This article is just showcasing a relatively small bit of tooling on top all that which makes it possible to reuse that work to produce containers out of the very same stuff, in a whole range of formats.
`guix pack` and `nix-bundle` are illustrations of how a novel solution (functional package management) to the very problem to which app bundling constitutes utter capitulation (dependency management) can not only retain the virtues the app bundle approach throws away in the hopes of making deployment simple, but even match it in ease of deployment when _none_ of the infrastructure of the package management system is expected to be present on the deployment target.
From where I stand, that's damn impressive.
All of this was achieved without the kind of ‘standardization from above’ that Apple gets to do on its platform. It's true that app bundling could have been a lot simpler if the Linux community lived in a locked box at the mercy of a Vampire King bearing the power to upgrade users' kernels in the dead of night without bothering to ask them, who preempted any diversity or choice in operating system components with a uniform common runtime, and gleefully ripped unseemly APIs out from under developers with every OS release. But instead— thank God!— we have such a wide range of environments under the name ‘Linux’ that I'm ready to agree with you and call it insane. Yet here we see that hackers made it work anyway, without bossing anyone around or compromising on the strengths of proper package management. And that's fucking awesome.
Given the near-complete lack of non-oss software support Linux has, it seems like both developers and users rather prefer uniform common runtimes and a lack of diversity in their operating system components. It's almost like a whole lot of things get much easier if there's some kind of standardization.
Why, thank you!
Redundancy of efforts in F/OSS is of course a bad thing. It's perhaps even more tragic in free software than in proprietary software, because in free software, developers have fewer formal barriers to drawing upon the work of others. But it's something free software projects can't simply disable by exerting brute control over their users and contributors. The point is that with tech like this, the hackers behind projects like Guix have triumphed in a tougher struggle than NeXT or Apple ever picked. And they've built technology that copes with a wider range of environments, not via ugly hacks on edge cases, but through a thoughtfully designed build system which renders the whole dependency tree of every program it builds transparent, reproducible, and portable. That they had to build a vehicle for such wild and varied terrain is not what I'm celebrating, the cool thing is that they _did_.
> Given the near-complete lack of non-oss software support Linux has, it seems like both developers and users rather prefer uniform common runtimes and a lack of diversity in their operating system components.
Alternatively, when you refuse to distribute source code, compatibility for you involves greater demands on your platform, because you can't leave downstream distributors to recompile and you refuse to allow your more capable users to fix your software's incompatibilities. It's almost like a whole lot of things get easier when you distribute source code with your application.
Regardless, I think there are a lot of factors that together explain the predominance of free software on free operating systems. Proprietary software companies aiming to hit as large a market as possible with a single codebase turning away from perceived fragmentation in the ‘Linux market’ is certainly one of those many factors.
