[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[David G. Mackay]

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 17:20 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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.

Dictate, no, criticize, yes.

> 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.

Well, for me, it means that I will use python for smaller projects, and
probably java for large/persistent projects.  However, there are ripple
effects in that people that have developed tools that I want to use in
python, i. e. zope, are also placed in an untenable position.

> 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.

True, but that cuts both ways.  If one of the goals is to get more
people to use open source, then making sure that it is usable ought to
be something of a priority.  If enterprises are going to make major
investments to develop software, then the current state of turmoil in
the open source software ecology is not attractive.

Dave