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A very nice reply, thank you. I believe though that there is a real problem of code reuse vs. reinventing the wheel in the FOSS community. One of the main ratio

A very nice reply, thank you. I believe though that there is a real problem of code reuse vs. reinventing the wheel in the FOSS community. One of the main rationales of open source is collaboration, but very often, developers choose to begin new projects rather than attempting to collaborate on an existing codebase. Instead of harmonious group effort, we end up with a "tower of babel" of competing projects. Choice and variety are good, but they need to be balanced against the principle of trying to produce the maximum amount of value from an investment of time and energy. Sometimes duplication of effort means that no new value is added by re-implementing the same functionality present in other software.

jdub 16y ago
"Choice and variety are good, but they need to be balanced against the principle of trying to produce the maximum amount of value from an investment of time and energy." vs. "I feel like writing a high performance, multi-node key value store, just to prove that I can" OR "I enjoy coding with X, and I think I could make a really cool browser with it" OR any other number of motivations. Some of those motivations produce a Redis, a guiding principle, a community, co-developers and a market. Some of the produce a SourceForget project that is never heard from again, let alone improved beyond alpha quality. But that's a lot of flowers blooming, and there's no shortage of developers realising that FLOSS is where the action -- and practical education! -- is. DVCS and social coding venues like GitHub make it all the more easy to start, share, and improve. You'll probably see all of that as messy and inefficient. Most experienced FLOSS developers see it as a necessary by-product of open learning, development and innovation -- our process.
- mycroftiv 16y ago
  Actually, I believe we are in agreement, for the most part. In particular, I think that DVCS are immensely helpful for encouraging "piggyback" development. It may be that the obstacles to code re-use and cooperation are mostly technical issues that can be resolved with the use of good tools. I am completely committed to free software as both a user and developer - any criticisms I have are motivated solely by a desire to improve the quality of the software produced by the community and encourage its widespread adoption.

jdub 16y ago

"Choice and variety are good, but they need to be balanced against the principle of trying to produce the maximum amount of value from an investment of time and energy." vs. "I feel like writing a high performance, multi-node key value store, just to prove that I can" OR "I enjoy coding with X, and I think I could make a really cool browser with it" OR any other number of motivations. Some of those motivations produce a Redis, a guiding principle, a community, co-developers and a market. Some of the produce a SourceForget project that is never heard from again, let alone improved beyond alpha quality. But that's a lot of flowers blooming, and there's no shortage of developers realising that FLOSS is where the action -- and practical education! -- is. DVCS and social coding venues like GitHub make it all the more easy to start, share, and improve. You'll probably see all of that as messy and inefficient. Most experienced FLOSS developers see it as a necessary by-product of open learning, development and innovation -- our process.

mycroftiv 16y ago
Actually, I believe we are in agreement, for the most part. In particular, I think that DVCS are immensely helpful for encouraging "piggyback" development. It may be that the obstacles to code re-use and cooperation are mostly technical issues that can be resolved with the use of good tools. I am completely committed to free software as both a user and developer - any criticisms I have are motivated solely by a desire to improve the quality of the software produced by the community and encourage its widespread adoption.