Flexibility - the Core of Open Source
There is a recent thread on LKML that I think is interesting enough, I wanted to highlight it for you, in case you hadn't seen it. Linus' comments, part of which were also posted by Matt Asay on Infoworld, stand on their own, but the general topic is design choice. What matters most? Design focus or user configurability? Can you have both?
Specifically, Linus wants to be able to use his mouse a certain way, and Gnome won't let him, although KDE will. It won't surprise you to learn that this elicited some replies. Some Gnome developers expressed that Gnome puts having things work out of the box as a higher priority than providing all possible options. Linus responds that the real issue isn't clutter but capability. If you solve the clutter problem by removing options, it strikes at the heart of what makes Open Source better -- flexibility. Flexibility is the core of open source, Linus says. It's not a corporate monoculture, as he puts it, because it's developed by a broad collection of people from different backgrounds who get together and work together, without preset top-down design decisions or what he calls corporate mind wash. It's customizable. That is its strength, what makes it better. Whatever you want to be able to do, no matter how quirky, you can do it.
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