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Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

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Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#51

Post by nollidge »

algorias wrote: post #29
ElliotH wrote: post #2

Not to be too harsh on Jeff Atwood - as he has decades more experience than myself. But does anyone else feel that this blog post is a bit out of line? In short when John Gruber gives the code out under a BSD thatis a gift to whoever wants to use it - and it gives them near-complete freedom to use Markdown however they like. I don't see why on top of this gift he is in any way obliged to provide 'leadership' or 'dire…

When you release code, there's an implicit commitment of improving and maintaining it, or at least finding someone who will when you can't anymore, unless you say otherwise from the start. The attention and effort others invest in your project needs to be respected. You do have an ethical obligation to follow through on the project, at least in my view. Feeling no obligation towards your user base just because one of…

> When you release code, there's an implicit commitment of improving and maintaining it

Why? Why are there any commitments whatsoever attached to making code publicly available? I could just as easily keep it to myself.

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#52

Post by nollidge »

dasht wrote: post #40

Atwood's blog post is an example of why I sometimes say that the main point of inventing "open source" was to turn the free software movement into the gratis labor movement. Atwood's account of history here is misleading, judging by the mailing list he quotes. He is unfair to accuse Gruber of being "passive aggressive". I'll talk at the end about why the accusation is part of the gratis labor movement. The discussion…

> From that, Atwood somehow gets "passive aggressive".

That confused me too. Exactly how is "I despise what you've done with Text::Markdown" passive?

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#53

Post by StrawberryFrog »

apinstein wrote: post #27
ElliotH wrote: post #2

Not to be too harsh on Jeff Atwood - as he has decades more experience than myself. But does anyone else feel that this blog post is a bit out of line? In short when John Gruber gives the code out under a BSD thatis a gift to whoever wants to use it - and it gives them near-complete freedom to use Markdown however they like. I don't see why on top of this gift he is in any way obliged to provide 'leadership' or 'dire…

I agree. I don't see why Jeff didn't just start a GitHub project himself as a new starting point for the community.

Um, he pretty much did that: http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/

By the way, what's with the assumption that github is the one true way? Is it that much better for you? I have code on Github, SourceForge, google code and while Github has some UI goodess, the windows tools for it are quite raw. The others also work fine. If you like DVCS, Sourceforge and Google code both do Mercurial

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#54

Post by StrawberryFrog »

rapind wrote: post #33
apinstein wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I don't see why Jeff didn't just start a GitHub project himself as a new starting point for the community.

My guess is that this article is a precursor to doing just that. I expect an announcement from Jeff pretty soon about a new markdown project on Github. I don't agree with his point of view in this article, however it does sound like he knows the project pretty well and would be suited to getting it rolling again.

It's over here: http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#56

Post by [deleted] »

nickelplate wrote: post #36
ElliotH wrote: post #2

Not to be too harsh on Jeff Atwood - as he has decades more experience than myself. But does anyone else feel that this blog post is a bit out of line? In short when John Gruber gives the code out under a BSD thatis a gift to whoever wants to use it - and it gives them near-complete freedom to use Markdown however they like. I don't see why on top of this gift he is in any way obliged to provide 'leadership' or 'dire…

"as he has decades more experience than myself" Decades ? I doubt that. And no, you're not being too harsh. In fact, I think you might be too kind.

[deleted]

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#57

Post by nostrademons »

algorias wrote: post #29
ElliotH wrote: post #2

Not to be too harsh on Jeff Atwood - as he has decades more experience than myself. But does anyone else feel that this blog post is a bit out of line? In short when John Gruber gives the code out under a BSD thatis a gift to whoever wants to use it - and it gives them near-complete freedom to use Markdown however they like. I don't see why on top of this gift he is in any way obliged to provide 'leadership' or 'dire…

When you release code, there's an implicit commitment of improving and maintaining it, or at least finding someone who will when you can't anymore, unless you say otherwise from the start. The attention and effort others invest in your project needs to be respected. You do have an ethical obligation to follow through on the project, at least in my view. Feeling no obligation towards your user base just because one of…

If everyone thought this way, many really great projects would never have been started, because their authors would be so bogged down by maintenance work they'd never do anything new. Take a look at John Resig's projects page:

http://ejohn.org/projects/

Click on anything that's not a JavaScript project, and you get a broken link. Would you rather he spend time fixing them up, or would you rather he spend time improving JQuery?

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#58

Post by nostrademons »

nollidge wrote: post #19
telemachos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure of the origin of the convention, but using two newlines consistently to mark new paragraphs (rather than indentation or just one newline) seems awfully common to me in technical writing. So the Markdown rule has always made sense to me. Or to put it another way, it was immediately natural to do it that way. Edit : to answer the question of the comment below this, poems need to be handled specially in Mar…

But what if you want a newline for a reason other than for paragraphs, like a poem or something?

I always just indent poems 4 spaces, making them into preformatted text.

In published work, poems are usually set apart from the prose and rendered in a different font anyway, so this seems natural enough to me. Courier isn't exactly my first choice for a poetic font, but it's good enough and gets the formatting across.

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#59

Post by nostrademons »

telemachos wrote: post #8

This isn't directly relevant, but if you use Markdown a lot, I highly recommend David Parson's Discount (a Markdown implementation in C). (Parsons is also active on the Markdown mail list, which is helpful.) http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/

I'll put in a plug for Pandoc here:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

It's written in Haskell, it uses a real parser, it fixes several bugs in the spec, and it can output to nearly any format imaginable. What else could you want?

Re: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

#60

Post by brown9-2 »

dasht wrote: post #40

Atwood's blog post is an example of why I sometimes say that the main point of inventing "open source" was to turn the free software movement into the gratis labor movement. Atwood's account of history here is misleading, judging by the mailing list he quotes. He is unfair to accuse Gruber of being "passive aggressive". I'll talk at the end about why the accusation is part of the gratis labor movement. The discussion…

Given your history behind the quote, it sounds as if Atwood found the quote to fit the judgment of the situation that he already had, rather than vice versa.
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