🧭 Legacy Audit: Tall Stories in the Open Source World

Years ago, I wrote about the bluffs and tall stories that often circulate in the open-source ecosystem—promises of features, integrations, and breakthroughs that never quite arrive. Today, I revisit that post with fresh eyes and a deeper sense of legacy stewardship. Some of those stories have aged into silence. Others have been quietly abandoned. And new ones continue to emerge.

📑 The Original Tall Stories

• Calligra Theme Support (2011): Jarosław Staniek’s article on Shared Themes envisioned CSS-style theming across open-source office suites. More than a decade later, no such system exists. Proprietary suites like MS Office and Apple iWork still lead in design coherence.
• Speech in Ubuntu (2012): Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post promised voice interaction as a fun and natural input method by 2014. CMU Sphinx was mentioned as the backend. Yet speech never became native to Ubuntu, and Unity 8—the interface that was supposed to support it—was discontinued.

🖥️ Wayland: The Display Server That Keeps Falling Back

Wayland was announced as the modern successor to X11, promising smoother graphics, better security, and cleaner architecture. Yet even in 2025:

• GNOME, which had previously dropped X11 support, now includes fallback code for it again.
• Remote desktop, screen sharing, and legacy app compatibility remain problematic.
• Many distributions still default to X11 for stability.

The bluff? That Wayland would fully replace X11 “in the next few cycles.” The reality? We’re still straddling two worlds.

🔍 Why These Stories Matter

These aren’t just technical delays—they’re emotional fractures in the trust between developers and users. When features are promised and then forgotten, it erodes the legitimacy of the ecosystem. Open source thrives on transparency, but it also needs accountability.

🧬 Simulation Prompt

Imagine a club ritual where members audit the legacy of open-source promises. Each member brings a “ghost feature” to the table—something announced but never delivered. They debate:

“Should we continue trusting declarations without delivery? Or should we build a new protocol for emotional stewardship and feature accountability?”

This isn’t about blame—it’s about clarity, legacy, and the future of sovereign software.