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Re: Wow..
by David on Monday 13/Sep/2004, @11:23
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Reducing the duplication of effort is a trap. Do not fall for it. This is the antithesis of Free and Open Source Software. Duplication of resources has a great many advantages.
First of all, the different projects are not interchangable. A developer that is happy working on KHTML might not be happy working on Gecko. Or vice versa. Similar arguments about merging (or dumping one of) KDE and GNOME have been around for years, but they ignore that KDE development is a completely different thing than GNOME development. The communities are different, the cultures are different, the even the coding is different (C vs C++, GTK-- vs Qt, multiple disjoint APIs vs fewer complementary APIs, etc).
Second, different free projects allows cross-pollination of ideas and code. Tabbed browsing came about because *one* browser first decided to try it out. GCC only got decent C++ support because Cygnus forked off egcs. Think of all the stuff you dislike about GNOME (or KDE) and imagine that they were the standard with no alternative.
Third, why dump KTHML? Why not dump Gecko instead? Perhaps the vote will go against you. While Gecko has more support for "broken" HTML, KHTML is smaller and faster. Would you stop using a Gecko browser if the "vote" for a single engine went against you?
Fourth, choice is king. There are lots of reasons why people use Free and Open Source Software, but choice ranks up near the top. This is not a dictatorship. You cannot tell a developer what she can or cannot code for. You cannot tell a user what he can or cannot use. Heck, you can't even tell them what kernel they must use! This is not a proprietary commercial software house where the CEO gets to choose what the employees will be working on. This is not their product where the customer gets a one-size-fits-all solution. |
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