This is about C, not C++. Though I haven’t been there in years, I chuckle to think what would have happened if you made this mistake on that news group.
1 really doesn’t hold water. Some ISPs in the US still waive the fee if you don’t rent equipment, so that doesnt really strengthen the argument. I now have an ISP that doesn’t waive the fee but that doesn’t matter either, since it is not optional it is just part of the total sunk cost. I still use my own router.
Your whole argument doesn’t hold water because even with Comcast you can bring your own equipment. They don’t go out of their way to help you... but they don’t stop you either. Don’t see how that is “control”.
Maybe you will not call tech support when your own equipment fails but you clearly have no experience in a support role if you think other people won’t!
Just spend some time on GitHub issues for more popular open source projects to get an idea, and the multiply that by at least 10 for the general public.
Suffice it to say that Packard was involved in X before XFree86. But the point was that although he was an actual productive contributor he was far from working outside of a consensus. There’s really no sides here. The market could have continued with XFree86, it did not.
I mean I think the “sole” contributor your are referring to is Keith Packard? Don’t see any reason to not name names here. In any case I guess what I find odd is that while he did a shit ton of work in spearheading a fork, it’s not like it was just him. There were a lot of people, greatly outnumbering the XFree86 steering committee that were unhappy with the direction of the project. It’s not like it was just Keith. That’s what I find odd about your assessment. Obviously there was enough consensus to fork.
> I seem to recall reading at the time that the XFree86 core team was unhappy that a sole contributor was attempting to modernize the system by introducing extensions, without building consensus around them to their satisfaction.
This is a kind of odd retelling/interpretation of events, considering the “rogue” contributor version is the only one that lived and XFree86 is history.