ImageDisk project is canceled

"Zane H. Healy" wrote: [aside: no offense taken or ment by quoting the above. I actually agree with it. but it also made me ponder the bigger question] It might be slightly unfair to paint all "pro open source" folks with the same brush. And 'polemic' has an agressive part to it which I guess I have not seen here. Maybe I was not watching for it. I would just argue that greater good can come from releasing the source code to pretty much any utility. Most of the fears/problems I have seen stated here have not come true in my experience. Most of the time a small group remains in control of the releases and incorporates changes as they see fit. There are rarely "renigade" branches, but when there are, it's often a good thing, as they add a feature which at least some constituancy wants. This rarely turns into a bad thing. Generally the good stuff flourishes. I agree that an author can do as he/she pleases and should always have that right. But I'd also say that a community benefits when the source for their utilities is freely available. I can site some obvious examples where not having the source has held back a more-than-willing community. Recently an author of a lisp machine emulator got frustrated and released his un-working code saying he was done and could do no more. Immediately several other people tried a bunch of things and the whole project jumped forward in a flurry of activity culminating, several months later, in *two* different emulators both workinng and running lisp code. The two projects helped each other and co-debugged and in the end made much more progress than any single project would have made. All I can say is this would not have happened if the author had not decided to release his code. As I said before, it's a Zen thing - you get what you resist. -brad