On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Yehuda Drori wrote: > hi... > > I would like to raise a point about OPEN SOURCE.. > I think there are a lot of human resources getting wasted with OPEN SOURCE > projects. > > I've written a review where I spill my gut about it at: > > http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?name=Reviews&rop=showcontent&id=7 > > and I would like you to response to that.. > > I don't want to get my hands burning but I think there is a point for a debate > about the open source projects future and I would like to get some other > points of view and see what the majority thinks. > > remember I don't want fights with no one, just get some new points of view :-)
I remember those points debated and chewed again and gain in slashdot, linuxtoday, IGLU, and whatever. I'm not claiming that OpenSource is the perfect developemnt method, but you seem to have raised some incorrect points. A number of points: Please give an example of where developmentresources are lost due to competition. You give an example of gnome and KDE. Gnome was originally created because developers considered KDE to be not free enough. Since then the issue of QT's license has been setteled, but gnome has taken a life of its own. It would be pointles to stop any of those two projects now. Neverthless gnome and KDE can share code. This is unlike, say, MacOS and WindowsXP, or MS-Office and OpenOffice which are projects that are not even allowed to share code. It is true that there are tens of window managers, clocks, cpu meters and such small applets. This may seem like a waste of code. But then again, those projects can "borrow" code from one another (look at how window managers evolved from twm and from wm2 in complicaed "trees"), and those are small projects, often done by one person or a small team. As for the huge number of projects: mny of then are very small projects. There are also many small commercial products (do a simple internet survey). Also consider the fact that there is no "master plan" behind them. Many of them sprung from day-to-day needs or urges of their developers (unlike mozilla or OpenOffice). You should think of SourceForge as a development cnter. 1300 out of 37000 is not bad for a development center. That's around 3%-4%. You should also consider the fact that some of the 37,000 projects are really "pre-alpha", which means that they are still vague plans, and require practically nill resources from SourceForge. If this was a standard "Hamama", you wouldn't have come to them with such an immature idea. Regarding the quality of office suites: if you ignore side-efforts like siag office and andrew (?), there wasn't any real free office suite development until the very late nineties. hackers have more important things to do, and the commercial suites did the job (applix, Star). Besides, reals programmers don't need no office suitte ;-) . Later came the projects of Abiword and gnumeric other components of "gnome office" joined later) and later koffice. Last your we got OpenOffice, as a token of Sun's commitment (not only IBM is in the game of free software). Regarding the kernel: some people conider the kernel's developemnet process as very messy and unorganized (no flames, please). But certainly any project that needs to scale beyond a small number of developers needs to have a clear development process which defines, e.g. who is allowed to modifiy which parts of the code and when. Look at larger projects like KDE, Gnome and debian. Consider the fact that just like in the commercial market, the work is being done by a collection of people with varying (and sometimes conflicting inerests. You can't tell all the commercial companies "you must put more resources into developing feature XYZ". Those are different companies and individuals with different resources, and linux world domination may not be the top priority of all of them. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
