[LAD] Open Source to be or not to be?

[David Robillard]

On Mon, 2014-06-30 at 21:58 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 11:13:06PM +0200, Stéphane Letz wrote:
> 
> > Fons, you know what?  the Faust zita-rev1 version  (still old
> > one of course..) now even runs in the web, automagically compiled
> > in asm.js  (http://asmjs.org) using latest faust2 git version
> > and running at acceptable speed in recent browsers like Firefox
> > or Chrome (still some issues here…) :
> 
> And what's the point of running a concert hall reverb in a web
> browser ? Providing a new 'business model' for audio engineering ?
> With some advertising around it and Google reaping the benifits
> and diverting them to some low tax island inhabitated by the
> stinking rich and their imported household slaves ? If that is
> the future of open source software, I'll step out. Or is it some
> form of masturbation for IT engineers who have nothing better to
> do ? Or are they too stupid to grok what's going on ?

++

UIs are one thing (not without their own problems, but running remotely
on pretty much anything is at least useful), but all this DSP in the
browser (or Javascript, period) nonsense is just that.  It's literally
the least appropriate thing to be doing on that platform I can think of.

One of the fun things you can do with compilers (like Faust) is output
pretty much anything as your "machine code".  What's fun, however, is
not always sane...

Native code aversion is a serious problem in the entire computing world,
which continues to snowball because all the language/etc innovation gets
directed at VMs for no particularly good reason (and/or you get
half-baked amateurish garbage like Javascript/PHP from people who have
no business inventing programming languages in the first place).  I
don't need a bloody virtual machine, I've got a real one, thanks.

Javscript doesn't even have real numeric types or sane lexical scoping.
The entire computing world is supposed to move to this joke, even for
high performance and real-time tasks?  Give me a break.

</rant>

-- 
dr