On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 09:36:03AM +0200, Shai Bentin wrote: > I've read what you all have written. I tend to agree with all of > you.
First of all, please print out and read at least three times Gilad's post. He makes the point with eloquence unmatched. Nontheless, I shall now respond verbatim to the numerous points you raised, and the flawed assumption they are based on. This post might come as flammatory, so if you're easily offended, you might wish to hit 'd' now. Before I begin, give me a single datum, please, both of you: what involvement have you had with an open source project? users, or developers? "This idea ... is supposed to give the audience quality software [but doesn't]": What do you call the operating system both of you, I assume, use? Is it not quality software, developed through the efforts of many volunteers? The fact that each of these volunteers spend a portion of his time developing his own pet projects, dozens of which already exist, is negligible. As long as said developer contributed ONE patch, or ONE bug report, that made the programs we all use better, everything else he does is irrelevant. "Why don't so many developers collaborate and pool their efforts .. to give faster and better results?" Had you contributed any code to any worthwhile project (and I assume you hadn't), I think you'd know the answer to this one. Free software developers work to scratch their itch (and the lucky ones also get paid for it). They work on what they like. Unless you provide some incentive, why expect them to work on project FOO, just because user BAR really really needs that project? User BAR should either do it himself, if he really needs it, or pay someone else to do it for him. I'm ignoring what you wrote about KDE and GNOME, as it has been addressed elsewhere. "The kernel project is one of the few project ..." This paragraph is filled with factual inaccuracies, which makes it pointless to respond to. There are many kernel versions, and many people publish their own version. What's more, every distribution publishes a different kernel - Redhat's kernel source RPM includes over 80 different patches which are applied to linus' version. Every succesful project has strict quality assurance guidelines, be it the kernel, mozilla, gcc, apache or even syscalltrack. The kernel is certainly not alone in this regard. "Standards should we set to define which projects merit attention .. " Hogwash. No standards should be set whatsoever, by anyone who is not either paying for the project, or contributing code for it. This is the developer's playground, which is a crucial point you two seem to miss. Free software is a meritocracy - the only people who [should] have a say are those who have earned it. For a given project, that means the set of developers, testers, users (those who contribute bug reports, not those who whine!) and sponsors. In conclusion, free yourself of the user mindset. Nobody is working for you, and nobody should be working more efficiently for your benefit (unless it's to their benefit as well) . If you want something done (which you implicitly do, "better projects"), get out there and do it. This article would have far more credibility if it was accompanied by a single patch to a single project. As a matter of fact, now that I think of it, is 'whatsup' not another project, where several other projects already exist? Did you contribute to any of the other projects? -- The ill-formed Orange Fails to satisfy the eye: http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~mulix/ Segmentation fault. http://syscalltrack.sf.net/ ================================================================= 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]
