tlug: Oxymoron in free software development sighted!

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

 >     Matt> The developers seem serious about it, though they haven't
 >     Matt> put out much documentation[...].

Okay, Mr. Steel-Trap Mind. What I meant by that is that the conception 
and development process, as evidenced by the documentation that does
exist, seem to be of high quality. And not much means *not much*, not
nothing. I don't get the sense that they are in any way trying to
exclude people, just that they're not making a strong effort to
attract the world to their doorstep ... which might or might not be
poor judgement on their part.

The 'release early and often' paradigm seems to work well for many
projects ... on the other hand Donald Knuth doesn't participate in
*any* online activities, from what I hear, but he managed to write
some damn good pieces of free software. So being inaccessible until
the product is done may be sort of in the TeX tradition.

I suppose you could argue that that reclusive tendency has hurt TeX's
popularity, and maybe it has.

Matt Gushee
Portland, Maine, USA
mgushee@example.com
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