Slashdot Mirror
The Battle Between Purists and Pragmatists
Glyn Moody has a thoughtful piece taking a long look at the never-ending battle between pragmatists and purists in free and open software. "While debates rage around whether Mono is good or bad for free software, and about 'fauxpen source' and 'Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists,' people are overlooking the fact that these are just the latest in a series of such arguments about whether the end justifies the means. There was the same discussion when KDE was launched using the Qt toolkit, which was proprietary at the time, and when GNOME was set up as a completely free alternative. But could it be that this battle between the 'purists' and the 'pragmatists' is actually good for free software — a sign that people care passionately about this stuff — and a major reason for its success?"
[Your post is fucking idiotic.
As stated in the summary, purism is what gave us GNOME.
No, a lack of any halfway decent desktop environment, and the convenient creation of a widget toolkit in a different application, led to GNOME.
Purism is also responsible for getting Qt under the GPL.
Except that it's not under the GPL, and never was; while it was at one time dual-licensed under the GPL even when dual-licensed it was commercially driven outside of KDE (the developers of Qt were still being paid by commercial licensing). Your purist fuckery "lost" because Nokia realized that more people would actually use Qt if it was LGPL.
Purism is what gave us gzip and PNG. Instead of just complaining about LZW, developers made completely new formats, and generated enough momentum around them to virtually replace their patent-encumbered predecessors, all the while creating superior technologies in the process.
Where the fuck does purism come into this? Creating something to get around a patent issue is recognizing the pragmatic realities of the situation and nothing more.
Purism is what gives us Web standards. The Browser Wars were one of the worst times in Web history because everyone was being too pragmatic. Browser vendors were only interested in locking in users to gain market share, and Web developers were only interested in coding for one browser and just pointing everyone who wasn't using that one to a download link for it. The Web is becoming a better place because of the growing purism among both browsers and developers, not in spite of it.
Horseshit...again. Standards were developed--and adhered to--primarily because the only way to beat Internet Explorer was everyone else to band together and force both standards compliance and develop better browsers than IE. They did, and IE had to play catchup. Pragmatism in action.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."