The Battle Between Purists and Pragmatists 213
Glyn Moody has a thoughtful piece taking a long look at the never-ending battle between pragmatists and purists in free and open software. "While debates rage around whether Mono is good or bad for free software, and about 'fauxpen source' and 'Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists,' people are overlooking the fact that these are just the latest in a series of such arguments about whether the end justifies the means. There was the same discussion when KDE was launched using the Qt toolkit, which was proprietary at the time, and when GNOME was set up as a completely free alternative. But could it be that this battle between the 'purists' and the 'pragmatists' is actually good for free software — a sign that people care passionately about this stuff — and a major reason for its success?"
Re:Purists are just pragmatists who... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pragmatists are just ungrateful. Without rms and his insistence on freedom, and the years of work on GNU, there would be no fame for Linux nor Linus (whom, to this day, is ungrateful and rude to the very provider of the tools and freedom that led to his project success).
Once they have benefited from the purist efforts, why must pragmatists be so ungrateful and rude? Why must they bite the hand that fed? Why must they whine like a free-market-Republican when the adults counter their bullshit?
Purism can be pragmatic (Score:4, Interesting)
Purism may seem to get in the way at times, but if everyone was pragmatic, and no one put their foot down and demanded that things be done in a certain way, then many of the advances we have made in the last decade or so would never come to pass. For example:
As stated in the summary, purism is what gave us GNOME. Purism is also responsible for getting Qt under the GPL. Regardless of your feelings about GNOME, you can't say that it is not at least a good thing we don't have only one major DE to choose from. Also, who knows what could have happened to KDE had Qt still been exclusively proprietary when Nokia bought Trolltech?
Purism is what gave us gzip and PNG. Instead of just complaining about LZW, developers made completely new formats, and generated enough momentum around them to virtually replace their patent-encumbered predecessors, all the while creating superior technologies in the process.
Purism is what gives us Web standards. The Browser Wars were one of the worst times in Web history because everyone was being too pragmatic. Browser vendors were only interested in locking in users to gain market share, and Web developers were only interested in coding for one browser and just pointing everyone who wasn't using that one to a download link for it. The Web is becoming a better place because of the growing purism among both browsers and developers, not in spite of it.
Re:Proprietary, pragmatic, and purist are a chain. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at the phases of, say, computing, radio, or other technologies, you see oscillations between the purist and the pragmatic. The theorists are invariably purist, the inventors pragmatic, the experimenters purist, the developers pragmatic, and so on, back and forth.
Let's indeed look at the history of Unix, which was kicked off because MULTICS was just too complicated an idea (ie: more purist than pragmatic). The BSD line got back into the hands of researchers looking for new ways to do things (back to the purist) and then started getting commercialized (back to the pragmatic). The modern ix86 BSDs are back to the purists, though arguably OpenBSD's tough stance on new code is back to the pragmatic in a way.
These oscillations damp down after a while - neither radio enthusiasts nor radio vendors have added much in the way of new innovations in a while. The wind-up radio for third-world countries and disaster zones being one of the more recent, and as revolutionary as it was, it was more of an incremental improvement than a radical shift.
A technology dies when the oscillations fail to keep the technology in competition with whatever replaces it. If nothing replace it, the technology eventually flat-lines but hangs around in undead form until something new does come along.
Re:The underlying argument ... (Score:3, Interesting)
But the underlying argument is not purism vs. pragmatism.
No, it's easily-influenced idiots who believe Roy Shitowitz when he yammers on about NOVELL IS EBIL and MONO IS TERRIBLE!!!111. Never mind that there is legal promissory estoppel protecting Mono these days, it's still EVIL!!!111.
There is no real pragmatism in putting tomboy or any other particular mono-dependent app in the default install.
What pragmatism is there in putting an application that isn't as good as its competition into the default install? Gnote certainly isn't as good as Tomboy, and Rhythmbox edges out Banshee only by a few points and that's not likely to last. The pragmatic argument is "this works really, really well and benefits our users." Maybe it's harder to wedge everything into the disc - oh well, that's their job to figure out.
I personally think there are too many things in most of the default installs (plural) as it is.
If there is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink install, then, definitely, tomboy and mono would belong in the default install of that.
Yes, there is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink install. It's called Ubuntu. Debian, or Ubuntu Server, exist for you to customize the way you like it.