On 2/18/2011 12:48 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
>
>> In a truly open system, you don't need to 'join forces' to take
>> advantage of each others' work. The version control system will tell
>> you everything you might need to know, and the fact that it is open
>> means that permission to use it is implicit.
>
> Perhaps the expression 'join forces' isn't quite right.
>
> The idea wasn't so much sharing information as sharing infrastructure; thus the 'forces' aspect of the 'join' since 'forces' implies infrastructure. At least that was my intent, and what I erroneously thought to be a good idea, as then you can avoid duplication of effort in the infrastructure.
>
> Since the hard work of integrating the distribution has already been done by Red Hat, and the result of that work is open in terms of the source for the distributed binary RPMs, the work isn't as hard as what the Fedora project or the Debian project does; but it isn't trivial or even easy, either, and much of the effort beyond trademark purging and replacement involves the build and distribution infrastructure.
Nobody said it was trivial or easy. No major software project is. But
the open ones put all their tools in a version control system that
anyone can access and duplicate. And the successful open ones find that
some of the people who do access and duplicate their work improve on it
and make their improvements available. Is anything like that happening
here?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com