On Dec 29, 2006, at 4:37 AM, Abigail wrote:
The fact that there's one source tree for Perl has several not
unrelated
causes: Perl is a moving target; there's no formal specification; perl
is complex, there just aren't enough people who are both willing and
knowledgable to do another implementation of Perl. There's probably
also
less reason to have more than one Perl implementation than there is to
have more than one Unix implementation, or more than one C compiler.
One could point to WINE and repeat that paragraph replacing "Perl" with
"Windows", and reach the conclusion that Windows is as open as Perl.
And, in fact, I've run into Microsoft apologists who do make that
point... and go on to argue that Microsoft is so constrained by
existing applications that they're no longer in control.
I don't really consider gcc with its extensions as an open system
either, for the same reason. It's entirely possible to be open source
without being an open system. It may be easier for an open source
system to become an open system, but it takes intent and effort to
clean it up and tie it down and make that happen. If there's no will to
make that happen, it won't.
