To: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Re: community spirit
References: <200411010336.iA13af6p023128@xl2.seyza.com>
	<20041101141701.GB9161@puritan.pcp.ath.cx>
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	<20041101144826.GD9161@puritan.pcp.ath.cx> <41867B20.1020608@melon.dk>
	<2982EA60-2C38-11D9-8C6F-000393CFE6B8@spy.net>
	<4186917E.3030209@melon.dk> <20041101232959.GA25080@hezmatt.org>
	<87ekjcswdn.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <418765A9.2040206@diku.dk>
	<878y9kpfcm.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
	<200411022006.iA2K6Q1n036262@xl2.seyza.com>
Organization: The XEmacs Project
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 01:23:02 +0900
In-Reply-To: <200411022006.iA2K6Q1n036262@xl2.seyza.com> (Thomas Lord's
	message of "Tue, 2 Nov 2004 12:06:26 -0800 (PST)")
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>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net> writes:

    Thomas> It's hard to make the distinction between good and bad
    Thomas> reuse but I think the distinction is pretty darn real
    Thomas> (even if a bit fuzzy around the edges).

It's very easy to make the distinction.  Reuse is good if (a) the
reused feature is appropriate, and (b) the reused implementation is of
sufficiently high quality and higher than the reuser can afford to
write himself, and (c) reuse does not require torturing the overall
design to fit the reused module.  If any of (a), (b), or (c) is
violated, it ain't.

    Thomas> Rule of thumb: Reuse is a virtue if and only the resulting
    Thomas> work remains "human scale" -- i.e., there is an overall
    Thomas> design coherence and any ambitious+educated person can
    Thomas> deal confidently with any part of the system they
    Thomas> encounter.

Nonsense.  The sentiment itself is arguable, of course, but the "human
scale" issue (crack me up, by the way---Kirkpatrick Sale's book is one
of the heaviest paperbacks on my bookshelf, only Complete Chess
Openings is bigger---at least E. F.  Schumacher had the decency to
write a short book and publish it in a pocket edition!) is irrelevant
to whether scale is achieved by de novo construction or reuse.  Human
scale is pure criterion (a), but that's not special to reuse.

    Thomas> And then internally to the code of these systems
    Thomas> themselves, well, I claim that nobody in the world is a
    Thomas> master of most of these systems: people just keep patching
    Thomas> them and praying and nursing their own insane pet theories
    Thomas> about how they function.

No argument there.

    Thomas> You give up too easily.  Users want and expect easy-to-use
    Thomas> rich functionality.  It's just that the bloat crap is the
    Thomas> only way it has ever been offered to them.

Sure, and XEmacs is a classic example (though long since relegated to
the "bantamweight" class).  I don't know how to fix it, but ...

"Dear Lord, if you're so smart, why aren't you *boss*?"

And it's not just you.  There are dozens of smart free software people
who know a thing or three about system building, some with enormous
entrepreneurial talent.  Take the leading example: rms.[1]  But then,
you just deprecated GNU out the wazoo, didn't you, so I guess he, too,
whiffed on the bloat-ball.  On the other hand, none of the *BSDs offer
nearly the range of software that GNU/Linux does---unless they offer
ports of GNU software.  In fact, by now all of them have rather
accurate Linux emulators!

Sure, we all know how to do it in theory, and given the resources,
people like you surely could implement it.[2]  But the fact remains:
nobody has managed to do it.  Nor does it look like you're going to
anything effective about trying to do it yourself---you've got better
things to do, like Arch, and Pika Scheme, and xl1, and furth, and so
on.  *And everybody else is just like you*: they have more important
things to do (and of course they want them packaged for the distros!)

No?

Footnotes: 
[1]  No, you don't have to aim at getting rich to be an entrepreneur.

[2]  Ie, I know that I don't have the right training and talent to do
it, but I do believe that there are others who do.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.


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