Hard, but apparently not impossible :-)

Posted Apr 7, 2005 13:41 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462)
In reply to: Hard, but apparently not impossible :-) by emk
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal

It's an interesting question: how does one (the Open Source community in general) enforce the creation of a technically superior piece of software? I'd say the distinction between something that "just works" and something that is extremely well engineered (and therefore much more succesful than its peers) is largely attributable to factors that cannot really be controlled: brilliance being the most obvious one.

Compare this to the way we ended up with the theory of special relativity. The problem solved by this theory had been known for decades before one spark of genius solved it in a revolutionary way of thinking. In retrospect it is hard to imagine that several Nobel prize winners spent so much time on theories that high school students now would find offensively naive. However, there's no guarantee that we would view the world in the way we do now if Einstein hadn't been around.

(Actually, the current state of physics demands that someone like Einstein step up to the plate..)

I'm sure dwheeler has much more to say about this. ;-)