you really need to read up on the history and principles of free and open source software. The whole FOSS community is one big evolutionary process. There is no “we” that can dispense workforce at will. People have the freedom to do what they want, and freedom includes duplicating efforts and even contradict each other. I suggest you start out with “CatB” from Eric S. Raymond (BTW Everybody loves Eric Raymond!) and other essays like “Voices from the Open Source Revolution” from Bruce Perens or “The Free Software Definition” from the FSF.

BTW this keynote was about the openSUSE Project, not about the FOSS community and for us, at this moment, it makes a lot of sense to duplicate and contradict because we want to emancipate us from our creator (Novell) and kick start our evolution. The more we do the better!

Have fun :-)

Henne

There’s too much duplication of effort. Don’t like an editor’s key layout? Develop a whole new editor from scratch! Don’t like feature X in a desktop? Create a whole new DE from scratch! That’s not leadership, that’s a rudderless ship. At some point Linux is going to have to find areas where product X has a clear feature advantage over product Y and consolidate things so that all types of that software use that feature. What’s the point of open source code reuse with major redundancy? We don’t need multiple office suites – if KOffice is demonstrably inferior to OpenOffice, why continue to waste manpower to develop KOffice? If Krita and Kexi are its only advantages, continue developing those, merge them into OpenOffice, and abandon the rest. Take the extra functions of Gnumeric, add to OpenOffice, abandon the rest. By concentrating development on strengths and abandoning weaknesses, we move forward. We don’t need Reiser 4, for instance, when we already have ext4 and Btrfs in development. I’d rather have one great filesystem for Linux than a choice of three or four unfinished ones. Let’s abandon areas of development that offer no clear advantage over existing code and redouble our efforts on the most promising software.

Smeegol is not the same thing at all as developing another text editor. Moblin was locked into using CPU instructions present in the Intel Atom but not AMD CPUs. Merging it with openSUSE allows for a Moblin experience across x86 CPU manufacturers. In fact, Smeegol is an example for what *I’m* advocating – it merged the strengths of two software products and ended up producing a working product before the Meego team (which is in effect partly duplicating what already exists in openSUSE). Leveraging the core of openSUSE with the UI of Meego gave a product with a better netbook experience than either in less time. That is the kind of thinking we need, but I’m not sure the keynote speaker understands why.

Master Rod

Master Rod