On Mar 21, 2005, at 8:57 PM, Tracy R Reed wrote:
Hmm... I guess it depends on what you call a failure then. This reminds me of:
Person 1: "America sucks!" Person 2: "Don't like it? Try living somewhere else! It's much worse over there." Person 3: "Quit making excuses for a failure!"
Ayup. And that kind of attitude winds up eventually getting ones butt kicked.
If the folks in the "worse over there" work to improve rather than just making excuses, they eventually become "better over there" and people leave.
This is actually in operation *now*. Many folks who came here in the late 80's and early 90's are returning back to their place of origin. In the case of technical folks from Europe, things are no longer "worse over there". The ideas of socialized medicine, subsidized child care, reasonable vacations, etc. seem to be good enough to offset any decrease in salary that they experience.
In software, this appears to be going on with Apple. Things are "better over there", now, and some proportion of people are switching from Windows. So, why didn't they switch to Linux instead? Because it's not better than what they have.
The goal should be to be the best possible--not simply better than the rest.
I never intended to imply that open source was perfect. Only that it is much better. Democracy sucks. But not nearly so much as the other forms of government.
Agreed. But true Democracy also tries to see what other people do right and *emulate* it rather than just make excuses for doing nothing. Open source should do the same.
I'm not yelling at Terry, specifically, about this. He just happened to
voice a comment I hear too often in the open source community that
pisses me off.
Tracy. :)
Urk. Don't know what I was thinking there.
But none of them are perfect right? It takes a lot of work to generalize
everything such that it will compile everywhere and make everyone happy.
I think it is more a deficiency in the state of the art than it is
anyones fault exactly.
I disagree. It is less a failure in "state of the art" than in simply "It's good enough for me. Deal."
Make excuses all you want, but there are a lot of things that Windows and OS X make a lot more convenient than open-source does. Unlike in proprietary software, the only limit for open source is developer motivation. Therefore, failures in open source fall squarely at the feet of developers.
-a
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