Development quotes of the week

In fact, overall Py3k uptake is very slow. Which isn't very surprising, as there's very little to gain by switching to it and more than a little headache.

At any rate, most of the world appears to still be on Python 2.6 and can blissfully ignore that's there's no 2.8 planned for probably another year or more. Which means the Python devs still have a year to come to their senses about discontinuing the language people actually use.

Recently, a few python packagers from a couple Linux distributions started thinking about wanting to port more python modules to python3 to aid in migration and respond to the user demand for python3 versions of some software. We came to the conclusion that we're all feeling our way down this path, writing a little patch here and a little patch there as we try to make a package here or a package there compatible. This is good organic growth but has some limitations: different distributions tending to reinvent the same changes, patches floating around unaccepted by upstreams, and common porting issues having to be discovered by each person individually.

The Oracle employees who are members of the OpenOffice.org project and who expressed themselves these past days have displayed a disturbing lack of understanding of Free and Open Source Software; LibreOffice is, after all, and until proven otherwise, a downstream version of OpenOffice.org, and as such deserves inclusion into the OpenOffice.org community. I can only imagine what it would be like if Debian was rejecting the Ubuntu employees among its teams, calling it a fork.

The sad thing in the bigger picture, is to see the community of companies grow (and fail) faster than the lessons / experience of past failures percolate through to their leadership. In my experience most people totally miss the most difficult piece of software engineering: which sounds like it should be software - but is really about people - and more importantly - them working together collaboratively in a constructive, friendly, and incremental fashion.

There is not one out-and-out success story of a company building a great high-quality custom user interface on the standard Linux stack, except Android, which is hardly a model of collaborative software development.