competition is good?

competition is good?

Posted Mar 30, 2007 8:26 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764)
In reply to: competition is good? by TRauMa
Parent article: Linux and flash

I take your "intelligent design" suggestion as the strongest possible insult, but we're talking about software development, not a biological process.

Evolution is not a good development method for software, except for some very specialized areas where you can run thousands of generations pr. second.

Sure it's nice to think of the plethora of OSS projects as evolution in action, but behind every single one of those projects is at least one designer,

Natural selection doesn't really work with software either, the only thing an OSS project needs to live is to attract developers, that's why you have ridiculous things like desktop applications written in C that just refuse to go away or evolve into using a higher level language.

To get back to your question; yes, I think that GNOME should have been scrapped around the time when Qt was released under GPL or maybe even before that, even RMS conceded that the QPL was a Free license.

The reason to start GNOME in the first place was that Qt wasn't Free, so once that reason went away so should GNOME.

That being said, GNOME has improved and is a useful desktop now, the only thing lacking is a proper high level language, but I guess the up coming C# rewrite will take care of that.

Once GNOME has been rewritten in C# it will be an ideal desktop for former windows developers to get started on, so there is merit in that approach.

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