Gentle persons: I keep hoping the jog-under-pause furor will die down but, like my old car, it keeps dieseling after it appears to shut down.
Over my career and because of its nature, I tried hundreds of open-source products and contributed to or at least helped test dozens. Of these, some are simple, some are quite complex, but almost all are tools written for developers. Only a few, like Open Office, are aimed directly at end users. Of the latter, EMC2 is the only one I know that bridges operational machinery, real-time control, complex functionality, and end-user accessibility, not to mention has had such longevity. I think it is a fantastic achievement. No software is perfect. Users can always make suggestions, nitpick, or downright demand changes to software, whether it is open source or not. Thousands of messages, blog entries, and manifestos have been written since Richard Stallman wrote the original GPL twenty years ago, and yet there is still this dynamic tension between what the open-source community can produce and what the open-source community wants to use. It is only human nature for a user to want just what a user wants. It is only human nature for developers to respond best to requests that seem to fit the gestalt, if you will, and the resources of the project. Even with a commercial product, the development team picks and chooses what it will work on, and even with a commercial product, waving money doesn't always get you what you want (don't ask me how I know!). I just ran a script on the src directory of EMC2_2.3.5. There are more than 360K lines in the text files. If one assumes that a third of these are not executable code but comments and the like, that leaves a quarter of a million lines of code in a variety of languages to manage. It's not Windows 7 but it's not your favorite Python script either. Making changes to the core functionality of EMC2 is clearly not something to be taken lightly. When the key developers say a suggested change is hard, believe them. They've already suffered through lots of changes that had unintended consequences (just ask Microsoft how common this is in the worlds of commercial software!). I also just looked at the usage poll on the Wiki. It's a little difficult to judge how many EMC2 users there are out there, firstly because no one is forced to respond and secondly because respondents are free to make more than one choice. Still, if we assume that the 1169 who said they use emc2.2x is a reasonable lower limit, then the current kerfuffle involves at most a few percent of the users. Making a core change might discombobulate ten times as many as it aids. Not that this is automatically bad, but it should not be done automatically. [As an aside, the survey poll also shows many different machine types are being used with EMC2, and the numbers suggest many times more users. There are no reliable data on the distribution of methods/tools used to generate g-code but whatever the total user population, I'd guess it is unrealistic to claim a majority of EMC2 users employ CAD/CAM with automatic generation of g-code.] Finally, while I never subscribe to the notion that you can't say something is wrong with an open-source product unless you can fix it yourself (how many are likely to understand the 360K lines of EMC2 source code?), I do have a personal aversion to hearing anyone say EMC2 has to be changed because some other product can do something EMC2 can't do, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. My gut response would be, so use the other product already, nobody is stopping you. I admire the developers for restraining themselves from saying it. It seems to me they are working hard to satisfy as many of us as they can. Sorry if I took up too much of your time. Happy machining! Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
