Dan Sugalski wrote:
> I don't think we should make decisions about the software we use for
> development based on political views.
While I do have many political views regarding free software, this is an
issue of ethical views. It against my personal ethics to use proprietary
software. Political views don't really come into play on this point.
> The decisions should be based on technical merit and general availability.
I would include "available under a free software license" as part of the
definition of "general availability".
For example, perforce doesn't ship standard with operating system
distributions such as Red Hat, Debian, and FreeBSD, because it isn't under a
free software license. However, CVS does ship with those systems.
Also, what if people want to learn how the source system works on their own,
and experiment with it? With only 100-user license, we are pretty tight as
to who can do that. There are probably more than 100 people on the various
perl6 mailing lists who'd want to at least experiment with the system on
their own.
On another point, developers typically want to run checked-out versions of
the software if they are actively participating. I have always been sad I
was unable to do this with perl5, even though I wasn't an active developer.
I would hate to see perl6 development go the same route. The code would
remain much more public and accessible if it were available via anonymous
CVS. Isn't that something we want?
One might argue that we can use a "snapshot" system can solve this problem.
In my experience, The "snapshot" system can be quite inconvenient, for both
those submitting patches and those accepting them. It just doesn't beat
anonymous CVS access.
Finally, most free software and open source projects have standardized on
CVS. Do we really have a compelling reason to go against the standard?
--
Bradley M. Kuhn - http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
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