Rafal 'Raf256' Maj <spa### [at] raf256com> wrote:
> And this is why Closed Source (as in "closed discussino, closed wish lists, 
> closed bugzilla archives) is usually beter then opensource.

  One interesting example from real life comes to my mind:

  It took something like 3 or 4 years for Mozilla to implement a feature
which could be used to disallow javascript from disabling the context
menu (ie. the menu which pops with the right mouse button) since it
was first suggested.
  Why? If you followed even a bit the discussion going on, you would
have noticed that it was an endless discussion with people fighting
each other's opinions. It was almost like a war which lasted for years.
Some people strongly opposed the idea (for whatever obscure reasons) while
others tried to defend it, and the ranting went on and on for years.
Naturally it didn't make any sense at all (why would it be any bad to
allow the user to do whatever he wants? if he wants to disallow javascripts
from disabling the context menu, why shouldn't the user be able to do
that?)
  Well, at last someone just added the feature to Mozilla and now it's
there, finally ending the stupid war.

  And this was just one single minor feature.

  I'm quite certain that if there was a public discussion group about
the new scripting language of POV-Ray, it would get filled with tousands
and thousands of articles and megabytes and megabytes of text with people
just fighting each other in stupid endless wars about what features are
or are not ok. The end result will most probably be that those thousands
of articles will have no effect whatsoever on whether the feature will
be implemented or not, so why not save everyone the trouble?
  No-one participated in the developement of the current SDL, and I don't
see too many people complaining about it (even though there should be
more than enough reason for that).

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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