[darcs-users] Larry McVoy (probably) talks about darcs...

Ketil Malde ketil at ii.uib.no
Fri Nov 26 09:57:10 UTC 2004


isaac jones <ijones at syntaxpolice.org> writes:

> [Larry McVoy] spends most of his time talking about how hard version
> control is, and how Free Software will never solve the problems that
> BK solved because they're not fun and it costs a lot of money to do
> it right.

That's hardly news, he seems to be doing that at every chance he's
got.  In a way, I think he's right - a commercial company can more
easily extract a concerted effort from its contributors.  As a friend
of mine put it, money is used instead of convincing people to do
something of their own accord. 

> I don't see any reason why this should be true

I don't think so either, even if free software moves more slowly -- or
is perceived to do so (we have little need for feature checklists).
Things that are broken will get fixed, and fixes accumulate to make a
good product.

> A lot of people have said that free software will never do one thing or
> another

A viable OS, a word processor, competitive compilers, decent
graphical GUIs, and so on and so on.  The only thing still missing
seems to be an effective virus...

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants




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