Brian J. Murrell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) writes: > It's not even about PR/PC either. I am probably way out of line here, > just being a lurker an' all, but it seems to me that dealing with > OpenSource (volunteer?) workers is better done with more care to ensure > they are not insulted to the point of taking their creativity somewhere > else. Is cultivating and keeping OpenSource programmers not a good > thing? Sure it is. But to some, "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen". Good software design sometimes necessitates quashing a bad idea in the bud, even if it sometimes offends people. I'd much rather have a good solid design and code base to work from, even if it means some people's ideas aren't adopted. Back in the early days of Linux, I wrote a lot of code - kernel patches, a curses library, ports, etc. - not all of it was accepted. But when Linus chose not to accept a patch I posted, I didn't take it personally - after all, Linus (like most people) hasn't a clue as to who I am, and so can only judge by the code I write. Some of it is good, some not. As in the curses implementation, I started out with a curses library I had written from scratch for MS-DOS and ported it to Linux. Someone else did "ncurses". Not IMO a "better" implementation, just different. For various reasons, ncurses was chosen to be the "blessed" version over mine. That's OK, I'll go off and do something else. But at least I *tried*, I wrote code, as opposed to some others who didn't, but sat back and criticized the work of others. If Linus wants to tell me an idea of mine is insane, stupid, or clueless, my first question would be "fine - tell me, how can it be done better?", and then I'd sit back, listen, and learn. And with the collection of folks here, a fair number of whom have been hacking Linux since 1991 or 1992, the person who would get so offended as to walk away from such an intellectual base of knowledge is a fool.
