> I wasn't aware of Toke's implementation of babel so far. Why are there > two?
I happen to believe that open (published) file formats and open protocols are way more important than free software. If the protocol is published, then it is easy enough to redo the implementation; if the protocol is closed, than even if you've got the source code, reverse-engineering the protocol might be difficult or even impossible. Now how do you verify that a protocol is written down in enough detail that it can be reimplemented independently? By asking your good friends to reimplement it. Since I've got plenty of good friends ;-), we ended up with four independent implementations of Babel: - I did the original implementation (with help from Grégoire Henry and Julien Cristau), - Markus Stenberg did a toy implementation in Python; - Toke Høyland-Jørgensen did a high-quality implementation within BIRD; - David Schinazi did a top-secret, proprietary implementation. A nice side-effect of having multiple implementations is that it keeps me honest: with multiple implementations, I cannot evolve the protocol without consulting the community. This means that even if I become completely crazy tomorrow, the protocol has a good chance to remain relatively sane. -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ Babel-users mailing list Babel-users@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/babel-users