[oneJob]

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

[jordigh]

We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.

[oneJob]

Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.

[jordigh]

You're applying a broad principle (competition is good) without considering lots of specifics.

First of all, within free software, collaboration is a lot easier than competition. Sure, we should all try to be the best we can be, but if our "competition" is also free, we can just grab their stuff and re-use it. We cannot, however, grab whatever we want from Matlab and re-use it, so we do have to compete against them.

Secondly, even if I agree with you that competition is great even in this case, how do you want me to modify my behaviour? To stop collaborating with Julia? To view them with more suspicion? To refuse to help them when they ask for help?

I already try to match features whenever possible. The feature I'm most envious of is their JIT compiling, but it's very difficult to implement this. Vice versa, I don't think they have a goal to match our features, such as a native Qt GUI or an exact implementation of the Matlab language.

Julia and Octave have lots of ideological differences too. For one, Octave is a GNU package, so it tries to adhere to the GNU coding standards and ideals. In particular, we prefer to call ourselves free software, not open source, even if both terms mean the same thing. I think the most important thing is to enable unfettered scientific computing. Julia's main goal is to provide a better language for scientific computing, while ensuring user freedom is a secondary goal. So far they have not compromised user freedom, and I hope they never do. So, there you have it, we're already competing on something?

[oneJob]

Hmm. Sigh.

It is frustrating and saddening how often I encounter the same broken assumptions and nonconstructive disagreement on HN. I'm beginning to disengage.

I have considered many of the specifics, but yes, I was applying a broad principle in a broad manner, because it has broadly been shown to be beneficial. Even in child play, competition is good. When two children play one will almost always have an advantage relevant to the game at hand, and so the "winning" child must learn to temper their play while the "losing" child must learn to lose beneficially. When the Petronas Towers were being built the teams were placed in competition, with rewards at stake, to complete their tower first. This helped keep the project moving forward at a fast clip. Militaries of different sovereign states participate in "war games" to foster their relationships all the time. Both Russia and China have been invited to participate in the RIMPAC war games, for instance. So, if the idea of friendly competition holds for childhood development, construction, and war, I'd say it holds fairly broadly.

I'm not going to bother getting into the remaining details of your response, because you honestly don't seem open to the discussion. I've got about a 1000 things requiring my attention and energy, and so I try to prioritize those that don't require me beating my head against a wall in vain. But, as a purely "release of stress" exercise, I'd like to point out that OSS is getting its butt kicked in the consumer market. It's getting it's but kicked by proprietary software and software as a service, which is hardly unequivocally empowering to the user, which is one of the most important components of OSS. So, you hate me, you disagree with me, whatever; if you give one flying fuck about OSS, put your ego aside for one short second and realize that OSS is losing to proprietary software and enabling software as a service unabated, while always getting the scraps from the table. Stop with the cognitive dissonance already and do something about it.