Re: XP Questions
Robert G. Werner (rwerner@lx1.microbsys.com)
Fri, 16 Jul 1999 20:24:11 -0700 (PDT)
Guys,
Let me make a couple of observations:
1. Diversity of approaches has never hurt the open source movement (much as
we might flame each other the fact that some of us are priviledged to use
vi while others struggle on under emacs ;-P is a source of
strength not weakness. Vi is better for some things, some environments if
you will, while emacs is admittedly good for something^H^H^H good for
other things :-) ).
2. ESR said that hackers tend to work on projects they are interested in.
I would bet with you that people didn't make a choice between working on xp
in Abisuite or xp on Mozilla or wxWindows, even. They probably got
interested in the idea and started working. I doubt that you would find as
many people to work on one "Grand Unified Windowing Lib" as are currently
working on the three different projects you mentioned. Thus the number of
people working on XP ideas, issues, and techniques would be reduced not
increased.
3. Back to diversity. Three different ways of doing one thing are not a
bad thing, in spite of what some C Sci people might think. To cite Larry
Wall, "There is more than one way to do it." In the natural world, this
is the rule. You never find just one species in a habitat that could
support five. You never see just one genotype even within species.
Variation, diversity, prepair living things to face circumstances that are
outside their experience. How could exploring diffierent ideas of what XP
means be bad?
4. I've never understood opensource to mean that we should all work on the
same project, even if we want to work on the same idea. If that was the
case, we shouldn't have both Abiword and whatever MAXWELL is called. We
all benefit when good projects are joined by lots of people but we also
benefit by having lots of people trying lots of ideas, if only by their
discovering that one idea or another doesn't work in practice.
I don't think this is exactly the time to be making challenges to the
Abiword team. If the code works, let it speak for itself. As a suporter
and user of Abiword, I'm not really interested in seeing the core team
make promises without seeing a line of code.
I hate to quote anyone so much, but let me finish with another reference
to ESR. His comments on some of RMS supposed excesses were that he should
let the code speak for itself (OK, so I paraphrased it and made it sound
nicer. Sue me ;-)). I think this is a case where I'm completely with the
Abisource team: write up something with wxWindows so we can compare that
to what we've got.
I think it is safe to say that in the Open Source world, usually, the
best code wins.
Any comments?
Robert G. Werner
rwerner@lx1.microbsys.com
Impeach Conggress!!
On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Tom Ryan wrote:
> Eric,
>
> Thanks for your thoughtful response. I am including the
> wxWindows developers in this dialog, as this topic is very relevant
> to their efforts [by the way, cc'ing the wxWindows mailing list didn't
> seem to work so I am putting that address in the "To:" field on this
[snip]
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