On Mar 29, 2005, at 9:30 PM, Todd Walton wrote:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:16:09 -0800, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The only Evil about is that which keeps me from having good, solid, stable, tested, documented software at a price (in money and time) that I can afford. I do not wish to compromise my standards by bending to someone else's ideology.
That's really surprising to hear that coming from you, Stewart. You seem to me to have a really good sense of how software should be built and operated. Also, it seems so obvious to me that open source code is a value above, beyond, and antecedent to, the list of things you mentioned above. Seeing a disconnection between the two is kind of jarring.
Actually, the latest OpenOffice 2.0 Java fiasco is a fine example of what is wrong with "Free-as-in-freedom" zealots.
OpenOffice 2.0 has Java dependent components. This has provoked a huge flamefest.
However, in all of the flamefest, no one has offered to rewrite the "offensive" components. Nowhere did I see that the OpenOffice folks refused "truly free" code. They took what they had and packaged it. The "fun" parts of OpenOffice are finished. As such, the OpenOffice maintainers have a huge pile of trash cleanup that never gets done. Things like: "The spacing between paragraphs links to the wrong paragraph relative to MSOffice." That's a grubby, unfun bug that open source folks will never volunteer to fix. The open source folks couldn't even be bothered to file a *bug* on it for 3+ years. They would rather go write a *new*, *shiny* word processor, spreadsheet, presenter, because it will be "so much better" than what already exists, and they end up producing yet another piece of incompatible garbage that doesn't work.
I don't blame the OpenOffice maintainers for taking the easiest path. Everybody bitched, but nobody is willing to put up the work to take the other path.
How about rewriting the offending OpenOffice code? No volunteers. How about fixing the GNU JVM? No volunteers to test it against OpenOffice. Oh, and by the way, how about yelling at the GNU JVM folks for producing such a crappy product that we still don't have a functional open source Java after *10 years*. Jeez, even g++ didn't take that long, and Mono shows that there is no technical limitation.
I'm amazed that the OpenOffice folks haven't loudly told the community to go blow it out its collective ass. If it wasn't for Sun, OpenOffice would still be absolute garbage and Linux would have no traction *at all* on the corporate desktop. While everybody likes to say "Foo is better than OpenOffice Writer and Bar is better than OpenOffice Spreadsheet and Baz is better than OpenOffice Presenter", they are not a cohesive package that can replace MS Office. You have to be able to replace them *all* in order to make it fly. OpenOffice does that; nothing else does. Oh, and, by the way, Foo, Bar, and Baz aren't better. There's a reason why so many of us use OpenOffice in spite of its faults.
I respect the OpenBSD folks. When something offends them with a license, they remove it and rewrite it. This is the *right* solution. I find it somewhat ironic that the BSD folks seem to be willing to back up their principles with actions more readily than the GPL folks given that BSD code can be made into closed source.
-a
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