> 50 years ago people wrote with pen, pencil, and paper. This takes longer > and leaves more time for thought and makes it far more likely that a > spelling error would be noticed.
Perhaps part of the problem is that people are firing of emails without enough thought and care. I don't need a spell-checker because I read everything I send through again to catch typos and mistakes. > Additionally the whole purpose of machines is to offload work. Are you You make it sound like doing spelling and grammar correctly is some kind of additional burden on communication. It's not. It's an essential part. >> Open Source projects do _not_ work by people turning up and saying "I >> want a spell-checker! Write me one!" and the developers saying "Yes, >> master. We will do your bidding even though there are other thing we'd >> rather be doing." > > So are you saying that noone should ever use the binaries distributed by > Mozilla.org and people should only get rebranded versions through > sources like Netscape? The binaries mozilla.org makes available are for testing purposes only. It says that on the download page, and elsewhere. If people want to use them as their browser, we can't stop them - but that's not what they are for. And end-users are not mozilla.org's customers. They are Netscape, Red Hat and Beonex's customers. > Actually many open source projects do work by people showing up and > saying, "hey, this feature would be useful!". The developers are never > required to implement anything, but if they are not receptive to > sugestions, they will miss things that could make their project more > successful. Why do anything open source if it is not to have other > people use it? This would imply that implementing a spell-checker has not already been "suggested". It has. It also seems that, uniquely with the spell-checker, people seem to demand rather then suggest. >> "If you do have resources, and say so up front, you are assured of a >> polite and civil welcome." > > The resources I offer are myself, as a tester, bug reporter, and user. > Or do only people who are able to develop in c/java/javascript/etc > count? And if I don't have "resources" that qualify for your defination, > what kind of welcome can I expect? That response is in regard to the spell-checker. For all other things, you'll find the welcome as you find it :-) Gerv
