Dustin Puryear wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Jackson"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 8:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [brlug-general] Re: open source: truthfully adverstised
>
>> From a purely capitalistic viewpoint, I wish that commercial
>> applications would be held to a higher standard. But it simply isn't
>> true
>> (ergo, I am agreeing with you).
>> But that's a huge benefit of open source - almost invariably the
>> developers of the application are in touch with the users of that
>> application, and gain immediate first-hand feedback. This is largely
>
>
> I disagree. The majority of open source projects are very small and
> tend to
> focus on the needs of the developer rather than other users. I would
> agree
> if you said "the huge benefit of most large, successful open source"
> projects.
>
Bah..it all goes into the evolutionary stew-pot of code, which is an
even more important concept than user feedback, beta-testing, and
debugging. In my own mind, it's the really most important concept that
makes Open Source work, but it's one we look at the least (because it
doesn't seem to have immediate practical ramifications).
I realized fully why just recently, when I realized that I needed a
specialized malloc for my 3D engine, that was fast, portable, but
handled a few specific jobs that no other malloc approached. Did I
write this malloc from scratch? Of course not! I went and found an
open source malloc and modified it to do the few specific jobs that no
other malloc had.
And the author of the malloc code that I cannibalized didn't write
it from scratch either; he had cannibalized another malloc and made it
do something he specifically wanted it to do. I'll bet that the code
history goes even further back, because the malloc is referenced all
over the place (I'm talking about dmalloc, btw).
I guess that's probably the best thing about open source; you can
easily leverage the work of hundreds of other open source programmers,
synergistically making you an uber-programmer in the process.
David Jackson
