I've never needed to sell myself. $corp will advertise needing a contractor and you apply as usual. If you have the skills and experience you tend to get hired.
The only difference is you don't get job security, pension or any perks. But you do get a lump sum though. Where you can then decide what's best.
It did in the early days, especially up until 2.4 which was generally considered the first enterprise-ready kernel version. (You can argue about whether the old "enterprise-capable" definitions still applied but they were a benchmark for a lot of people.) Of course, lots of ancillary stuff too in userspace and outside the kernel related to filesystems and the like.
Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history#O...) tells me that version 2.4 was released in early 2001. That is a long time ago. Most of the commercial world was running SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX. So is it fair to say that the Linux kernel has been "quality" for 25 years now?
2001 was immediately post dotcom crash and so all the people that had bought into the Sun "the network is the computer" were tossing out expensive E4Ks, and getting cheap intel servers to survive.
HP-UX and AIX were already legacy.
Linux 2.4 was when it hit critical mass because of the publicity of the dotcom boom and it was like what was left after the "tide went out and the market found out who was swimming naked".
Certainly. The 2.4 kernel and IBM embracing Linux at around that time pretty much made all proprietary Unix legacy.
The desktop took longer with less well-defined transition points and, arguably, MacOS with its BSD foundations (and command line option) ended up being a good alternative for a lot of the non-Windows crowd--though Windows is still dominant as a desktop/laptop OS. (Windows/Azure are, of course, still major in backend corporate environments as well.)
Good point - house-number search isn't there yet in Corviont.
Right now the offline geocoder in the demo does place/street-level search + reverse, but street + house number ("Main St 12") isn't supported yet. It's explicitly on the near-term roadmap: richer geocoding output with house numbers and (optionally) street/area geometry instead of just centerpoints.
Photon is solid - but it comes with a very different operational profile than what I am aiming for.
Photon is built on Elasticsearch (Java) - so it tends to mean a heavier index + higher RAM/CPU expectations and more moving parts. That's fine on a beefy server, but it is a rough fit for the "drop-in appliance on small edge/on-prem boxes (amd64/arm64) + simple ops" goal.
Corviont's geocoder is intentionally "boring": a single SQLite file + an HTTP service, built from Nominatim-derived data. Fast startup, low RAM, easy to ship per-region, and it stays consistent with the rest of the stack.
That said - if there is demand for a "server-grade geocoder option" for people already comfortable running Elastic, I am not opposed to offering it as an alternative profile. The default is just optimized for constrained edge hardware and minimal moving parts.
No. When I looked at Photon and saw that it involves running Java plus an OpenSearch/Elasticsearch backend on the device, I assumed it would be heavier in terms of memory and moving parts than my setup (single SQLite file + small HTTP API).
Have you (or anyone here) actually run Photon on edge-class hardware? If you have real-world numbers, I'd be interested in seeing them. When I add house-number search, Photon might be an easier route than enhancing my current approach.
> involves running Java plus an OpenSearch/Elasticsearch backend on the device
photon is just a single process and opensearch runs inside it (but you can run photon and opensearch separately). Saying "Java" means more memory is in general wrong as the underlying technology Lucene is heavily memory optimized.
I'd say it's pretty usable to run a EU-sized country or several US states on any commodity PC. For embedded devices, it really depends what is the device. On Raspberry PI it should be fine for batch geocoding, realtime (typeahead) will definitely be lagging.
Thanks both - appreciate the clarification and the Spain datapoint.
Those numbers look pretty reasonable. I’ll keep Photon in mind and, as I get time to benchmark different approaches on a few representative regions/hardware, I’ll use the results to decide what the best way forward is - and I’ll publish the numbers when I do.
Sailfish OS looks nice. but i am not sure if their strategie for applications is the way to go. Applications need to be specifically built for Sailfish OS with their IDE which uses Qt.
That means you can't run just any linux software on it.
Nope. You can use SDL2, which is behind the Godot port for Sailfish (3.5 still). Supertuxcart, Openlara a bunch of games stuff is viable. There is an active Lua Love porter and and and ...
Dunno if that's possible. To stick with the example, you can either go for gender neutral language or reject it. There is no "I'll stay out of it and do neither". Your only options are one or the other. So feels like a bit of a cop out.
For the decision itself, I don't see how he should be put in some extreme political camp for that. I think that's probably hard to understand for anyone outside the US / culture wars bubble.
There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do", but somehow the people scared of "gender police" are always the ones that want strict rules saying that nobody is allowed to use it.
Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".
I suppose there's no way to not make a _decision_ though, is there? If, to stay with that example, he says "You know what, anyone can make a PR to gender any way they like", that sounds like a blood bath.
Reasonable responses I can think of are:
1. No we will not use gender neutral language here, it's a policy.
2. I think it's a good idea, but I don't have the bandwidth to make ground rules for that right now, so for the time being it will stay as it is.
3. Good idea, I'll set up some policy on that and if you have time to change things, help is appreciated.
> Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".
If that part is true, that's pretty wild. If he _did_ ask someone else to remove symbols from their personal avatar, that sounds as political as it gets to me... But from some quick research, I couldn't find anything about such a thing happening.
> There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do"
And how does that work, exactly? If you get a PR to modify all the docs/code to be gender neutral you accept it? And what if in the same PR someone else vehemently opposes to the change? Or what if 2 days after the PR was merged you get a revert PR by someone else?
The thing is that you cannot just ignore "politics", politics are an integral part of our lives. Completely ignoring politics means accepting the status quo, so it's by definition a conservative position.
