J j.e.taylor@uea.ac.uk wrote:
I know several ALUG members who keep sitting down and going "I defend Open Source because it means we dont have to keep re-writing the wheel everytime we want to use one". If this is so, why are there so many programs which do the same thing as other programs, instead of all of the people who work on these con-current programs working together on one "good", "efficient" one?
Variety is the spice of life, and with out the variety, there's not a whole lot of point in having anything, the 'different' programs often use different toolkits, had different origionating ideas, and have different goals. The developers may well have started on the code at the same time, some of the projects may be forks of other projects (usually due to political arguments between groups of people, see BSDs variants for an example). Next you'll do the "why doesn't everyone use just one Desktop Environment" and "Why don't we all use the same distribution", there's reasons for everything. Anyways - you already know this, you're just being obtuse again and looking for responses ;) (Oh, and you could think of it *this* way, if it was such a brilliant idea to throw all your eggs in one basket, how comes a lot of the more useful software out there for windows *isn't* written by microsoft? and why is it that microsofts new titles generally magically appear, after aquiring yet another smaller company? (fair enough, M$ then fuck it sideways afterwards, but hey, you can't have everything)). There are as many different projects out there as developers with different mind sets and goals, there's a lot of compromise put in to most designs, you can either be extremely secure, or extremely flexible, or extremely simple to use (but fucks up badly when you want it to do something complex), I don't think I've yet come across anything that covers all three, you can get some very nice balances in the middle, and that's why you have so many forks/projects that seem the same.
Anyways - I wasn't actually in the mood for a rant. I have bad head.
Brett.