ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python CANNED

[Chuck Spears]

>The conclusion may seem obvious to _you_ but this is no guarantee that
>everyone else also possesses this knowledge. OSS is being hailed as
>the second coming, and it comes as no surprise therefore that some
>people might be deluded into thinking they could harness this power to
>cure cancer overnight or land a man on Mars by 2005.
>
If you can get by his trolling and unbearable arrogance,  there are
some kernels of truth in there.  I come from a commercial background
as well but instead of trying to exploit the OSS community, ive been
lurking around looking for a project I feel I could contribute to. 

 Most geeks by their nature, are very independent and abhor order.
You have to have order to get anything done.  Thats why most
successful projects have one or at most a few people pulling the
strings because if you don't, the project will flounder.   I've
personally based a few of my projects on some OSS projects and they
failed miserably.  Because of the bugs and the Authors unwilligness to
address them or even accept them as bugs.  You can say "well why didnt
you just fix it yourslef" but I just didnt have the time.

On the other side of the coin, i've used OSS projects like PHP and
Postgres with great results.

The other problem with hobbyist geek programmers is they are just in
it for the fun of it.  They get bored when the last 10% of the project
which is mostly bug fixing and rengineering code coes about and
generally abandon it.  I've poked into literally over one hundred
sourceforge projects that started out as good ideas and had lots of
activity.  i'd come back in 6 months and There would be almost no
activity.  With a developer with a commericial background, he might be
more willing to see the project through.

I too get annoyed when an OSS author pulls a massive library into his
project just to get a few functions out of it he could have written
himself.  It's really problematic as Brandon has said when you are
using CygWin or Ming because a lot of these libraries dont work on it.

My bread and butter is palm and windows development so I cannot
abandon the platform yet.  What i've been trying to do is build up a
nice linux dev environment using ming and python.  The python side of
things works great but the C++ side... well.. sucks.    

Thankfully, I finally decided to evaluate VMWare and being able to run
linux and windows together has been a godsend so I can hopefully
abandon the cygwin stuff.