On Mon, Jan 13, 2003, Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote about "Re: article on ynet": > I have emailed him few weeks before Trolltech has announced that Trolltech > are switching from QPL to dual license (GPL. & QPL) - if he would have treated > this mail, we probably wouldn't have GNOME today, and we wouldn't have 2 > teams working on desktop enviroments..
You know, had I listened to all the people telling me of better ways to do a Hebrew spell-checker, or told me of other people who have non-free spell- checkers that could probably be swayed to make their spell-checker free, we would still not have a Hebrew spell-checker today. So far none of the other competing methods resulted in an available Hebrew spell-checker, and none of the non-free spell-checkers (e.g., Rav-Milim, and various projects done in Israeli universities) were actually made free or published. And 3 years have passed since I announced my detailed plans to write "hspell". So sometimes developers of free software *should* stick to their guns, take risks, and not desert ship before the fog clears. And even if when the fog clears we are left with two alternatives solutions, it's not such a huge loss. In a few years, either one solution will sink (like most people don't remember Tcl/Tk, or even Xt and Motif, nowadays), or if there's enough merit in both both will remain (the Emacs/Vi war is raging on for almost 20 years). Richard Stallman said in his lecture (and I don't know if he's right, but I guess he has all the data...) that we no longer have problems in finding people to write free software. So it's not such a huge loss if some work is duplicated. I'm not saying all work should be duplicated 10 times (like is happening in the commercial software world), but if parts of it is done a couple of times - it's not that horrible. > After all - if 99% of the entire Linux community can agree to use XFree86, why > do we need 2 desktop enviroments? it's just confuses ISVs, it's a nightmare to > interoperate between them.. Actually, it's about time somebody started to develop X12... Or at least about a new version of the ICCCM or the Inter Client Exchange paradigms, that Gnome and KDE tried to reinvent (badly, in my opinion). If that happen's, you'll also have two versions of X windows :) -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jan 13 2003, 10 Shevat 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |This message contains 100% recycled http://nadav.harel.org.il |characters. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
