From: Greg Donald <greg@...>
Date: 2007-09-13T04:04:22+09:00
Subject: Re: IronRuby

On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Felix Windt wrote:
> Clueless about what?

Clueless about how to participate in a productive way with open source.
Making one's own version of an open source project is not participating,
it's forking.  Forking, except in a very few rare cases, hurts a project
more than it helps.

> Making money? Running a business? Dominating entire
> market segments? Being incredibly fast at playing catch-up in market
> segments they did not innovate in (and they aren't very good at innovation,
> so that's an important one)?

It's no disgrace to not be good at everything.  Just because Ruby is
awesome and they didn't make it they feel the need to go and copy it?
Why can't they just send patches in to Matz and the Ruby dev guys like
other contributors?  What's to be gained by making another version of
the same thing?  Do they think there's a gob of would-be Ruby users out
there who would love to start up Ruby if it only came packaged from M$?

> Those may not be goals important to you, but they are goals important to
> Microsoft. And they most certainly excel at the skills necessary to achieve
> those goals.

That's exactly my point in a nutshell.  Their goals are very different
from most open source project goals so why are they trying to feign
active participation when anyone with a brain knows their intentions are
not genuinely friendly.


-- 
Greg Donald
Cyberfusion Consulting
http://cyberfusionconsulting.com/