Too many applications? Find the one you like and use/support it

'Twas brillig Thursday 25 September 2003 02:00 pm, when Zenaan Harkness 
scrobe:
> > My all-time biggest annoyance (this is more community than Linux per
> > se) is the overt, excessive, ridiculous bloat of "new projects" that
> > are similar, or the same as, some existing projects.

And how many different Golf, Tetris or first-person-shooter games or email 
clients or web browsers do we need for MS-Windows anyways?  The situation you 
describe is not unique to Linux or *BSD or any operating system.  The cause, 
in the open source community at least, is that there is an enormous number of 
curious and tinkering software developers.

Some projects are started because existing projects don't address a particular 
issue, or take another issue to extremes.  Other times, projects are started 
so the developer can gain practical knowledge in a new programming language 
or set of programming tools.  Then there are those projects that are started 
because a developer thinks he or she can do it better, faster or more 
efficiently than what's already released.  Sometimes a project is started 
simply because a developer wants to work on a project of his or her own (this 
would be the "scratching one's own itch" phenomenon that Eric Raymond 
described in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" 
[http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/])

Yes, it can mean that I will have to sift through 20 or more projects to find 
the one that best fits my needs, but it also means that I am not stuck with a 
particular program forever.  If at some point in the future I find that my 
program selection is not working as well as I hoped, I can switch to another 
application with varying degrees of difficulty.

It is this diversity of programming opinions, methods and results that I find 
exceedingly valuable *because* it leads to a dearth of applications and 
solutions.  This gives me the opportunity to find a program that will fit 
*my* needs and not the needs of some software company that may have a 
different idea of how to solve a particular problem; and as a developer 
myself, it gives me the opportunity to learn from existing work and to create 
the solution to exactly fit *my* situation and then to share it with 
everyone.

-- 
Sean Lamb - [email protected]
"A day without laughter is a day wasted." -- Groucho Marx