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Report From The Mozilla Developer Meeting
About 50 people packed into the Sputnik conference room at Netscape yesterday. Around 12:30 Mike Shaver and Alphanumerica's David Boswell kicked off the meeting. "Hopefully, this'll be the first in a series," Boswell announced. "Annually is ridiculous," he told me later. "I'd like to see it happen every three or four months ..." The two sounded the theme that Mozilla development was happening -- whether people were aware of it or not.
At one point, Dave Sim from the O'Reilly Network said "I've learned more in the last hour and a half than I have in the last two years." Mike said that was the problem: their story that wasn't getting out. "What is the story?" Sim countered. "What is the big picture?" Shaver said the real problem is there are lots of stories. Yes, there's users that want to use Mozilla as a full-blown application -- but there's also people who want to develop applications for the Mozilla platform, with others focussing on interoperability. "The platform story is one of the best things about what Mozilla does."
Alphanumerica's David Boswell agrees. "We see Mozilla as an application virtual machine that will allow us to write applications." Because the application can run on any system with a Mozilla browser, developers reach systems running Windows, the Mac OS, Linux, OS/2, and even Amiga and BeOs systems or set-top boxes. Pete Collins pointed out later that "Mozilla is 95% cross-platform code." He described the Mozilla platform as "write-once, run-anywhere -- done correctly."
That could be a huge draw. Earlier in the meeting someone suggested a "People who are doing stuff with Mozilla" page. "We had one long ago," Mike Shaver joked. "It listed NeoPlanet." But now, according to Pete Collins, there's been a spreading interest in Mozilla. "Since November, December, it's really starting to pick up momentum ... Alot of validations are happening because things are being done externally." Cameron Price had flown down from Real Networks in Seattle to attend the conference. Identifying himself as "just a grunt software developer," he pointed out what everyone was saying: it's not just a browser, it's a set of tools. During the group discussion, one developer even said "I'd like to see Mozilla come out and not have any browser with it."
A quick survey of the room revealed some impressive projects. Aaron Leventhal, who flew in from Wisconsin, is working on wearable computing and voice-browsing for the blind. A generalized user interface would allow seamless transitions between devices with Mozilla. Another developer wants to make his own R&D distribution of Linux using Mozilla's XML parser. ("Everyone writes specialty XML parsers," Cameron Price told me later.) By the end of the day the developer said he'd gotten answers to his Linux implementation questions. But more importantly, he'd gotten a sense of where the other developers were going. "The scope of what people have planned is mind-boggling. I feel so much smaller."
Mitchell Baker, who identified herself as Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler," said that as a result of the meeting, "We learned how many people are writing applications using Mozilla." Pete Collins said the turn-out was a positive sign -- "Overall, just a good vibe" -- and so did David Boswell. ("Very validating. A room full of 80 external developers ...") "I don't think we're gonna have a really simple platform in the year 2000," Mike Shaver warned the audience. But the release of a preview version of Netscape 6 had already generated some interesting issues for the group discussion.
The first question in the developer group discussion came from Asa Dotzler, an independent QA tester from Austin, Texas. ("I test the tip," Dotzler said at Thursday's Mozilla party.) He asked a deceptively simple question about how they're defining "skin" and "package," and Dave Hyatt conceded the definitions they were using internally clash with public definitions. The problem is that what people think of as "skins" are more like Mozilla applications or packages -- and that needs to be clear, for security reasons. (A generalized system for ensuring security was suggested -- maybe giving skins directory-specific access. Someone cited the way this is handled in Java 1.2, and Mike Shaver said "maybe that's a model we can copy" if necessary.)
The group discussion continued for nearly two hours, and the other big issue was bug reporting. Dotzler gave an exaggerated example of an off-target bug report: "This Net2Phone button on my toolbar isn't working." What do you do with reports of non-Mozilla bugs? "You shouldn't even take bug reports on alternate skins," one developer suggested. Or should you? ("That's a slippery slope. Let's see how big a problem it is ...") Shaver said it doesn't seem unreasonable that people are going to want to report bugs about Aphrodite. "It may not be our fault, but it may be our problem ... We can create a tag for that easily. I think that's the way to do that and not panic too much."
The bigger concern is how the handling of non-Mozilla bugs will scale.
"As long as the bug database holds up."
"It should be the author's responsibility."
Someone even suggested they "take a lesson from Slashdot and have some volunteers for triaging." Everyone began talking at once. "Now we're going," Mike joked.
He started by saying "I don't think we want to follow the Linux kernel module of bug tracking." He seemed to be leaning towards the rule of thumb that "If it's in the source tree, it should probably be on Bugzilla," and later suggested that maybe "Anything that goes into the tree should have a module owner and a QA contact." Across the room, someone pointed out the implicit vindication in worries over having too many bug reports. "I think this is a marvelous problem to have. I look forward to having this problem. This means we're successful."
After the group discussion, the developers broke up into three smaller, intense groups discussing skins, bugs, and applications. Mozilla developers are already working on skin-switching for beta 1. (Several skins could be active at once -- for the browser, the newsreader ...) Alphanumerica's Cameron Barrett, leading the skin group, talked about how he built the Sullivan skin, with some help from Pete and David building on Aphrodite (which started out as an open source skin). He said he started making the Sullivan skin in early March -- with no Mozilla experience at all. After a week to get up to speed, he completed the design in a week (mostly by doing mock-ups in Photoshop), with another week and a half for coding. Total development time: four weeks. He talked about the challenges of designing a GUI for different platforms. (Predictibly, there's lots of issues with the Mac OS. "You could emulate your own windows in the Mac, but it wouldn't be very Mac-like. You have to give them a software that's going to behave the way they expect ...")
Barrett predicts hundreds if not thousands of skins once the skin-switching is incorporated into Mozilla. But after the talk, he said skins also serve an educational function. "Our main message was to get people to understand that it's so extensible." So what happens now? "I think people are gonna experiment."
At the applications meeting participants discussed packaging and install questions, API issues, sound, and Unix plug-ins with Mike Shaver. Someone asked about installing Mozilla on Unix networks and maybe even in Linux distributions, and another developer suggested making an easy-to-digest package out of Javascript. And yes, they're still recruiting people for Mozilla hacking. (Mike Shaver joked that "If all the people who were at the party last night had spent those three hours fixing bugs ...")
The problem with developing applications for Mozilla is that Mozilla is a moving target -- the platform is evolving while people are developing. One developer suggested the solution might be writing apps for a specific build -- M14, say -- and then upgrading as necessary. (And there was some discussion about the term "beta" vs. "stable branch points" or "snapshots in time with a name" ...)
Later R. Saravanan showed the applications group XMLterm -- an Xterm-like interface written using the Mozilla component libraries. On a Dell laptop, the interface was running Emacs -- including cursors -- and even Towers of Hanoi. ("A new regression test," someone joked after a few moments of stunned silence.) Saravanan said it took him 10 months, working part time ("It's not my job!") -- and that it had never crashed.
Mitchell Baker was part of the bug group, and says they discussed "the question of building community and educating people on how to produce better-quality bug [reports]."
The other impressive application was a remote script editor -- and Alphanumerica's next project is crash-recovery functionality -- saving state information on browser windows.
Boswell said the turnout was higher than he expected, and was already planning the next developer meeting. "It would make sense to have the next one in New York. Or at least not in San Francisco ..." Meanwhile, O'Reilly's Open Source conference in July will also have a Mozilla track.
Note: Readers interested in grabbing some Mozilla and Netscape 6 compatible skins should see the choices on offer at alphanumerica and mozillazine.
The sybject is the question... what are the real differences?
BlackNova Traders
Mitchell Baker, who identified herself as Mozilla's "chief wizard wrangler,"
It's "chief LIZARD wrangler", come on, even I know that. Project Gecko, Mozilla's a big lizard -- come on, why would she be wrangling wizards? Their pelts aren't even good for much of anything....
I believe that the ability to write cross-platform GUI applications on the Mozilla platform is one of the strongest features it has going for it. Even if the "browser wars" fizzle out and IE wins the day (which I really doubt), the platform Mozilla makes available will still be quite valuable in and of itself.
Unfortunately, Javascript may not be the ideal language for writing these cross-platform applications. The thought that's floating around in my mind right now is adding Perl to the mix. It's already impressively cross-platform, and an extremely powerful programming language. Just imagine what you could do with Mozilla's platform coupled with an embedded Perl interpreter and Perl language bindings (e.g. for XUL) as good as (or better than) Javascript's bindings...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Wasn't it a bad thing when Microsoft decided that people needed the latest version of Explorer to access and run some of their software? Now Netscape doesn't want Mozilla to be just a browser but a set of tools - and have applications written specifically for and requiring Mozilla. I do realize that badmouthing the big 'ol opensource project is wrong, but it seems to me that they're trying to work the same kind of muscle as Microsoft was except that everybody loves Mozilla. (except for that disappointing interface)
A planet where apes evolved from men? Long live the apes.
2) Chop out Email, News. I want a web browser. I already have an MUA and a newsreader.
3) Single-menubar-button toggling of Java/Javascript, and image-autoloading. I usually want 'em all off all the time. Sometimes I have to turn 'em on, and I don't want it buried under three levels of menus like in Nutscrape 4.xx.
I admit that I haven't been following the Mozilla story as closely I as I probably should be over the last few months, but now I see the reason that there isn't a fully functional browser release. Since when has the Mozilla project been about a platform? It sounds like Mozilla is trying to be all things to all people, instead of just concentrating on one thing, and doing it well. While I appreciate that a platform is of more use overall than a single application, there are some of us that have been waiting patiently for the browser that Mozilla promised for a long time.
It sounds like the project has become a little too ambitious too quickly. I would love to see all these various projects come to fruition, but it sounds like all the projects are being delayed up by all the others.
This is probably too simplistic a view, of course; I don't mean this as flamebait, and I'm sure I will be corrected. Am I the only one who is frustrated from two years of waiting for Mozilla?
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Another non-Netscape Mozilla development... this is looking into the use of W3C RDF for logic/inference applications (eg. client-side decision support tools). See the Mozilla Enabling Inference pages for details, and Geoff Chappell's Mozillation announcement on the RDF Interest Group.
DARPA's RDF-related Agent language might also be of interest to /. conspiracy theorists... ;-)
-- danbriPerlScript is a server-side tool to be used in ASP-style pages instead of VBscript. This is completely different from what I was suggesting. My thought was to embed the Perl interpreter in the browser on the client side, to allow not just "dynamic content" but a full-blown application to run entirely on that Mozilla/Perl platform. (Such an application might load from the local hard disk; there may not be a client-server interaction at all...)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Now this isn't meant as flamebait, but why Perl? I appreciate it's cross-platform, and great for some tasks, but I'm sorry, Perl isn't number one for writing object orientated applications in. Let's face it, Perl sucks as an OO language, with it's packages and it's "bless" function. Perl is simply an "enhanced" version of awk, and it shows.
People who write web pages for a living aren't going to want to write in Perl. JavaScript may not be the most powerful tool in the Universe, but at least it has a syntax which most people can get used to, even if they're not bearded hippy Linux gurus. Asking them to write stuff in Perl of all things is just plain stupid.
For a far superior alternative to Perl, see here./P.
Yes, embedding Perl into Mozilla would add about 1 Meg to the size of the runtime. Have you noticed how large that runtime already is? Given that it already can chew up 32 Meg in a flash, I'm not sure that one more would hurt much!
I know that Mozilla is very modular, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with the dynamic loading capabilities (if any) to answer your last question. I don't know if Perl glue would need to be in an XPCOM module (which is probably best) or whether it could be a "plugin" that end-users install (which might be XPCOM; I don't know), but I'm sure it must be possible to embed Perl without re-architecting Mozilla again.
I guess this is a project I could try to work on sometime (if nobody else is already doing it), although there's a lot of code I'd have to familiarize myself with before I could even begin...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I have to say that this is a good point. I am using M14 on Win32 platform mostly and there are good and bad things to see. M14 is fairly stable, it formats HTML flawlessly, but... There are still tons of bugs and problems. I hear that the Linux version is better. I've also run Netscape 6 preview (and it sucked so bad, must have been based on M10 or something). Mozilla shows serious promise, but it's not done yet, so don't go sticking forks in it.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Oh, come on. Can you honestly tell me that every major program (I mean big ones, like Netscape, or IE, or Apache, not stuff like 'ls' or 'chmod') doesn't crash occasionally? I think this is a great idea, although what I'm unsure about is what exactly are they going to do? Run the entire process in a big try/catch/finally or eval block?
Of what use is a stable app on an unstable platform? You still lose IE when you lose Windows...
Hm... good point. See my comment on your "IE 5.5" statement.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
For Netscape to fork and develop separately from Mozilla would discard all the benefits they hoped to gain from releasing Mozilla in the first place.
The only way I could imagine this happening would be if the Mozilla developers took the code in some direction very different from what Netscape is willing to accept. While that's conceivable, both sides have good reason to avoid that sort of division, because of the synergy Netscape and Mozilla have when using the same codebase. (Also, while the majority of Mozilla.org's contributors remain on Netscape's payroll, they'll continue to follow Netscape's priorities.)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I'll be the first to agree that it's been a long wait. I nearly gave up. However, I'm excited to see some of the incredible things Mozilla is already capable of.
I suspect they didn't start out aiming at making Mozilla a "platform". They started by making a set of tools. As more and more tools were created to aid in the creation of the browser, a "platform" appeared as a natural result.
Perl may take a different approach than most OO languages, and it only supports method inheritance (no data inheritance), but it's perfectly suited to object-oriented programming. It's more naturally polymorphic than most OO languages. True, Perl doesn't take an "OO Nazi" stance on strictly enforcing OO rules; if you want that, use Java instead.
People who write web pages for a living often have to deal with Perl already for server-side CGI scripts, unless they're an ASP or PHP shop. Perl may have a lot of features that are hard to learn, but you can start small and use just the features you do understand. Strict OO languages don't have this kind of flexibility.
As for Python, it might not be a bad idea, but there are a lot more Perl programmers out there than Python programmers. (Supporting both would be good, especially if via plugins.)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I hope they're planning to Aqua-ize the interface, or at least provide it as an option. The current preview is being ripped to shreds on all the Mac forums I read as ugly, nonintuitive, and just plain broken, especially in the design of the dialogs. Unfortunately, I doubt that submitting thousands of "it's not Mac-like enough" bugs to Bugzilla would necessarily help things.
However, if work keeps progressing on Fizzilla or the Rhapsody Yellow Box ports...sweeeeet.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I'm not entirely sure that I understand you're post but here we go...
Wasn't it a bad thing when Microsoft decided that people needed the latest version of Explorer to access and run some of their software?
Yes, but only if that software (whatever it was) did not actually need one of the components. You're point is like saying "it's wrong to distribute X application because it requires Y library".
Now Netscape doesn't want Mozilla to be just a browser but a set of tools - and have applications written specifically for and requiring Mozilla.
Yes, Mozilla does require Mozilla - this doesn't even make sense.
According to Hemos, there was a power outage, and Cowboy Neal unplugged the servers from the UPS so he could microwave himself a burrito.
Just downloaded and tried the newest nightly build for win32 (build id 2000040908) and I can't use those nifty alt right/left arrow combinations, also when viewing slashdot I can't in the poll selection change the format of the comments :(
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
My conclusion is that a way of doing this is using the voting feature of bugzilla, and start by fixing the bugs with the most votes. Thus, people are encouraged to see if anyone else is having the same problems they have themselves, and the time developers have to spend on finding duplicates decreases. Those who have uncommon bugs will of course be run over by this scheme :-(, but my opinion is that it is more important to help lots of people than help only a few.
Comments anyone?
Cheers
//Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
More people know Java (than Perl), and Java will be supported/included anyways. And its faster, too.
So, really, why Perl?
As for using a Mozilla-based "tool set," if your application specifically uses parts of Mozilla, and thereby requires having Mozilla installed, that is no longer an artificial dependancy.
On the other hand, an outright advantage to being "Mozilla-based" is that there is some degree of "right" to redistribute the code "tuned" to your application.
On the gripping hand, this introduces some packaging problems, with either:
- Having to carefully match version identification so that Module X, deployed by The Y Group, can be safely connected to Module Z, deployed by The Prime Group, or
- Having to statically link big chunks of library into applications, so that if I install three applications that use parts of Mozilla, I effectively have nearly three independent copies of Mozilla installed at once.
Neither of these outcomes is particularly attractive at this point...If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Notice as required by slashdot: The above was humor. It was only humor. It is not to be confused with anything but humor. If you saw anything besides humor, that is your fault.. the poster disclaims any liability for anything except the humorous content of this post. Poster's maximum liability is to have the reader mildly irritated. In no event shall... blah.. blah.. blah...
What I am hoping Mozilla can provide for me
is a browser that is small, fast, and
stable. I don't care if I can use it to
read news, read email, edit html, etc. etc. etc.
I'll use emacs when I need a nuclear
powered swiss army knife.
I also want my browser to support things like
client side VBscript and ActiveX as well as
JAVA 1.2.2. There are a lot of cool sites
on the web that use ActiveX, and it's
a shame that those of us who use linux
don't have access to them.
I recently started browsing with Win2K/IE5,
and no version of netscape (including 6) that
I've used can come remotely close to the
quality of browsing that I get from IE.
I would love to switch to Mozilla/Netscape 6,
but I don't want some kind of gimmicky
set of tools that supposedly does everything,
I just want a browser that is stable, fast,
and supports most content on the web.
Amazing magic tricks
And I speak as a Perl advocate.
Perl together with Safe.pm is able to provide a security model that allows people to run untrusted applets, etc. But it is not as comprehensive a system as the browser, and more importantly it is not the same system.
Something like a browser should have a single security model that there is no confusion about. If you start matching unmatched security models, well welcome to the security hole game.
Perl is a great language.
It just isn't a great language to have client-side stuff delivered in over a browser.
Cheers,
Ben
PS JavaScript, BTW, is not a very good language IMHO. If x and y are both 2, then what is x+x? It could be 4 or 22, neither variables nor operators are typed. Bad decision.
PPS Some good points for JavaScript. A lot of web programmers don't know, but should, that JavaScript objects are virtually interchangable with Perl's hashes. JavaScript also supports full closures.
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Since Perl compiles a program into an internal form and runs that, it doesn't have nearly the overhead of a true interpreted language. However, the Perl compiler is always available for the "eval" operator to dynamically compile and execute more code generated by the program, giving it the flexibility of an interpreted language.
Yes, C/C++ can be made faster than Perl. But well-written Perl code can be fast enough.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
If you read the article, you will notice that Mozilla has applications being developed for it. This implies that Mozilla is not just a program in and of itself, but a program that will run others from within itself (a host program so to speak). A good example of this is SAP (which runs modules built for it) or Photoshop (which runs plugins built for it as well).
Now even if Mozilla is bugless, there is a very real potential that someone may write a really poor program (plugin,module,etc.) which is pretty buggy in and of itself. Without a crash recovery section a bug in this plugin or whatever could take down your application also and all the other non-buggy plugins/apps that were also running. And remember, you have no control over the code of what gets written as a compatable module for your software because apps/plugins/modules are developed after your software is, and are written by someone else outside your own company .
- Sig
Haha! Amusing, and rings scarily true :/
... did many external programmers join the team afterwards, or did the center remain largly NS?
Out of interest, how much of Mozilla's development was funded by Netscape? I know a large number of the core team works for Netscape
Alphanumerica's David Boswell agrees. "We see Mozilla as an application virtual machine that will allow us to write applications." Because the application can run on any system with a Mozilla browser, developers reach systems running Windows, the Mac OS, Linux, OS/2, and even Amiga and BeOs systems or set-top boxes. Pete Collins pointed out later that "Mozilla is 95% cross-platform code." He described the Mozilla platform as "write-once, run-anywhere -- done correctly."
This statement above, is pretty darn exciting. While many people probably think that the browser wars were just about Microsoft wanting to dominate the client-side browser (and eventually maybe the server side), it was also about Microsoft maintaining it's stranglehold on the desktop operating system. Microsoft was scared that if Netscape became the defacto standard browser, app developers could eventually write to netscape API's, thus bypassing the Windows API and effectively rendering Windows irrelevent. The reason Microsoft was so scared of Netscape was the same reason Microsoft was scared of Java -- they would lose their monopoly on the API in which application developers would have to write to.
So Netscape supposedly "lost" the browser-war. Big deal. It's round two now and Microsoft should be really scared. AOL has released a web appliance running Linux and Mozilla code. No Microsoft there. Mozilla is completely modular, cross-platform, and open-sourced so developers can build apps around it once and have complete control. No need for Microsoft here, either.
Java was a "threat" in that it threatened the dependency on window's API's. However, Sun kinda messed that up by controling it. Mozilla is Open-Sourced, and can't be controlled (or embraced and extended).
These are exciting times. Mozilla may be exactly what is needed to wrench desktop applications control away from Microsoft. If developers start writing to Mozilla API's, that's the foot in the door.
Mozilla as a platform is a pretty darn exciting idea. Maybe the Web Browser really will eventually become "part of the operating system." ^_^
Hopefully, this is a good time and place to broadcast a message to skin developers :-)
:-)
The 6 basic navigation buttons I want in every skin are:
1) back
2) forward
3) up (shortens the url by one segment)
4) reload
5) stop
6) home
In that order. Mozilla has it *almost* right, but not quite (the up button is missing).
I also want to be able to define multiple "home" buttons and have them appear beside the usual home button, in every sense equal, and not have my own buttons relegated to a space-consuming "personal tool bar".
While I'm going on about my wishes... what about all that space to the left of the "help" item? I want to be able to put the location box there, saving a whole bunch of valuable vertical real estate.
Hmm - just one more wish today - when I minimize a tool bar, how nice it would be if the space to the right of the little tab were transparent, winning me back a tiny bit more vertical real-estate, instead of opaque, empty space.
Thanks in advance, skin hackers, for taking this seriously
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
...or prisoners of a static model for Object Orientation?
The beautiful thing about Perl's approach to object orientedness is it doesn't assume any specific definition of OO. You can use whichever features of OO appropriate to the task at hand.
Since OO theory is a developing construct, many other interpretations of OO theory take a snapshot of current OO theory at some given point. But then, as the theory evolves, the static model is left behind. The compiler must then be updated, thrown out, or rewritten.
Because Perl as a language is based on the idea that "there is more than one way to do it," it was only natural that it adopt a dynamic model which allows new developments to be integrated into the OO theory it uses at a later date.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
This Wired News item indicates the DOJ might push to open-source MSIE as part of the remedy in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
It seems to me this would take a lot of wind out of Mozilla's sails. Does the world really need two open-source browsers? And with a majority of the end-user installed base, an open MSIE could very well grab a larger chunk of developer effort.
Okay, I stand corrected. You can run it under IE on Windows. That doesn't really offer the cross-platform parity that Mozilla does, so it's really not a substitute.
Besides, I was envisioning more than just generating dynamic HTML; I was thinking of bindings that would allow Perl to integrate cleanly with XUL and make fully interactive applications on a portable platform (Mozilla) that would be (hopefully) easier to program than most other cross-platform GUI framework solutions...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Joe: I mean, the very idea of using a symbol which is seen as symbol of a political ideology other than the one currently in vogue in the USA!
Bob: Besides, who needs to remember that a red star represents revolution, not communism, or the fact that any and every political system out there can be twisted to create a dictatorship - what was Pinochet, if not a capitalist? What did McCarthy preside over, if not show-trials?
Joe: You said it, Bob - anyone questioning the political conformity of the day can almost certainly be traced back to either Stalin, Mao or Hitler - so what's the point of listening to them? I mean, come on! The government-men arn't stupid... they know what's best for us!
Metrol,
Did you actually read and understand what advid was saying? By the statement you make above we are led to believe that you have not understood his remarks. Advid describes the difference between the realization of the communist idea as opposed to the intrinsic qualities of that idea. Through corollary we can deduce that you claim that the idea itself is the same as its realization. I don't mean to pull a "Socrates" on you but to come to the truth of the matter we need to logically dissect your statements. You have declared that there is something intrinsically evil about communism. I think that we need to take a look as some definitions here.
intrinsic adj 1: belonging to a thing by its very nature; "form was treated as something intrinsic, as the very essence of the thing"- John Dewey [syn: intrinsical] [ant: extrinsic]
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University
intrinsic ( n-tr n z k, -s k) adj.
1. Of or relating to the essential nature of a thing; inherent.
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1996, 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
communism \Com"mu*nism\, n. [F. communisme, fr. commun common.] A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life; specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all. Note: At different times, and in different countries, various schemes pertaining to socialism in government and the conditions of domestic life, as well as in the distribution of wealth, have been called communism.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
As we can see, the word intrinsic is an adjective (used to describe a noun.) In our case the noun is "evil" and the word "intrinsic" is applied to that noun in reference to the target "thing" or "it" as the definition refers, this "thing" or "it" being communism. Or, "communism is intrinsically evil." We will address the validity of that statment later.
The logical error involved in the total statement of yours comes in when you say that there is something "intrinsically" wrong with the idea and try to prove this through the citing of imperfect instances of its implementation. It is not a logical error to say that something is "intrinsically" wrong if it is in the nature of the thing to be wrong but it IS a logical error to say that a system is "intrinsically" wrong if it has been implemented in a way that goes AGAINST the very nature [intrinsic] of the system. At this point a separation is made between the ideal and the actual. The implementation of communism at the hands of Stalin and Mao is contrary to the philosophical basis [very nature] of communism (see the definition above.) Advid has said as much in his statement.
It seems that you have overlooked the main point of Advid's post by missinterpreting the meaning of the word "intrinsic", unless you intended to imply that the end product defines the intrinsic qualities of an idea. This is a very dangerous statement to make because of the circular argument that arises. Analyzing your statements with the definition of intrinsic we can see that it is logically inconsitent to claim that an action that takes place after the creation of something defines the creation of the said thing.
By you saying that communism is intrinsically evil, and by using the definition of the word intrinsic we can extrapolate equivalent statements "Evil belongs to communism by communisms very nature." Or "communism is evil by its very nature." This statement can be logically refuted. I bet you could read all the communist literature (real, not propaganda) and NOT ever come up with a statement that says that communism is evil. We can say that Stalin and Mao are evil because of their actions, but we can not say that communism is evil because they chose to implement it in ways contrary to its purpose. Now if you want to claim that the end product defines the beginning ideal, by all means try, but be prepared for a firestorm of debate following this idea. There are probably more instances of misuse of an ideal than there are of proper use.
In programmer's language : Improper use of the C++ language (exceeding array bounds) does not make C++ an evil or wrong language. This makes the person who implements the language incorrectly evil or wrong in their implementation of the language.
Sorry this is so long.
Random_Task
"I can hoist a Jack. I can lay a track. I can pick and shovel too. I'll do anything you hire me to." - John Cash "Legen
Actually, I was very curious about that myself, considering that the slashdot stats claim an uptime of 77 days.
I wouldn't say we're in a position to demand answers, but I've very surprised they haven't been forthcoming, especially since it sounds like it was just a communication link outage.
__________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Couldn't find it, so I posted it myself. Here ya go.
--
The shareholder is always right.
I wasn't whining. I was speculating on what could be done with Mozilla and Perl integrated together.
In point of fact, I am seriously considering working on this myself. It's always a tough decision where to focus attention -- I have many more projects I'm interested in than I have time to devote to them. Because this one is particularly interesting, I suspect it may end up fairly high on the list...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay