From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tlaronde@polynum.com Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:28:34 +0200 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: <20100330132834.GA23514@polynum.com> References: <74D7F419-45B5-4A7C-BEC9-BD00DE32619C@rejaa.com> <49ca336015fc7cfab826e5612b212532@quintile.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <49ca336015fc7cfab826e5612b212532@quintile.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan ? (was: native install) Topicbox-Message-UUID: f90a4bc8-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 01:34:12PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote: > > This way (dot-it-your-self-way) we will "only" have one-man projects. . . > > True, if anyone feels that a project is too big for them then > by all means put a shout out on the list and see if anyone there wants to help. Everything can not always be done as a collaboration; and the main possibilities are in parallele works. This implies a kind of independance. Indeed, when there are several people working on the "same" thing, it's because the thing has been thought, is consistent (hence: thought by very few people, with one leading), so that it's an organized hierarchy of "one man" works. Take the example of TeX, METAFONT (the conversion of WEB/Pascal to something compilable on the majority of systems). When I started looking at what was going on, trying to make sense of the thing, it was not possible to be several doing this; and since I didn't know at the beginning, I couldn't obviously explain. Now I know. But it would take me all the time to explain to someone else, hence we would not be 2 doing the work, but 1 explaining without doing, and the other trying to do without having understood by doing... And the "collaborative" effort shows in the web2c result: things that are common between all the pieces written by D.E.K. are implemented with slight divergences for TeX and METAFONT, with variations in names, in parameters and so on, because some have worked on TeX, while others worked on METAFONT etc. The main task now is cleaning and deleting and having the strict minimum of code. And you can compare. Donald Knuth has done the work, the majority: the code. And a bunch of people have contributed chunks for the compilation framework. On one side, you have code (result) and consistency; on the other side, you have _inhumanity_ since you have increasing of the entropy that is disorder: order is unnatural, and is the mark of human activity. "Open source" seems very natural in this sense: the bazaar... -- Thierry Laronde (Alceste) http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C