flexibility I never wanted. I don't want alternatives to core system management; I want one correct answer that is rugged, robust, well-tested, and standardized so that I don't have to play the "How is this service configured atop this service manager" game.

OP blames FOSS for not providing an IDE protocol a decade earlier, but doesn't ask the rather obvious question of why language-specific tooling is not only still around, but as market-viable as ever. I'd argue it's because what LSP tries to do is just stupid to begin with, or at least exceptionally hard to get right. All of the best language tooling I've used is ad-hoc and tailored to the specific strengths of a single language. LSP makes the same mistake Microsoft made with UWP: trying to cram the same peg into every hole.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still develops their proprietary Intellisense stuff because it actually works. They competed with themselves and won.

(Minor edit: I forgot that MS alone didn't standardize LSP.)

But that is not at all how Posix operates or has operated. Posix standardises common denominators between existing implementations. The fact that we now have strlcpy(3) and strlcat(3) in Posix 2024, is not because Posix designed and stipulated them. Rather, they appeared in OpenBSD in 1998, were found useful by other *nix-es over time, spread, and were finally taken aboard by Posix that standardised what was already out there and being used! This to me is the very opposite of the point the author is trying to make!

open source people create reusable interfaces. i'd argue they go one step further and create open and public internet communities with standards, practices and distribution/release channels.

Thus far, open source has optimized for maximum utility for individuals who can write code... but AI may be changing that soon enough.

    > But then, how can Linux exist? How does that square with “never break the user space?”

Coordination means that the entity is not free to do what seems to be in its interests. If we look at it from the evolutionary aspect it means that the group is hampered in adapting to a changing environment.

So the problems described in the post are annoying, even debilitating maybe, but that's because the creators are rather free in doing what they like best. If Open Source were coordinated then perpaps the software won't even exist, because then the creator would have decided not to create it.

This said, it makes sense to try to gain some coordination. But for that there's a price. For example an commercial entity imposes some "coordination" and freedom is lost. Or some ecosystem vitality is lost. In other words for better quality you have to let go some worthwile characteristic.