On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 03:59:15AM -0400, Paul Gress wrote: > Philip Brown wrote: > > Its not a matter of "reconsidering". It's a matter of someone volunteering > > (or being "financially encouraged") to take it up. I'm not their boss; > > I'm certainly not paying them any money :-) Thus, i dont tell people what > > they have to package. > > > > > > > Again you point out a big deficiency of Blastwave. Do you think the > entire Linux could have been built on whether programmers asked > themself, does this benefit me or do I feel like doing it?
Err, yes, that is EXACTLY HOW IT HAPPENED. sheesh. Go read Linus's descriptions of how Linux got where it is today. Go read ESR's theories of open software. As a free software programmer for over 17 years, I can also tell you from personal experience, this is exactly how it happens. Open source programers write what they need, to have it work. Linus wrote what HE needed, to have Linux work for him. Other people took what he wrote, and said "hey, this almost meets my needs, but it just needs this little extra bit of code <here>". They wrote that bit, sent it back to Linus, and used it themselves. For the most part, no-one said, "hey, everyone tell me what you need for YOUR purposes, and I'll spend all my time coding something that I dont personally need". If you want something done, but are too lazy to do the work yourself, and too cheap to pay any kind of money to encourage someone else to do it... you can *request* that someone make something for you... but enough of this illusion that you are somehow entitled to have everyone do everything you want, the way you want it, for free. The whole point of "Open Source", is; "if you need something, here's the source code, now go write it/build it/make it yourself" The more business parts of things that get used with Linux, only got done because Redhat/IBM/et. al, PAID MONEY for the privilege of telling a coder, "you're going to write this for us now". "I feel like it", and "I got paid money", are the two sum total factors of how linux+suse+redhat+.... got built. Even the oh-so-wonderful open source ATI 3d acceleration support, in the xfree86 tree, got built... BECAUSE SOMEONE PAID MONEY for it to be done. It's a pain in the butt and way too much time for anyone to have done in their freetime, so it wasnt getting done otherwise.
