[GRASS-dev] GRASS inefficiency and FFTW

[Daniel Calvelo]

On 2/27/07, stefano de paoli <dplsfn at yahoo.it> wrote:
[...]
> Many humanistic studies on licensing simply neglect
> that developers have to solve problems because of
> licenses. Free Software is usually thought in an
> idealistic way,probably due to Eric Raymond idea of
> Bazaar.

I'd say that most *developers* think of Free Software much more from a
Stallmanian point of view. It is a process, for sure, but considering
its product as perfect public good (in economic terms) or social
patrimony (in political terms) is IMO a more powerful analysis
perspective.

[...]
> What is menaningful is to learn from the GRASS NR
> case, something for our understanding of Free Software
> in general: that the idealistic idea of Bazzar is
> simply wrong in many cases.

It has much of the same magic (in anthropological terms) that complex
systems theory, chaos or self-organization discourses convey.

> Open Source advocates usually says that the solution
> to a problem in the "Open Source model" would be the
> best possible solution.
>
> Observing the GRASS and Numerical Recipes case
> (altough it may be a minor example) I concluded that
> the claims about the "best possible solution" is
> simply wrong.
>
> The solution to a problem could be a "quick and dirty"
> solution related for example to the limited amount of
> time that a restricted group of developers can
> dedicate to the problem.

Absolutely.

> Probably my mistake is to think that this solution is
> necessarily related to the "freedom" of software.
> While many GRASS developers have pointed out that
> other issue are far more important, such as the amount
> of developer effort required to make the change .

You could frame that considering freedom as ultimate goal, constrained
by resources availability. The freedom-as-goal would entail both the
individual freedoms (explicit and prominent in the GPL and much of
FSFs discourse) and the social freedom (more explicit in the Creative
Commons or Open Access discourses).

GPL is an operational device that bridges both, in the best
tocquevilian perspective, using individual licensing decisions to
orient a whole corpus of knowledge embodied in code to become
non-alienable patrimony.

But the process of production, be it bazaar or cathedral as extremes,
is at another level of analysis. GRASS is special in this respect for
the reasons already discussed: low manpower-to-size ratio, age,
specialization. An optimal development scheme for GRASS would probably
require a good deal of planning (because of the "old" design of the
system as a whole would have to be reconsidered in several aspects)
and other, less pragmatic motivations to developers (i.e. something
else than "fix it"). Not really bazaar-like.

Daniel.

-- 
-- Daniel Calvelo Aros