On 8/29/07, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Picnic's solution is horrible and proprietary,
It's "proprietary", yes, and closed source at that. What's
"horrible"
about it, though? It's a lot nicer than the GUI we were just comparing
it to.
The fact that it's proprietary.
Ok, "horrible and proprietary" was a tautology. I should have guessed.
The lead developer has, I believe, previously
commented on the issue,
and expressed an opinion that an open-source solution is far
preferable, so the answer is "probably not".
I also agreed that such a solution is preferable. Someone buying you a
beer is preferable to you buying yourself a beer. But if no one's
shouting you, that's not going to stop you drinking, is it?
A is better than B. B is better than C. If A isn't going to happen,
why shouldn't B?
Because the community to which I am referring is one
of those great
"open source" communities, which thrives on sharing techniques, code,
extensions - I'm talking about everyone else who uses MediaWiki,
excluding Wikimedia.
Yay. Integration of open source projects with closed source software
is a fact of life. MediaWiki runs on Windows. It almost certainly has
workarounds to make sure that it renders ok on IE.
So, as before, our choices aren't really
between integrating with
Picnik or doing it ourselves, because the latter option is unlikely to
actually happen. The more feasible choice is between integrating with
Picnik or doing nothing at all, and having no online image
manipulation. Which do you think is preferable?
Which do *I* (and, if I may be so arrogant as to presume, a good many
others) find preferable? Rolling our own solution.
So given a choice between B and C, you continue to choose A. We're in
agreement that a home-made, open source solution with a high quality
GUI is the best outcome. No argument whatsoever. But no one is
volunteering to make that happen - or, to continue my analogy from
above, buying you the beer. Is option B (integration with a
third-party site) really worse than option C (nothing)?
Clearly this discussion is going nowhere. Bah.
Steve