We want Cog! We want Cog! And some political blabbering...

 
Hi all!

<rant level=5>

Ok, so I was sitting in my car on the way to work this morning,
thinking. Well, ok, to be honest I was first sitting up half night
surfing about VMs and implementation techniques, etc, for fun, as usual.
:) And chatting on a swedish channel about VM tech, LLVM, Parrot, JITs,
Forth implementations yadda yadda etc.

So... I have two questions:

1. When do we get the first Cog? :) We already know there is a working
version.

2. Why is Cog not being developed in an open repo?

Perhaps someone already explained #2, but then I forgot. Since Cog is
meant to be released as open source (I presume) then I don't get why we
can't have access to the work in progress. Or is the decision not really
made yet? Is Teleplace going to decide later? Or is Teleplace worried of
"tech theft" or something similar?

I don't get it.

And please don't give us the:

"It is too early, we want it to be juuuust right before releasing it to
all you people who don't understand these kind of things and just mess
it all up if you, eh, get read access to it... ehm."

Let me be utterly frank about some "politics" here:

You Andreas is putting a whole lot of new energy into Squeak.org, which
is a blessing for sure! I love that. But I can't help wondering slightly
over the "politics" behind that effort - your time is NOT cheap - I am
pretty certain you are important within Teleplace.

My guess is that Squeak tech is very important to Teleplace and you
really need Squeak.org (and it's cousins) to be live and well etc, and
given the rise of Pharo, where you don't have anything near the same
influence, I also presume this issue suddenly got "critical". ;)

This is all fine and perfectly natural btw, don't read anything
suspicious into what I am writing (sorry for the bad english). Now,
given all this - why are you holding Cog under a cloak?

We all know how open source works and we all know that One Man (although
his name is Eliot) can't match the strength of a strong open source
team. You need to build a community/team around Cog, you can't just dump
it on us and then expect all the Igors and Davids etc to dig in and
learn it! It doesn't work that way, it takes time to grow a team and
every day that Cog is under wraps is another day wasted growing that team.
</rant>

Phew. :)

regards, Göran

PS. Slightly annoyed with the "Sure, we like open source, ehm, when
other people do it..." and hoping there is some other perfectly good and
viable explanation for the secrecy.

 
On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 10:02:20AM +0100, G?ran Krampe wrote:
>
> We all know how open source works and we all know that One Man (although
> his name is Eliot) can't match the strength of a strong open source
> team. You need to build a community/team around Cog, you can't just dump
> it on us and then expect all the Igors and Davids etc to dig in and
> learn it! It doesn't work that way, it takes time to grow a team and
> every day that Cog is under wraps is another day wasted growing that team.

IMHO, in this particular case, I think it really *does* work this way.
Speaking just for myself, I think that if all the Cog work was in
a public repository, there is very little that I could do to offer
constructive help, and there is quite a lot that I might do that would
be distracting.

Also, I think that open source is not just about source code, it's
also about free access to ideas. Check out Eliot's blog if you want
to see some real open source!

Dave

 
Hi!

David T. Lewis wrote:
But you know, Eliot can always just say "sorry, busy". I really, really
don't buy that argument.

> Also, I think that open source is not just about source code, it's
> also about free access to ideas. Check out Eliot's blog if you want
> to see some real open source!

I know his blog, I love his postings. Last one was a year ago IIRC.

Still, IMHO, open source is about team work. The "doing it all by myself
because noone else can help" seems to me to be a rather non OSS way of
thinking. But hey, that's just my 2. :)

regards, Göran

2010/1/8 Göran Krampe <[hidden email]>:
I am eagerly would like to help.
But i can also understand that sometimes it could be more distraction
than help and thus
sometimes we could hear: 'Hey piss off, let me finish my work, which
my customer paid for'.

:)

> regards, Göran
>
>



--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.