#acmqueue

Contained within this rant are some good points: Code reuse is good Removing unneeded dependancies is good Fixing up libtool to not check for fortran would be brilliant However, surrounding these good points are a lot of non-sequiturs and nostalgic romanticised thinkings harking back to the good ol' days when all you needed was a terminal and a |. I'm sure it was lovely back then, but these days some of us like being able to plug in our USB devices and have them automatically detected, being able to just click on the wifi network we want to connect to. So libtiff is an implicit dependency for Firefox even though Firefox cannot display tiff images, and this is an example of how badly designed the whole system is. Is it not more likely that someone somewhere (possibly the author, in his haste to show us how hardcore he was because he compiles everything from source) had forgotten to pass a --disable-tiff to one of the other 121 packages? Surely even the complaint that Firefox uses 122 other packages shows that code reuse, rather than being "totally foreign in the bazaar" is actually quite a common occurance? The bazaar (I'm assuming this is to mean the free software world) is anarchistic? From all the software projects I've worked on over the past 15 years in Free Software, the one thing they have in common is a very strong sense of hierarchy so that clearly can't be an anarchy, can they? Large distributions have smart people who are thinking about the best way to put them together, people can't just fling their code into them, so these aren't anarchies either. There is also a fair greater sense of reverence to Eric Raymond and his ramblings (the man has written articles about how he is the embodiment of the god Pan, for goodness sake) in this article than I have seen in the Free Software world. The man is a hack, anyone who has ever had to look at his code would be able to tell you he isn't very good at it. He stopped being relevant to the Free Software community circa 1999. This rant seems to be the ranting of an out of touch old hacker, who's a bit annoyed technology has got too complicated for him to understand, but rather than seeing that as the inevitable progress of technology (a modern car is considerably more complex than Henry Ford's, the modern aeroplane is more complicated than the one the Wright Bros used, and the modern computer OS is more complex than the operating systems of the early 80s), he concludes that it was better in the old days, and everyone today is a moron.