On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 05:28:36PM +0200, Lars Gullik Bj�nnes wrote:
> In all your "questions" and statements so far you make _a lot_ of
> false assumptions, resulting in coming of as offensive towards the
> people doing the actual work.
I believe my questions have been fairly stated as questions, not false
assumptions, and it has certainly not been my intention to get personal.
Yes, my perspective is different from some others. I hold to the view
that open source entails a kind of public trust, bringing with it
certain ethical obligations to current and potential user communities.
This point of view about open source is not universally held, I know.
It is not even widespread. And it does ruffle some feathers. Anyone
who has served on the board of directors of a charitable organization
is familiar with conflicts among constituencies, and that the lifeblood
contributers on the front lines don't always like what they hear from
people who seem remote from the front lines.
Everyone has a different point of view as to whether an open source
project is satisfying this or that user constituency, and what claim, if
any, a particular constituency may have. That's the way it goes, and in
this respect, the parallel to charitable organizations is robust.
I do not believe that "here's the source, go do it yourself" is an
appropriate or ethical response to user constituencies with a genuine
ethical claim, in most situations. And it is my belief that various
Unix constituencies actually *deserve* more attention than hypothetical
users on alternative platforms -- this has been front and center in my
comments.
Yes, I have felt obliged to raise questions about LyX's future and
the choices that have been, and are continuing to be be made by
participating developers. Personally, I consider LyX to be the premiere
project in the history of open source, and so my concerns about public
trust are strong.
Obviously, my questions have been pretty fully expressed here, and
a number of answers have been aired, either recently or at a point
available in archives.
As I said recently, the LyX community has a lot of reasons to be proud.
I would count the quality of the dialog over the past five or six years
as one of them.
Best of luck at the Developers Conference.
