Gunnar Hjalmarsson said:
Even if you turned from _all_ to _approximation_, are you really sure
of that? I'm certainly not.
I'm not prepared to do a formal study, but based on my experience, I'd
say that the moron percentage is *at least* 90%, and probably more
like 96%-97%. Sturgeon was an optimist.
One of my "free scripts" is provided within a SourceForge project.
There are about 65,000 such projects. Are you telling me that
"approximately" all the free software there is crap, and the
developers morons? ;-)
How many of those projects are moribund? How many of them have more
than 2 or 3 active developers? How many of them have made it past a
pre-release Alpha state *and admit it*? How many of them do something
useful, and do it reliably?
This is a Usenet group where an open source software (aka Perl) is
discussed. Instead of making such patronizing, generalizing
statements about free scripts and their authors, wouldn't it be much
more appropriate to acknowledge the power implied in the spreading
of free software, and encourage more of the kind?
The power in the spreading of free software comes from perhaps
200-300, and certainly no more than 1000, good programmers who are
willing to give their work away. The hype of free software comes from
the millions of people who are using the work of the several hundred
for free, and who seem to think that if they give their work away it
will magically achieve the same level of quality. This doesn't happen
unless they're willing to put a substantial amount of work in it;
Linux is not where it is merely because hundreds of people have the
necessary skills to find the bugs in it, but because Linus and company
test and apply the fixes that come in. Someone who releases free
software into the world without taking this into account -- and that
includes people like Matt Wright and the 'maintainers' of the 60,000+
moribund SourceForge projects -- is a moron.
Charlton