>Jim> In the long run, I'd rather have all of them out there than have
>Jim> one single project, because it means that the general idea we all
>Jim> have in common is safe, no matter who actually wins, and that the
>Jim> users have a choice about what's most important to them.
>
>It seems to me that the whole notion of `winning' (and, implicitly,
>`losing') is misguided and misleading when applied to free software.
Well, cool ideas are much better and finding their way between free
systems, that's true. But, for example, GNUstep has a very nifty
remote messaging system (which Andrew McCallum says is faster than
NeXT's, by the way) that's quite specific to Objective C's conception
of objects. There's no way that's going to carry right over to STk or
Guile. That effort, if GNUstep doesn't make it, is pretty much lost.
But the situation is certainly better than in the proprietary world,
where the source goes down with the ship. What I wouldn't give to see
the guts of Mathematica and Macsyma...
Hmm, this is off-topic. And getting political. So I'll shut up now.
Received on Sat Jan 11 1997 - 00:10:47 CET
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