From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Feb 23 02:30:35 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id CAA03024 for chat-outgoing; Sun, 23 Feb 1997 02:30:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from freenet.hamilton.on.ca (0@main.freenet.hamilton.on.ca [199.212.94.65]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA03019 for ; Sun, 23 Feb 1997 02:30:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca (james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca [199.212.94.66]) by freenet.hamilton.on.ca (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id FAA22387; Sun, 23 Feb 1997 05:30:46 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (ac199@localhost) by james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id FAA16990; Sun, 23 Feb 1997 05:32:53 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca: ac199 owned process doing -bs Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 05:32:53 -0500 (EST) From: Tim Vanderhoek To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: Terry Lambert , ben@narcissus.ml.org, nate@trout.mt.sri.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RMS's view on dynamic linking In-Reply-To: <12622.856657876@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 22 Feb 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > That's not to say that human behavior cannot be categorized - you do > have all your basic fear response, sex drive, and pack instinct > indices to rely on when you're trying to predict things such as > whether one group is likely to jump on another anytime soon, and > they're generally not far wrong. Where it falls down as a science is > in basically the same place that political science breaks down - on > the smaller (and I daresay more practical) scale where the brownian > motion of individual human quirks is too great an influence on events > to allow a linear set of rules to operate reliably. In other words, > you just have to pick a basic direction and roll with the random > punches as they come from all conceivable directions. This, of course, proves what we have all known --- namely that quantum physics is not science. Now that it's not a science we can start making some of those excess English majors study it and save our precious Math majors for real work. > Heh, somehow I doubt that the greatest periods of accelleration or > decelleration in FreeBSD's future will have much to do with its > organizing principles. I suspect that most people will continue to go > on in much the same way they have these last 3-4 years, quietly fixing > bugs and adding features to the system as they deem it appropriate. > Where the greatest potential changes lie are in passing comets - some > event external to the project sucking one or more project members > away, or perhaps more positively funding its development in some > specific direction. Who knows? Least of all, I suspect, Terry. :-) I believe it was John Dyson (although if someone wishes to correct me, they are free to do so) who at one point wrote that if he left the project for whatever reason, he felt confident that someone would appear and replace him. Backing up his suggestion that people magically appear is the recent gnats-meister incident. It's filled by mpp now, but before scrappy had been making noises about it, and still before there had still been people who made it work. Without Mike P. it would still exist, and would still continue existing into the future. All of this suggests that the funding situation of FreeBSD is more stable and less dependant on the whims of individual developers than your comet analogy suggests. -- Outnumbered? Maybe. Outspoken? Never! tIM...HOEk