On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Shai Bentin wrote:
> I've read what you all have written. I tend to agree with all of you.
>
> On the one hand, looking at it through a business perspective, Open
> Source does promote waist of programming hours, thus I agree that one
> way is to form some sort of a committee which will be as widely accepted
> as possible and will do two things:
>
> 1. Give out certification for Open Source programs, according to some
> well thought out and defined requirement list which they will post.
>
Whatever. But don't tell others not to write something similar. If we take
Freecell solving as an example: my solver was not the first and I know
it isn't the last. Considering the fact that some AI university courses
instruct their students to write one, then there probably would be a large
number of them as time progresses.
I happen to know several people who wrote or are maintaining a Freecell
solver. Each solver is written differently and handles things differently.
We constantly improve our solvers, not only because of a virtual
competition (we are on friendly terms with one another) but also because
we wish to improve them, just so the developers will feel their software
is more complete. My solver for example has the advantage that you can
theoretically reach a large number of solving paths by specifying various
heuristics on the command-line. Tom Holroyd's patsolve had turned out to
be much faster than mine, in its latest version. OTOH, my solver groks
meta-moves which each comprosis of several super-moves (which gives a
feeling of a real player) while his solver only uses atomic moves.
The "professional" Freecell community can always use another solver,
because it wishes to find as many solution paths as possible, find minimal
solution, gather statistics, etc.
> 2. Form some kind of road map for the Open Source project priority and
> preference. This means that they will give a higher priority, and better
> chance for certification for certain projects which follow that road
> map.
>
> Of course no one has to get this certification, however, looking at
> business processes, users will tend to want to use certified programs
> more than non-certified. This business fact will actually cause many
> Open Source projects either to disappear, or conform to that committee.
>
> On the other hand, Open Source, as it is today, promotes creativity. Out
> of such many projects come out very innovating and interesting ideas. If
> we change the environment on that, who knows how many ideas will simply
> get lost.
>
I think there is some unnecessary duplicate effort out there. This is not
the case for KDE/GNOME, but I think that there are too many active or
inactive editors; or too many sound manipulation programs, none of which
is complete; perhaps there are too many Freecell solvers out there. ;-)
But again, I'd rather see that, than try to enforce one way of doing
things on programmers. I have an idea for a competition in which
self-gathered groups of hackers will have to present the most complete
software of a certain type: vector drawing, symbolic mathematics, sound
editting - anything that's really missing or incomplete in the open-source
world. The GIMP is the ultimate proof that you can write enterprise-class
software that will exceed or even surpass its commercial competition. It's
a tremendous and well-designed project, which is still under heavy
development.
Uniting projects is sometimes a good idea, but it's not compulsory to
ensure that eventually genuine progress will take place.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Yehuda Drori
> Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 8:38 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: open source - is it that good..???
>
> 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 :-)
>
> --
> Yehuda Drori
> http://whatsup.org.il
> your Linux spot on the web in HEBREW
>
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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