Re: Doom of Debian Re: Debian Weekly News - February 18th, 2003
Davide Inglima <st970743@educ.di.unito.it> writes:
> Miles Bader wrote:
> > Ha ha ha... such `enthusiasts' are hardly a loss, I think...
>
> Well... if you think that you can get rid of enthusiasts you are
> wrong. This is all IMO but think about it from this point of view:
> enthusiasts make good testing ground. They do bug reports, they ask
> for features, they help other people to enter in both the Open Source
> mindset, and the Free Software one.
You misunderstood what I said -- I think enthusiasts in general are fine
and good, it's just these _particular_ enthusiasts that are `hardly a
loss.'
Free software has no problem attracting (and keeping) enthusiasts, so
we should hardly be upset if some of the less thoughtful ones change
their mind for some silly reason.
> > In any case, this is actually a sterling example of how source-code
> > availability and modifiability wins big: .... If it was a
> > proprietary program, the easter-egg would still be there, and no one
> > would be the wiser.
>
> Yes, but this does not answer by a mile the problem I was raising.
It certainly does answer what you said in your original message;
however you seem to have changed your argument below:
> If people is already driven off because of the Free Software/Open
> Source community at large inability of getting a common ground and
> beginning to build a set of common tools which work well and
> seamlessly together because any coder is trying to do the prima-donna
> and rewrite interfaces, protocols, scripting languages and common
> utility libraries (and the schism between Gnome and KDE is a nice
> example of this happening [1])
What does any of this have to do with free software? Such problems are
rampant in the `proprietary software' sector as well; Microsoft's
overwhelming grip on the market has helped to change this a bit, but
it's not because of any inherent advantage in proprietary software.
Things will probably eventually shake out in the free-software world as
well, but you have to give it time. If you try to force the issue you're
almost certainly going to end up with something horrible (e.g. Motif, or
much of the dross that comes out of MS).
> then, what do you really think would happen when incidents like the
> one of Micq begin to spread more and more and more?
I see no connection between the `micq incident' and the points you
raised above WRT standardization. Please elucidate.
-Miles
--
Yo mama's so fat when she gets on an elevator it HAS to go down.
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