I'd bet that this is the difference between having good middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your directors and middle managers, you can target the C players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up shedding B players anyways.
I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff
This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay.
I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players.
In theory this could be handled by stuffing the extra 96 bits in an IP extension header. But this solves nothing because then any switch that isn’t IPv4+ aware will route packets incorrectly. Literally every single switch on the internet needs to be updated/replaced before you could start generating IPv4+ traffic otherwise the one outlier will send your IPv4+ packets off to Uzbekistan.
OR
Maybe you don’t use those 96 bits for routing. But then it becomes nothing but a sort of subnet address and you haven’t fixed the routing table size problem. And actually every endpoint needs to upgrade too because endpoints that don’t recognize the header extension will generate crazy responses and confuse TCP packets from different computers as coming from the same machine.
There’s no useful and backward compatible way of extending IPv4.
That would be pretty amazing if Xorg ever rendered in a way that was even equal to other platforms (mutter, Windows, android, MacOS, ...) given how crazy the separation of concerns in X is and how many silly boundary crossings need to be made to process events and render them.
It would have to rely on compositor and driver bugs in those other platforms.
That's funny, because for me, it's exactly the opposite. I use Gnome on Wayland/Mutter and it works great - I've never had a linux desktop that had such great UI rendering. Gnome on X doesn't work and is buggy - it's riddled with graphical glitches that other platforms (even smartphones and tablets) don't suffer from. How can that be considered to "work"?
Nobody is intentionally going to make X worse but everyone will make the kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environments, and other components better but potentially different in ways that no one will be updating X to match. X and it’s associated tech like DRI will bitrot. And of course existing bugs will go unaddressed.
I think this is a very emotional issue because people are being told that an important tool will be taken away from them, but I also think that it's important to think about being reasonable.
X, architecturally, is a dumpster fire. None of the ideas that were reified in it's design, types, or behaviour - not forcing rasters down unix pipes nor building widgets with X objects nor rendering networked fonts nor the general concept of immediate-mode widget rendering - are actually used today in modern X apps and have been mitigated-away with hacks and jury-rigs. But the design and the types and the protocol persists and no one wants to work on this nonsense in their free time. Unpaid programmers have voted with their commmits and Xorg has been orphaned. It's a dirty job and for the longest time only paid programmers have maintained X. And the last company to pay programmers to work on this stuff canvassed their customers and decided that the work didn't need to be done anymore.
Everyone using X today has been free-riding on RHEL customers for years and Redhat has decided not to burden them with this anymore. And nobody else is volunteering to pay for this.
I don't think entitled developers is the right term here. As an Xorg user, how much did you pay to use Xorg?
...which was a peculiar discussion because I don't think anyone mentioned that just about everyone runs X today with some combination of DRI2 or DRI3, which involves plenty of latency, boundary-crossing, and buffer-copying.
This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless.
Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move.
That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg.
Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.
Exactly. What we’re really seeing here is technical debt from the fact that we have so many different desktop environments. Much of the cost of having Gnome and KDE was hidden by the fact that a lot of the job of putting pixels on the screen and handling keyboard and mouse events was done (very badly) by X in one way or another.
Now the compositor/screen manager isn’t doing that anymore because it never should have and it was a terrible division or responsibility in the first place. But we have devs pushing forward on multiple different fronts with different DEs and development is painfully slow.
I suspect you're being disingenuous since I never said either of those things, so I will ignore your second question.
You used the word should - should get a full time job. Based on what you say, you don’t think freelance work is acceptable. If you considered it acceptable then you wouldn’t be admonishing people, telling them what they should do.
I've never met
You’re just full of assumptions. I get paid crazy-well - much higher than the salaried employees I work with, and unlike them I can bill off-hours. I don’t have a company retirement plan but that’s cheap with the excess I get paid over salary. And I write my own vacations.
The term "consultant" sets the expectation that one would not enjoy those benefits during their work there.
No, it sets the expectation that I’m consulting. That’s all.
Was it? It sounds like the franchise agreement that they signed was fairly straight forward and was never really in contention, based on what little I’ve read about this story the last couple of years. Are there any references or news stories that support your claim that google had to be “pressured”?