competition is good? [LWN.net]

competition is good?

Posted Mar 29, 2007 14:29 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: competition is good? by dion
Parent article: Linux and flash

> Wrt. Flash implementations there is only one need: To have the best
> possible implementation.

The definition of "best" is multiple:

1. the fastest implementation; or
2. the smallest implementation; or
3,4,5. the implementation best-integrated with my KDE/GNOME/XFCE
desktop; ...

> Wrt. Desktops there are many users with different needs, but that's
> something that should be handled by adding configuration options, not by
> creating a separate project for each user.

Configuration option: do you want all the DE's software to be developed
using C++, C, or C#, using GTK, Tk, LessTif, or Qt (so you can extend it
with your own knowledge)? I don't think it's possible...

> Even though the technical reason for starting GNOME is gone (non-Free
> Qt), there are many people still working on that project for somewhat
> vague reasons like having a preference for C over C++.

Even if I agreed that GNOMErs are evil (and I don't), some people just
don't have the ability to program in C++ over C.

> There is no danger in having one really good implementation that
> everybody uses, just look at samba, gcc, Linux and openssl*, those
> projects and their users do very good without any direct competition.

Without competition like MS-CIFS, lcc and lots of proprietary compilers,
*BSDs, and GNUTLS?

> I guess my point is that the danger of lock in and mismanagement isn't
> that big of a deal with OSS projects, because if a project goes astray
> you can always fork it and keep going, so keeping the developers and
> users consolidated around that one project only has benefits for both.

That is your error IMHO: if a project goes astray you can always fork it
and keep going IFF you have the necessary skills to make it keep going the
way it is. Anyway, "keeping developers and users consolidated around one
project" is a pipe dream... people disagree all the time, that is why we
do have thousands of different legal systems in the world.

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competition is good?

Posted Mar 30, 2007 10:16 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

Best wrt flash should be something like: Correct, fast, integrated in that order.

WRT GNOME choosing C, that is widely regarded as a mistake or at least widely enough that Miguel shares that point of view.

Choosing C over C++ is really not a forgivable offense when talking about desktop applications IMHO.

I guess I should specify what I meant by "direct competition", MS-CIFS doesn't compete directly with SAMBA as it's not Open Source and thus not available to everyone that SAMBA is available to.

The same is true with GCC, lcc is not Free software and doesn't come close to GCCs abilities.

gnutls does seem to try to compete with openssl and there are certain smaller Free ssh implementations (dropbear for one), but they do not have nearly as wide a deployment (I certainly had never heard of gnutls before) so both openssl and openssh can be said to have a monopoly.

The BSD kernels could be seen as competitors to Linux, but again there is no direct competition, as BSD is a whole other OS, when was the last time you swapped out Linux with the BSD kernel on your system?

That being said I don't think forcing anyone to do anything is ever a good idea, so I fully respect peoples rights to choose what projects to work on.

All I'm saying is that the situation is much better when a single good project dominates without any competition than when there are n+1 crappy competing projects.

Having a single good project might not always be possible, but when it is it can be very, very good in deed.

competition is good?

Posted Apr 5, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link]

Whence the "C is a bad desktop programming language" tirade? Have you learned nothing in the past decade?

GNOME has had five years of API and ABI stability. The C++ language has had about five ABI changes in the same timeframe. So even if we don't count the changes in KDE and Qt libraries, 3rd party software OEMs have had to re-build everything from scratch for each of the numerous KDE/QT interface and C++ ABI combinations shipped with various versions of various distributions, which is an outrageous amount of effort. Or they've shipped everything statically linked, resulting in extreme bloat in both disk space and memory usage. The GTK+/GNOME apps have just worked, and will continue to just work for the foreseeable future.

There you have it. C is superior to C++.

And for the record, read Miguel's rants again: he is not tired of C, but of languages which aren't garbage collected or JIT compiled. Neither C nor C++ has this, so they're both obsolete!

There, now aren't you glad we have desktop competition? :-)