[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Wed Oct 22 16:20:53 UTC 2008


On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:03:07AM -0500, David G. Mackay wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 08:39 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Unanswered:
> > > Is there similar outrage against upstreams as well?  Where is it?
> 
> On this list, it's shouted down.  I commented some time ago about the
> rather toxic behavior of the python developers vis-a-vis breaking
> compatibility at virtually every release.  You would have thought that I
> had urinated in the holy water.
> 
> It's an ugly little wart on the free software movement.  There's nowhere
> near the incentive to take care of your user base without a direct
> financial gain.  Not, mind you, that commercial ventures haven't done
> the same, but the consequences to them are more severe and direct.

You don't get to dictate what the upstream project's priorities are.
If you don't like the fact that apps break with every new python
release (I don't like it either), then pick a different programming
language with an upstream whose priorities better align with your
needs. eg, Perl or Java or OCaml or any number of other languages.
Open source is about freedom of choice & that applies to everyone,
users, developers, packagers alike. The python developers/community
have decided the level of stability they want between each of their
releases - they decided to accept a certain level of breakage. You
have the freedom to decide whether this matches your needs and if 
not, no one is forcing you to use python.

Daniel
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