>Even if it’s a one line change, it could take years to get that upstreamed and spread into various Linux distributions. If you listen to episode 67 about Zig, that was one of Andrew’s motivations behind creating Zig.
No, I'm sorry. This is a very, very bad reason to start a new project from scratch. If you want to avoid bureaucracy then it's not hard to create yet another Linux or BSD distribution, countless people have done it. Once your project grows larger you will find bureaucracy creeping back in again because you have to make some of the same decisions. Do I accept breaking change A versus breaking change B? How do I force people to test a patch across thousands of machines at once before accepting it? How do we reach consensus on subjective things like fonts and icons? And so on.
These projects have plenty of other reasons to exist, it's not like they don't. This is just a poor explanation for why they exist. I hope nobody mentions this nonsense again in an interview.
No, I'm sorry. This is a very, very bad reason to start a new project from scratch. If you want to avoid bureaucracy then it's not hard to create yet another Linux or BSD distribution, countless people have done it. Once your project grows larger you will find bureaucracy creeping back in again because you have to make some of the same decisions. Do I accept breaking change A versus breaking change B? How do I force people to test a patch across thousands of machines at once before accepting it? How do we reach consensus on subjective things like fonts and icons? And so on.
These projects have plenty of other reasons to exist, it's not like they don't. This is just a poor explanation for why they exist. I hope nobody mentions this nonsense again in an interview.