"Too Much Choice" and "Too Many Programming Languages"
They want us to think grown-ups are like ignorant children and corporations must decide for them, helped by LLMs
Programming is not too hard. Once you can code in one language (or paradigm), adapting to the rest isn't too difficult. The syntax varies, the libraries are different, the function calls (or classes) change, but adaptation revolves around memorisation, not concepts.
When it comes to frameworks, applications, or operating systems (or renderers, desktop environments etc.) it's more or less the same. If you know how to use GNOME, then learning KDE isn't too hard (the fundamentals are similar). If you can master GTK, then Qt isn't too hard (I've done both). The tools or the abstractions aren't the same, but there are commonalities.
IBM is trying to build a "movement" (corporate agenda) around consolidation, uniformity, conformance, lack of choice etc. It does not use these terms, but this is what it is aiming for. We see this not only in Wayland, which is also being advanced by people outside IBM (like IBM is controlling non-IBM elements, e.g. GNOME). They also promote Flatpaks and attestation. They love to troll people who disagree with them, as if people who don't agree with IBM and GAFAM must have some mental issues, then ostracised.
This modus operandi is exceedingly smug and it is leading to alienation. Such alienation begets fragmentation. Culling opposing views also increases hostilities. At the end, instead of collaboration, there are several "camps" and they cannot stand each other. It starts looking like this:
So now they get divided along political views. Remember "Ethical Source"?
This idea that there's "Too Much Choice" or that we must all adopt Wayland is absurd. Many people have no plans to adopt "the ecosystem [which seeks] to reduce software choice and push everyone into vertical software monocultures."
A breadth and wealth of choices is what made GNU/Linux so resilient. When Microsoft killed Novell the community remained robust enough to carry on.
Free software will outlive IBM. Wayland might not outlive any of the companies that participate in making it since 2008. The whole "Wayland-or-DIE" attitude is immature, misguided, and typically self-serving (the people who do that have a personal stake in the outcome because of projects they have and they're incredibly vocal).
Programming languages are just different ways to produce machine-readable instructions, whether they're interpreted or compiled. The idea that we should have just one processor architecture or one "unified" programming language is dumb and dangerous. What IBM and its apologists aim for was attempted in the 1930s and it failed. Many people died, starting with the disabled. People who opposed that were "trolls" or "enemies". █
