Re: Open Source Enhancement

Cameron Gibbs <mr_point_n_click@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Joachim Schipper wrote:

No bot is quite this coherent. And he has posted in a wide variety of
newsgroups, on a wide variety of topics, with the same mix of
enthousiasm, self-confidence, and disregard for established structures.

Plus, his original message - granted, maybe apart from the part quoted
above - was coherent, contacted a group he wished to contact, and
revolved around a central idea. It might not have a very large chance of
attracting interested people from this newsgroup, but that is a result
of insufficient research and/or the notion that casting a wide net might
work, not of bot-ness.

Of course, all this should not be mistaken for encouragement; this is a
group dedicated to the OpenBSD system, not some to-be-written operating
system that might or might not be a desirable alternative.

Joachim

I need to get a foothold somewhere.
Happy to go along with something but it is hard to find where my end goal
might be supported.
Wouldn't it just be cool if you had what I describe? All it would take is a
few individuals with the skills and resources who would be willing to say
yes :)

What I see here is a slightly different philosophy, however, between
the development environment that you describe and the majority of
development that's done in most of the Unix and Linux world. I know
that my own opinion, and based on some experience, is that I don't
personally agree with these sorts of tools.

I agree that everyone can make a contribution, but I feel that the
limitations of the past in that arena are a result of businesses
preventing free exchange of information between the appropriate
parties. Artists can improve the look of a project, but most
companies categorize people so that they end up fighting with one
another. Things are a bit better in the open source world where
anyone can make a change but, alas, it's almost the exact opposite
problem where the coders rarely have time to mess with others' "wacky"
ideas and instead suggest that they learn to code it themselves. They
rarely do.

It sounds to me like the tool your describing already exists in the
form of Visual Basic, .net, java, etc., where one cares not for what's
happening but just drags stuff around and drops it somewhere to make
new windows and buttons. I'm not sure it even qualifies as high-level
programming anymore, and it's not plain interface design nor
usability, but perhaps it's called graphical user interface design or
some such thing. Perhaps high-level programming markup language?

My experience is that these tools waste time (for me), time that I
don't have, and I nary have time to work on building them. Not only
that, but there are certain levels of bloat that I consider to be
counter to the common good, and I think it's part of my job as an
open source advocate to observe that half the problem is creating
crappy software that requires new hardware that then requires more
time to integrate, create drivers for, etc., just so people can write
more crappy software and repeat the cycle. If we'd spend less time
writing drivers for hardware from companies that release no hardware
information because of proprietary and business-oriented connections,
I'd think we'd have a lot more time to do productive development to
improve many of the things about which people complain.

--
Brian Blackmore
blb8 at po dot cwru dot edu
.

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