> 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.
That is one opinion.
If wxWindows was the Grand Unified Windowing Lib that Mozilla
used for portability you can bet your a** that there would be a
wxMac port done by a Mac lover that wanted to use Mozilla on the
Mac (and a wxBeOS port and wxQNX port and a wx* port). Or
maybe those other OS developers would decide, in this grand
theology of open source that you describe, to create their own
Mozilla porting system from scratch. Yep, that makes a lot of
sense.
I guess the beauty of open source in that case would be that there
would be so much of it to write.
> 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.
Whatever.
> 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?
Are you smoking something? It is a Bad Thing if there are multiple efforts
are trying to solve the exact same problem, resulting in duplication
and fragmentation of efforts.
> 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.
I was never trying to define "what opensource means". "Logic"
means that one can get further if one does not duplicate efforts and
one works with others toward a common goal. Open source implies
cooperation between groups of developers. (hypothetical question:
Is source code really open if no one looks at it?).
> 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.
1. I really don't care what you are or are not interested in.
2. I did not ask them to do anything. All I did is ask if they have
considered wxWindows and their reasons for not using an existing
solution. It seems from the response that, either they were not up
to speed on the progress that wxWindows has made since their
evaluation or that they were monitoring wxWindows progress but
felt that they were too far along to change.
3. They were the ones that made a good natured challenge to the
wxWindows team. I merely clarified their challenge by asking
them if we could prove that wxAbiWord worked as good or better
then their current porting system, would they consider using
wxWindows as their standard porting system.
> I hate to quote anyone so
> much, but let me finish with another reference to ESR.
My suggestion: start having some original thoughts of your own
and stop quoting others to prop up your excessively lame
arguments.
> 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.
Did you even read my response? I agreed with them completely on
the issue of doing a port of wxWindows first and seeing if it could
meet or beat their current system.
The bottom line that it makes sense to work together on projects
that share a common goal unless there is an overriding reason not
to cooperate. In this case, AbiSource said that they indeed
considered using existing solutions, but those solutions were
disqualified at the time based upon their requirements. Thus,
AbiSource did their due diligence -- that was my original question.
Sorry to the rest of the group for my blunt comments, but it has
been a long week and I have no desire to try and come up with a
measured response to such an inane message.
-TR
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