🤝 It's not about competition

Thinking competitively comes naturally - our society trains us for it. There must always be a winner and a loser. So with the Next Gen Embedded Linux project, it is tempting to assume something new can only succeed if Yocto loses. That is not what I am seeing. The market keeps expanding and growing. Yocto is established and will continue to serve teams that need to build everything from source, that care deeply about binary reproducibility, and so on. Alongside them, a growing segment of companies lacks the resources to maintain a Yocto build system. I keep seeing small teams with different priorities: they want a simpler way to bring advanced technology to their products. They want to lean on existing package ecosystems while keeping the tools to customize and maintain what they ship.

The Debian and Alpine Linux distributions offer a useful parallel. Alpine did not replace Debian; it met a different need - a lightweight base for building containers. Both keep growing because the market and its needs keep expanding.