An Illusion and Cult Worship of Magnitude (Ubiquity as "Victory")
Size of companies? Size of their debt (how much they're able to borrow with so-called "credit")? Where does this lunacy end?
From Appeal to Popular Opinion By Douglas Walton
Some companies want us to think that their large(r) size implies merit. Or that projects with many contributors/coders can use magnitude as evidence of "success".
One common example of this is Linux. Another is Microsoft.
Linux has many contributors. It's also bloated. Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of workers. Its software is still bloated and unreliable. And no, I don't need a program that sucks up one gigabyte of RAM to write a simple letter.
There are Latin terms for all sorts of fallacies (one is detailed above; there are others). Those are logical fallacies that piggyback misconceptions. One example of that is Wayland being "new" (it's actually not!) and hence "better". Somehow the most valuable (or highly valued) artwork is centuries old. Why is that?
Now consider GNU. Its core tools are not overly complex. Nor should they be. There are similar tools in the BSDs and there are some Rust cultists (read: lovers of Microsoft's proprietary GitHub) who try to replace them in the name of... God knows what (certainly not security).
A lot of people out there prefer simple tools, simple protocols, and simple workflows for a simpler life. I myself still use IRC - the same thing I used in the early and mid-nineties. Moments ago I connected again to the same IRC networks that I connected to when I was a kid. They still work. Not much has changed, except the people and the irdc (IRC daemon) at the back end.
We need to get rid of this dumb, shallow notion that something being newer, bigger, more "advanced" necessarily makes it better. It just doesn't work that way. Many people still use the same toaster or kettle technology we had 50 years ago. It's good enough to get the job done. Due to relative simplicity, repair work is also ranging from trivial to feasible.
This past week Microsoft and IBM both pretended to be doing OK [1, 2] and Microsoft's propagandist (and source burner) Todd Bishop is again spreading the "headcount" propaganda that we debunked here about half a dozen times before. It goes something along the lines of, yes, we lay off many people, but we add the same number of people. It's a lie. Those companies get smaller while, for investors' sake, pretend to become "more efficient" or "equally big".
Size isn't everything. Size can be a liability when salaries in IT are high and lesser-paid workers are inexperienced. Right now it looks like Microsoft cannot keep up with salaries (payroll), hence almost 30,000 layoffs so far this year.
GNU has been around for over 40 years and it'll likely continue to exist for another 40 (in some form). It doesn't need to allocate millions or billions in budget for "workers". █