On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 11:56:46AM +0200, Toralf Lund wrote:This was meant as a more general remark. The point I'm trying to make is just that I object to the notion that the level of responsibility someone can be expected to assume when (in this case) publishing a software product, is a function of the amount of money that person got paid when developing the product. I think responsibility should be linked to different factors entirely than a person's salary.
If I make a load, public announcement saying that I've written this great piece of software that is the best thing since the reinvention of the wheel (;-)), and that will render all applications known so far hopelessly irrelevant, I think people have every right to shout at me if it doesn't. That's true even if I give the software away for free, and
GMAFB. Where does the gcc developers say that, or anything remotely
close to that?
The only I find is that they make available "regualarNot necessarily. I'm not sure this applies to you, but I think many people in the open source community suffer from a gross misunderstanding that can be expressed as
and high quality releases" of "a compiler with various frontends" and
encourage "everyone to help develop and test". Whining is whining no
matter how grand you guys try to make it sound.
Contribution is just about coding.
or
Development only involves implementation.
I think any experienced software engineer would agree with me that this is wrong. Criticising software *is* contributing to it. If the criticism is concerned with the general structure of the software, and constructive, I daresay it's a more valuable contribution than any amount of code, as coding is really not that difficult, while making good decisions at the architectural level is. Of course the criticism may be misplaced, unjust or ill-founded, but by the same token, contributed code may be ill-designed, buggy or irrelevant to the task at hand.
I'm not trying to imply here that the gcc developers or freeware package maintainers in general aren't open to criticism. In fact, it seems to me that misplaced remarks of the form "stop complaining and start contributing" whenever someone has the nerve to criticise an open source product, more often than not come from persons only loosely associated with the project, or not involved in the development at all.
- Toralf
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