At 3:15 PM -0700 5/29/99, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
>On Sat, 29 May 1999, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>
>> The quote from Jolly Chen does not seem consistent with Eric Raymond's
>> analysis in "The Cathedral and the Bazzar." Since the latter is pretty
>> well known, I would expect it to provoke disagreement unless it can be
>> justified or explained a bit more.
>
>Assuming that one finds the analysis in TCAB to be correct, which a lot
>of people don't. There's no need to launch into an anti-ESR war because
>of these, but there's certainly no reason not to voice honest opinions
>just because Eric disagrees with them.
>
My focus was wrong, sorry. The real point is that there is an obvious
inconsistancy with a current hot viewpoint. If one wants to publish a
conflicting viewpoint it should probably be explained more or else the
resulting discussion will generate more heat than light.
I suspect that if you got Jolly and Eric in a real conversation about what
they really meant then they might not disagree as much as it first
appeared. Eric himself points out that the need to make something that
actually works requires some kind of coordination and filtering of patches.
If the coordination is too rigid then either the project languishes (*BSD
vice Linux) or a new project splits off (egcs vice gcc). (Does MySQL vice
mSQL constitute another example in this space?) If the coordination is
too free then the reliability of the product suffers. (Can't think of a
good example, but then the good examples are probably projects that have
died and been forgotten.)
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