>Life's to short to spend it wound up in a knot of needless fury. - James Gosling
How very true. However, as I said in the first line of my comment yesterday, I'm not mad, I'm disappointed. The other title was more of an in joke with JavaBlogs because everybody who reads it knows that a big controversial title is guaranteed to draw everybody and his dog to read what you wrote.
I think from the comments I got on the article I've learned something. That is, that I take Open Source (and I usually think of it with the capital O and S :) software way more seriously than a lot of other people do. I read The Cathedral and The Bazaar by Eric Raymond. I read Young's book on the founding of Red Hat. I stopped using Windows and moved to Fedora Core Linux and then wrote a tutorial to help others get started on their move off of Windows. I've got a couple of open source projects far enough along that I can share the code and perhaps it will prove useful to someone. I want to write a whole hell of a lot more.
Often I take a hard look at my own work and slink away realizing that someone else has put in more time, more effort, had a better idea, or just done a better job than I did and their effort is the one which deserves to be promoted rather than mine. Informa is an excellent example of this, I did a RSS parser that is buried in the older version of HotSheet but nobody ever used it to build anything else that I know of and it is quite clear to me now that any further effort in that direction is counterproductive to both myself and others. If I do have anything to contribute to a RSS library then it should be somebody else's so that we all benefit. As for why I continue to plug along on HotSheet, when there are better readers out there, I'd say that it is because mine is one of the few Java readers and thus it is also one of the few cross-platform options, and also because I'm planning to do some things with it that nobody (and I do mean nobody) is doing right now.
The same is at true of FourColor, a viewer for comic books in .cbz and .cbr formats that I wrote. I'm divided over whether or not it makes sense to continue on it now that Comical is out. But Comical isn't advancing all that fast, nor is it any more feature rich than FourColor at this point, so at the moment I'm leaning towards releasing the code just to see if anyone else is interested in adding to it and seeing whether it can overtake Comical or whether it is just another useless also-ran. If Comical started to really take off though, the topmost link and text on the page for FourColor would be one to direct people to go work on and use Comical instead. I think that a ruthless attitude, even towards your own work and your own desired projects is the only thing that helps everyone advance. Building another text editor or RSS reader, or anything in a dozen other grossly overcrowded categories is a huge waste of time. There are programs which practically go begging to be written, write one of those.
Here's an example of a comment I got that strikes me as if it came from another planet than the one I live on:
"The guy thought it would be a cool hack, over a weekend. Who cares if he didn't look around to see what was out there already? There's no "rule" out there (thank God) that says people need to look at what other people have done, before doing something themselves."
In my book, yeah, there is a rule like that. People who do otherwise, when it is so easy to go to Freshmeat and browse to the Java section and type the letters RSS just to see everything RSS related under Java (I just did it to time it, I had a list of 22 items in under 1 minute 30 seconds) is wasting their time. There's no law against wasting time and there never will be. However, I felt that not choosing to take the very limited amount of time necessary to do that was indicative of the problems that Sun has with open source at this time. Does it not strike you as strange that Sun didn't learn from the fact that Blackdown did a huge portion of their work for them in porting Java to Linux?!? They benefitted already from others having the code and working on it, but they don't see the benefit to opening it up. Here for example:
"Oh, yeah. I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business." - James Gosling on favoring open sourcing Java
Hmmm, whether it actually works as a business. Hmmm. How's that whole Java Desktop working out for Sun? I hear that it's making a lot of sales and that Sun is very very pleased with it. Isn't it based on Linux? It certainly seems that someone at Sun figured out how that works as a business. Maybe it's only other people's source that should be open.
"Where in the Open Source Law Code does it say "Though shall read all the code on freshmeat.net before reinventing the wheel"
Since you asked, I'll tell you. In the second point from Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar article, "Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)." Constructive laziness got us Linux, your attitude got us NOTHING! You don't read the code on Freshmeat, you just scan through to see if there's a couple of things you should look at real quick. If that's too much effort for you, do what you do and keep it to yourself, don't release something and pat yourself on the back for your "open source."
"Perhaps James Gosling, like myself, programs in his spare time because he finds it an entertaining and thought-provoking exercise. In many ways the process is more important than the end result."
Again, I don't agree. It may be more important to you. To the guy across the street who washes and re-washes his car all weekend, that's damned important stuff. But for everybody else, it does jack squat. So in summation, I'd have to say that I still don't think Gosling gets open source and neither do a lot of other people. Had this been anyone else other than Gosling I would have let it pass without comment. Lord knows I've seen a lot of wheels reinvented over and over again through the years. But in his case I felt that it shows the attitude towards open source at Sun beautifully. There's a complete lack of it really penetrating or being understood in any way.
"I should learn more about RSS, so I'm going to take James' lead and go write a feed reader..."
Sigh...
Followup: Shortly after finishing my posting I read on JavaLobby that Scott McNealy has no interest in open sourcing Java. I know that some programs are already starting to rewrite their licenses to exclude SCO from being able to use any future versions of their software, perhaps if the same happened to Sun and their Java Desktop it might help them figure out, "what problem does it solve that is not already solved."