18 Dec
2004
18 Dec
'04
10:48 p.m.
On Sun, 2004-12-19 at 01:46, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 10:20:44AM -0500, Dave
Robillard wrote:
No disagreement about that.
Not everyone's standards/opinions are the
same as yours.
And not everyone's credits are the same as yours.
Did you ever have a close look at Scala ? It's one of those
rare apps that show off a level of dedication and quality
that's hard to find. It has probably taken years of hard
work and painstaking research.
If the author of such a great work makes it available for
free, I can only say 'thanks a lot'.
If ever you contribute anything that reaches only ten percent
of the value of Scala, then maybe you will have gained a bit
of the authority required to question the author's choices.
Until that time, you will just make a fool of yourself by
doing so.
I think there are two types of contribution, application
contribution(free as in beer) and source code contribution(free as in
speech). While Scala falls into the first category, AFAIK Dave is an
active open source contributor.
OTOH, how do you measure the value of Scala or any other application?
Is it determined by popularity?
And if Debian wants to preserve its (her ? his ?) virginity by
imposing strict rules on what will be included and what will
not be, that's fine for me. But please don't impose the same
attitude on the whole world.
I don't think it was Daves intention to rant on the authors decision to
not release source code. He was trying to point out some of the
motivations behind open source that some of us seem to forget.
Marek