Gregory Smith wrote:
> OSS has change alot.
>
> These days you are excluded if you do not toe some social-political line.
> The word "professionalism" is bandied about.
>
> It used to be a hobby. People understood you were doing this for free.
> The government was not involved. It was not on the radar.

Now that is incredibly far from the truth. Mainstream OSS used to be
people who developed for professional reasons, with most widely-used OSS
starting as funded, or at least academic, projects. Sendmail, postfix,
Apache, Unix, PostGress, the list goes on and on. Not an amateur or
hobby effort in the lot. And a LOT of government funding - mostly from
the US DoD, NSF, DoE, NASA, etc. (the same folks who brought us the
Internet).

NOW, we've seen an influx of folks without a clue about professional
software engineering - and the result is not pretty. Lot's of bad code,
poorly maintained, poorly documented.

Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra