Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!inferno.mpx.com.au!goliath.apana.org.au!news.syd.connect.com.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!qns3.qns.com!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!detached.demon.co.uk!dan From: dan@detached.demon.co.uk (Daniel Barlow) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 23:23:25 GMT Organization: I need to put my Clue here! I have it somewhere ... Lines: 51 Message-ID: <Dq8Jn1.AH0@detached.demon.co.uk> References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <4la318$ah3@sidhe.memra.com> <31794DB6.7DE974DF@lambert.org> <olSKcKG00iWQ85P5MQ@andrew.cmu.edu> X-NNTP-Posting-Host: detached.demon.co.uk Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:21845 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:717 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3196 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17753 comp.os.linux.advocacy:46400 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3354 In article <olSKcKG00iWQ85P5MQ@andrew.cmu.edu>, Peter W Boettcher <pwb+@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote: > >Excerpts from netnews.comp.os.linux.development.system: 20-Apr-96 Re: >Historic Opportunity fa.. by Terry Lambert@lambert.or >> In practice, we reaaly have two groups of people: those who >> burn their free time playing with computers and those who >> don't. >> >> I'd argue that the people you are talking about belong to >> the second group -- they aren't willing to cook a bunch of >> Saturdays on building "Word for X windows". > >I disagree. I am a fairly competent programmer, but do not have >the experience necessary to do anything productive with system >development. I would, on the other hand, be willing to spend >some time working on applications. Good. May I offer some tips on how to do it? There are essentially two approaches which might work: 1) Collect together a bunch of people who'd be interested in helping. Set up a mailing list, and a web page to report progress to other interested parties who don't have the time to actually help. Now spend several months in pointless arguments about what the file format and internal data structures should be, the necessity of full extensibility, internationalisation, Unicode support, and a builtin programming language. After a couple of months, just get bored of the whole thing. 2) Write something that kind of works enough to be useful. Put it up for ftp/web somewhere. Invite testers, comments and patches. Continue to develop it. Method (1) was adopted for several Linux wordprocessors. Can you see where they are now? No, thought not. Method (2), though doubtless characterisable as a grotty hack, was employed successfully in the design of, say, Linux. Yeah, design issues are important, but so is prototyping. Even if the final delivered item contains no lines of code from the original, it's still extremely important; without the original there'll probably never _be_ a final delivered product. Daniel -- http://ftp.linux.org.uk/~barlow/, dan@detached.demon.co.uk, PGP key ID 5F263625 ``Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative'' --- Oscar Wilde