[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

Wed Apr 29 00:41:11 UTC 2009
Phil Schaffner <P.R.Schaffner at IEEE.org>

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 18:17 -0400, Jeff Johnson wrote:
...
> It sounds lie [sic] a great plan, well reasoned, and rational,
> clearly listing the costs/benefits of creating and participating
> in a OSS project, and astutely pointing out that any
> project that doesn't understand the OSS model is eventually doomed.
> 
> Its a shame that reality of OSS projects invariably comes to the  
> boring conclusion
> 	We're all doomed.
> from (if nothing else) the 3 laws of thermodynamics.

Well, from this statement at least we will continue:

Zeroth: You must play the game.
First: You can't win.
Second: You can't break even.
Third: You can't quit the game.

A more formal statement of the 2nd law may be applicable: The entropy of
an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase
over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

> But the vendor/capitalist model for software has far deeper flaws
> than the OSS model you've described.

So, paraphrasing Churchill, OSS is the worst form of software
development except all the others that have been tried.

> 73 de Jeff	I was born an optimist!

Ah, then hopefully humans can do better than thermodynamic systems!
:-)

Cheers,
Phil