Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jul 2007 21:57 UTC
"Last month, Novell decided to push the limits of developer empowerment and perform an elaborate experiment in innovation by liberating the company's entire Linux engineering team for one full week of free hacking. During Novell Hack Week, hundreds of skilled developers employed by Novell at various facilities around the world worked together on open-source projects of their choice. Driven by creativity and passion instead of deadlines, instructions, and executive decisions, Novell's best and brightest created impressive new software and added innovative improvements to existing programs."
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Member since:
2005-07-08
I can't stand people who dismiss good ideas simply because they come from someone they don't like. The free software community will naturally select the most promising and successful technologies regardless of who invented them. That's the foundation of meritocracy.
Novell has made some dumb and disastrous decisions. But supporting the development of a free software implementation of a well-designed high-level runtime environment is not one of them. Practical cross-platform compatibility may not be achievable without Microsoft's cooperation. But even so, advanced runtime environments are essential to the technical evolution of free software. It's a logical extension of a broad strategy of powerful abstractions that also includes virtualization technologies.
Maybe Java is the better way to go, especially if the free software community can enhance its dynamic language support. Maybe Parrot can emerge from the Perl project as a promising cross-language runtime. But at this moment, most unbiased experts would agree that the CLR/DLR is most advanced high-level runtime. In the spirit of free software, let's allow the best solution to emerge on its technical and practical merits.