Are you seriously going to sit there and argue that open source is a sheer meritocracy with a straight face? Okay. Here are 4 examples:
These aren't examples of discrimination, these are examples of people making comments you find offensive. I don't think anyone argues that OSS is a "sheer meritocracy" -- there's far too much politics and ego-stroking for that to be the case. However, one consideration that is never actually considered is gender.
Have you ever been denied SVN commit access because you're a girl? Has your memory management patch been rejected because you weren't a man? Has anyone refused to explain to you the difference between covariance and contravariance because it's a "boys only" secret?
Be prepared to be offended. OSS has a "hobby" feel to it for most people, and as such there's an informality that makes people feel that they can let go of the business-like social inhibitions that are so often in place to prevent offending the sensibilities of the separate cultures that make up an audience. You get it unfiltered, and you might not like what makes it through.
Yours isn't the only culture that gets lampooned; it's just the only one you care about. If you were a deeply religious person, for example, you may be severely offended by the irreverent treatment of what you hold so dear by the proselyting atheists who make up a disproportionate amount of the community. And there are many other examples.
But if you have real examples of actual discrimination, of opportunities denied because of your gender, then there is a real problem that needs examination. However, if you're just offended, well then hello and welcome to the Internet.
So your world is divided into "people who agree with me" and "mindless zombies".
I think that's a bit of a stretch, don't you?
Miguel's argument: RMS attacked me, but he's also famously attacked many of the most important players in bringing parts of his ultimate dream to reality. Conclusion: RMS's has an unproductive penchant for attacking people in his speaking and writing, including his own allies, if they don't subscribe to all of his philosophies.
Your interpretation: People who don't agree with me are mindless zombies.
A bit of a stretch, you must admit.
> I think
.Net is a platform with technical merit
I have yet to see it. Really.
Might I suggest that you have yet to look?
C# and the CIL bring to the table:
If mono hadn't been an implementation of a standard proposed by Microsoft, it would have been hailed as god's gift to programmers.
He has no idea what the relationship between C#, CLR,
.NET, and Mono is. So you disagree with RMS: fine. But you're doing yourself a grave disservice by dismissing him as someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Love him or hate him, he's a sharp guy who knows his stuff.
Stallman is a sharp guy who knows lots of stuff. But that doesn't mean he knows this stuff. RMS has a proud history of running on about things he disagrees with on principle without taking the time to fully understand them.
No one can be expected to understand everything about everything, and restricting someone with views as strong as RMS to only talking about things he fully understands would be an unacceptable handicap.
There most definitely is a logical argument. In a word: patents.
Not really. You're just as likely to run afoul of a MS patent (even one relating to the
MS already tried one legal tack to go after OSS, namely the SCO lawsuit. There's no reason to think they wouldn't try another.
The SCO lawsuit was perpetrated by SCO, not Microsoft. While MS was happy to see it happen, they weren't behind it, and contrary to some
Perhaps you're thinking of something else?
May I be the first to say "amen"? I've been very dissatisfied with the 2.6 kernel and its schedulers on the desktop, CFS in particular. CFS seems entirely braindead for desktop use compared to the older schedulers in 2.4 and yes, even 2.2.
Oh yeah, and which other scheduler's, if any, did this guy write?
Actually, he wrote CFS. Or rather, he wrote the original implementation of CFS. Ingo Molnar re-wrote his implementation and announced it as if he had come up with the idea. At least, from Con's perspective that's what happened. That's why he left Linux development, and why he has no intention of trying to get his scheduler into mainline.
This post is the utmost of absurdity. You create a strawman that is an awful piece of code, and then talk about why it sucks -- well, yeah it sucks, you deliberately crafted it to be so.
I realize that no one is going to read this now, but FWIW, here's an actual example from one of the most well-respected python projects in circulation:
def render_to_response(*args, **kwargs):
"""
Returns a HttpResponse whose content is filled with the result of calling
django.template.loader.render_to_string() with the passed arguments.
"""
httpresponse_kwargs = {'mimetype': kwargs.pop('mimetype', None)}
return HttpResponse(loader.render_to_string(*args, **kwargs), **httpresponse_kwargs)
You recognize it? Yep, that's one of the most commonly used functions in the Django project.
I can't even imagine why the Sheriff's office would want to seize the records relating to law enforcement within the state, but I'm sure he has a Very Good Reason.
What would the boss do? Maybe he'd come to the conclusion that Java and C# are for professionals while Python and Ruby are for hobbyists?
It is.
Dynamic languages are fast and fun, but writing maintainable code in Ruby or Python takes an absurd amount of time and discipline. Take the following real-world, not-at-all-uncommon example. Imagine you have the function "get_results", and you want to quickly determine what all the parameters do. So you have a look at the code:
def get_results(**args):
color = args.pop('color','red')
return generator(color=color).encode(_fetch(**args))
Totally, completely, useless. So you end up following a series of rabbit holes trying to track down the actual usage of these parameters -- and even when you think you've got it all figured out, you still can't be certain because the complex interaction of possibilities in a dynamic language means that you never know what details will end up later being significant.
In order for the thing to be maintainable, the comments would have to outweigh the code by a factor of about 3 to 1, and the documentation needs to be rigorously maintained so that it stays in sync with the code. If you're the original author, then no problem! You wrote the function, so you know what it does. But in a corporate setting with a team of 5 programmers and average turnover, this is a nightmare.
Languages like Java and C# are significantly more verbose and explicit than languages like Python. You're forced to spell everything out in excruciating detail or the thing just won't run. It's like being FORCED to write documentation as part of your program: functions and parameters need to be explicitly declared, class structures can't change shape during execution -- all the important decisions about the shape and usage of your code needs to be decided and written down, and can't be changed without updating all your definitions.
Python and Ruby are "fun" because they don't make you work. There's a cost to skipping all that work, though.
Tell us how you know that Mono doesn't infringe on Microsoft's patents. Tell us how Moonlight doesn't infringe on Microsoft patents. Clear this stuff up.
I'm not sure you understand how patents work.
Mono is an implementation of the standards on which
Likewise, Richard Stallman can never be certain that GCC doesn't infringe on Microsoft's patents regarding Microsoft's C compiler, or that Emacs doesn't infringe on any patents in Microsoft Word.
What's worse is that actually researching to see if there is any patent infringement opens you up to more danger, because if you looked, then you'd be subject to triple damages in any court case for knowingly infringing on a patent. This is why the Linux kernel team intentionally avoids researching Microsoft's patent claims regarding Linux.
Mono is neither more nor less susceptible to patent claims from Microsoft than any other project; be it Python, Ruby, Java, AbiWord, or Gnome-Terminal.
Just because you made it different doesn't mean you made it better.
That goes double for UI.
The FBI: think of it like heart surgery with a backhoe.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin