Today's entry is about "philosophical wars". I would like to write an entry about this because of a special talk I had in the night at the Chemnitzer Linux Days with Lutz Willek and some others.
The main point is that if you think about special free software or open source projects, you can almost everytime think about two projects, which almost do identically the same.
For example when I think about free/open window managers, to my mind come KDE and GNOME. They are the biggest projects of the winow managers - and they do almost identically the same. But they were designed in different ways.
GNOME uses GTK (The GIMP Toolkit) and KDE uses Qt. GTK is part of the GNU project.
Furthermore if I think of the two biggest free software licenses - the
modified BSD license
and the GNU General Public License
come to my mind.
Both licenses provides freedom - it only depends on YOU, how you define freedom
for yourself. :-)
You can imagine of some more examples, but you should notice that the biggest projects
in a special category are not very friendly to each other and that there exist a really
war about thoughts, ideas, algorithms and some more things.
In the last run I think of VIM and
Emacs - it's not a question about how usefull an editor is, but how you love it.
But it's always the user's choice which software he uses for his daily tasks, so the wars will go on about the users...