I think you're right that many more people are in theory capable of joining the group, but not that the industry is conspiring to keep it small. If anything it's the people who have an academic history that stretches back to childhood that end up dependent on having someone to guide and grade them. Beating your own path through the wild is scary, uncertain, and often thankless, so I think you'd only want to do it if you already felt sure you were among the most motivated and dedicated members of a group.
Well, the industry is rewarding people who had the privilege to invest their childhood into one singular focus. By the time they graduate they are way above everyone else and so they can both do management and leadership while still having elite level technical skills. Most people start working on their skills in university, so I think we would see more elite engineers if companies just let them specialize over a long time, and structure the companies to allow this. Instead companies structure companies to replace engineers easily, and so the person with pre-existing technical knowledge has a huge advantage.
I don't think it's necessarily a privilege to have a childhood with a singular focus. Again, having your whole destiny picked for you leads to a kind of person who often does not lead themselves with any confidence. The trappings of success will be on them before they've ever faced a test from the engineering school of hard knocks. They'll try to lead right away (because they'll be sure they were picked to lead) but the smarter move would be to try following for a while.
I think the test is right: how long can you hold onto a single project so that you specialize more and more deeply? Every startup is an attempt to do exactly this, and most startups still fail.
I think you're basically right about this: if you're going to ask an ecosystem to bear the costs of a breaking change, you should be asking yourself what will be bought for the price you will pay.
For users it's a set of scales that hangs in balance. On one side is the disruptiveness of the change to them, and on the other is the promise of what they will gain once on the other side.
If there's a problem with the current thinking it's that it proposes to trigger a big expensive breakage that we'll be paying for for 10 years, but there hasn't been any serious discussion of what else is broken about git that needs to be fixed to git to continue to be relevant for the next 10 years.
Most discussions are pre-constrained by the idea that ecosystem wide breakages are impossible.
In theory it's good for me if the git ecosystem splits compatibility in half with no obvious benefit. That just makes it easier for me to waltz in with a third backwards-incompatible migration path, one which actually offers eye-popping kinds of benefits in return for the cost of the breakage. That's why I'm competing with you in the race to replace Github. It's just that I'm also racing to replace git, so I assume you'll be in some amount of trouble if I should succeed.
OpenStreetMap is a database, not a map application. The map on the official openstreetmap website is more of a demo to show some of the data. There are many different map apps that use OpenStreetMap data though.
I tried the TomTom app (on iOS) recently but found it incredibly buggy, especially when connected to CarPlay. The speed indicator would often just show 1mph, the dark mode would work about 20% of the time, and searches would show results from other countries ahead of a place 4 miles up the road.
It's a... mix. I can see all the shapes of the roads and areas i mapped in my area, but they seem not to trust OSM naming so they either have no name or the name TomTom gave to the equivalent street.
I can see most POIs i added with the exact name i gave to them, but the reviews and opening hours are pulled from Tripadvisor.
It's explicitly advertised for driving, not walking, so it's optimized to get you to places. CoMaps and even OSMand are much better for walking around.
And there's a simple reason for the search being so bad in most OSM apps: offline search.
The focus of all these apps seems to be a self-imposed "the app should never touch a server, ever, because what if the user is on a 100$/GB roaming plan in Africa", but indexing the maps is not easy.
I run a local Nominatim database (search engine for OSM) for Italy and it's ~57gb of data and indexes for one country only, and it barely supports fuzzy search.
It's like YouTube. It likes to try to send you down rabbit holes. It thinks maybe there's one type of post you want to engage with, so it will keep feeding you that type of post because it is running a big ol classifier with computer vision as a category
It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.
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