[MPlayer-dev-eng] [patch] prefer ALSA over OSS

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 11:20:54AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > LMAO, wtf kinda question is this? Most any project with paid
> > developers is a joke. Certainly not leading...
> 
> LMAO, WTF kinda answer is this?
> 
> I'm afraid you're serious though and willing to dismiss projects with
> paid devs outright.  Sometimes I can just shake my head at your binary
> views.

Yes, I'm quite serious. I've seen the utterly atrocious code that
comes out of commercial free-software houses. It looks like the sort
of crap you expect in proprietary software.

> Downloads are nothing more than numbers.  What you want and need are
> (active) developers and mindshare.  We are a handful of people hacking
> away in their spare time without any direction or organization.
> 
> Other projects have hundreds (even thousands) of developers, artwork
> people, translators, web monkeys and even marketing teams ...

This is the way any good project should be. Ever read the Mythical
Man-Hour? More developers == worse project.

And... artwork people? web moneys? marketing teams? WTF! Free software
does not need these things, except for stuff like games where art is
needed. Or are you talking about ugly icons and gui toolbar buttons??

> > BTW, did you even read the OSS blog link from IRC?
> > http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5
> 
> I didn't notice it on IRC.
> 
> What can I say?  Typical proprietary sw whining: "Our product was
> technically soooo superior and the shortcomings were just there because
> nobody was paying me to fix them and the zealots rejected my great piece
> of software, my beloved baby, only because it was not GeePeeEll.  If
> only they had used my stuff from the beginning, they would have
> exchanged their freedom for a better API.  What an excellent deal they
> would have made, look at the mess they're in right now ..."
> 
> Serves him right.  He chose to sink his ship himself by making it
> proprietary.  It's not like he didn't have alternative options.

Yes he's an proprietary whiner, and my comment on the blog reflects
that. But your response is a bit short-sighted too. OSS already had a
free version back then with the good API, and the typical "NIH" kernel
kiddies insisted on throwing it out and replacing it with something
disgusting.

If you read the article more you'll see that replacing it wasn't the
only stupid thing they did. Before dropping OSS/Free from the kernel,
they crapped its internal driver API; whereas the original version
shared almost all of the code between drivers, they "improved" it to
duplicate the code in every single driver. This is the biggest problem
across the board with Linux and hardware drivers. Every type of driver
I've RTFS'd has 90% code duplication with other drivers for the same
type of device. Framebuffer drivers are the worst of all. If these
things were implemented right, a driver for a new piece of hardware
would be maybe 200 LOC at most.

Rich