[TCLCORE] Words to consider...

[Jeffrey H. <jef...@aj...>]

I found this on Slashdot (The Cathedral and The Bizarre), which
is based on this article:
	http://www.macopinion.com/columns/macskeptic/00/07/07/index.html

The whole thing is well worth reading, but I'm excerpting some juicy
bits to ponder:

....
Programmers - at least the kind who are likely to get
involved in OpenSource project - are a notoriously independent lot.
They love to do their own thing and always think they have a better
way to do things.

Normally, this is an advantage because, with filtering and discipline,
this is from whence the fountain of creativity which drives this
industry comes. Unchecked and unfiltered, though, and you have
unbridled chaos. As a result, you have no less than six different
desktop systems and two different configuration systems and tools
whose command line options change not only from system flavour -
but from revision to revision. Perl is the best example of this - when
they went to version five, they changed the language syntax in a way
which broke existing code. Perl itself is a testimony to the
OpenSource mindset - it's a gruesome mishmash of inconsistent
syntax and function calls - definitely a product designed by
committee - but one wherein each member clearly wasn't listening to
anyone else.

Raymond touts the stability of Linux as proof of the OpenSource
concept, but that's a bit misleading. The core of Linux was written
by one person - Linus Torvalds. Moreover, there is a small group
who shepherds the contributions to the kernel to keep it stable and
clean. In other words, there's a priesthood at the top of the bazaar.
If you check into each successful OpenSource project, you see the
same thing: a small group of referees who filter the input and weed
out the bad ideas. The bazaar has cops. The chaos is contained.
....
....
People jump on the bandwagon and promote the software, and the
crowd grows and grows - often way out of proportion to the quality
of the solution. Perl, again, is an excellent example of this. It's really
a terrible language - badly.. ok... not designed, clumsy and
arbitrary. But it works - is better than shell scripting, and more
powerful than awk... and it was the first serious attempt at such a
language. So it went platinum with a bullet.
....
....
Ironically, when commercial developers release applications which
are clearly not 100%, we accuse them of forcing the customer to be
beta testers, but in a sense, OpenSource assumes you're not only
going to be a tester; you're going to be a programmer and fix the
bug!
....

Jeffrey Hobbs                     Tcl Ambassador
ho...@Aj...          Ajuba Solutions (née Scriptics)

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