[Linux-aus] Open Source Monoculture

[Leon Brooks]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 16:16, Brad Hards wrote:
> Monoculture isn't necessarily a long
> term thing though - growing your whole farm in peas one year and
> wheat the next is still a monoculture.

Kinda. You're rotating your crops, which makes it a polyculture but only 
just.

> The failures tend to come from explosive growth in pest populations
> (eg locusts) or from natural disasters (fire, flood, hail).

That's just the immediately obvious failures. Long term salinity 
problems (ring any bells?) exhaustion of trace elements, replacement of 
a thriving bacterioculture with a partly functional alien one, and so 
on can all have repercussions a looooong way down the track.

> An agricultural polyculture (characterised by mixed trees, various
> crops in different stages of development, animals, people, small
> plots - as you see in subsistence living and more modern permaculture
> environments) tends to have moderating influences for those things,
> and catastrophic failures are rarer.

So... BSD's not *quite* dead yet? (-:

> In terms of total vulnerability, any variation is likely to help
> though. 

True.

I call to the witness stand in support of this assertion, none other 
than Microsoft Windows. More and more of the newer W32 worms don't work 
on older versions of MS-Windows. The "variation" here is provided by 
simply not upgrading. (-:

Cheers; Leon

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