Hi. I've observed that some time ago you started sending tons of revolutionary ideas regarding the way the software should be written, and crtiticising the current practices.
I am not in the position to refer to those ideas, because I didn't manage to comprehend them fully (although I am trying to figure out what is the "system F" that you mentioned in your "thunder" essay). I also made three other observations: firstly, that you are pointing out significant vulnerabilities of the GNU project as a whole; secondly -- that not every addressee wishes to become acquainted your thoughts, and lastly, that if someone dares to criticise you, you're often getting impolite. With regard to those observations, I can offer three suggestions. The first one concerns software security and the odds of the aforementioned "Thompson virus". As you pointed out, we cannot guarantee that there is no back door in every GNU system installation, but I think that even if we apply your methods, we won't be able to do so. Simply because (as some of the participants of the discussion noted) the back doors can be implemented in the hardware, not in the software, and you will never be able to guarantee that no one is able to access your system. So why should we bother? If there are some people accessing my files, why should I feel unfomfortable with that? Why can't I trust that someome with such great power isn't going to be mean and evil? (There's already so many things that I can't control. I can't know for sure that I'm not going to die tomorrow, but I think that being worried about that wouldn't make that last day of mine any better) The second suggestion is that perhaps instead of sending all those letters to some news groups, you should start a blog? That way, you could watch the statistics and tell how many people are actually interested in your concerns, and you could present your ideas in a more coherent and systematic way. And people who didn't subscribe to Ian Grant newsletter would have been receiving a few unwanted e-mails less per week. When it comes to the third question, please remember that other people have their own issues, and may see no reason to consider your concerns more important than theirs. When you're announcing that "there's no need to hook guile to gdb, because if we rewrote all software with proper methodology, there'd be no bugs", you seem to ignore the existing code base and common practices. Of course if you can present a universal way of creating good software, then I'm all ears, but so far I haven't seen such presentation (or it might have drowned in the flood of your other thoughts and discussions) I wish you all best with your endeavour. M.
