I recently read some interesting articles (see [1,2]) by Bert Hubert about IaaS and SaaS in the EU, which are generally considered cloud computing at large. He has quite a deep understanding of such topics, and the reading is enjoyable and triggered a few reflections.
I'm writing this post to react to one of the many articles and threads about the presumed death of this or that programming language, library, framework, or tool. What that article was about and who wrote it is secondary. I could synthesize my idea by citing a well-known joke by Mark Twain: "The rumors about my death are greatly exaggerated."
I recently finished reading a book published one year ago, written by Vittorio Bertola and Stefano Quintarelli. Unfortunately, it is only available in Italian, but its title perfectly encloses all the topics it covers: The shattered Internet: digital sovereignty, nationalisms, and big techs. Like me, Vittorio and Stefano are among the relatively few early users and participants of the primeval internet network of the 90s, even before the World Wide Web was conceived. This book is a disenchanted and realistic travel in the story of the Big Network and how it has become a broken dream today in many respects.
In principle and the traditional vision, the roles were clear enough. Upstream developers had to create and support their own projects, including multiple libraries, tools and modules, possibly for multiple operating systems. Distribution maintainers had the responsibility of collecting a significant software set, porting on various architectures, choosing versions that work well together for each piece of software, patching for coherence and well-established policies, eventually providing a build and installation system for the end users. At the end of the day, a quite complicated and articulated work that many people out there do for fun, others as a full-time job.