Hi there, Unfortunately, I find myself compelled to answer to Mr. Robin Rowe's attacks, FUD, and all the false assertions he did about myself. Although I knew very few people would take the time to read the interview and then compare it to what Mr. Rowe says I said, I expected, from the long time you know me on this list, not to beleive his attacks without a hesitation. I'll make quotes and comment them. Please make your own comparisons and decide. Of course, you can browse the mailing list archives for the full threads: http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.comp.web.dillo.devel (search for September 2003) -- I'm quoting my missing emails, in full, here. Once I read that the only way to stop FUD was to rebate it point by point, so here I go:
Now, if you want to make dillo run on M$ Windoze natively, you're on your own. Some of the reasons may be found in the interview page:
http://www.dillo.org/interview.html
Thanks for the link. Very interesting. You sound quite hostile to Windows users as a matter of personal politics.
Please go to the interview and read it. If not at least search for these keywords: "windo" and "user".
May I ask, what does a policy of denying Dillo technical support to Windows users accomplish?
Unless using CYGWIN we have no Windows users because there's not a working native port yet. How can I be blamed for not supporting non-existent users?
Do you intend to prevent people from using software they have already paid for anyway?
_Ridiculous_. How can I prevent all (or some) of the windows users using their OS of choice. Mr. Rowe puts me as if I was trying to actively deny these people the right to use their SW. How? Turning off theiy machines from my house? Has anyone ever read such an statement from me in this mailing list? I read it again and again and can't understand why I'm bashed this way.
Should I throw away my copy of Windows 2000 to accommodate your political views?
Please, please, read the interview and search for such an statement. Incredible, Mr. Rowe keeps inventing implicit assertions, and then charging them on me. I've never said that. You can chose whatever OS you want. I'm only the project leader of a Free-SW project that aims for POSIX compliance. I even suggested him to try the recipe Kelson prepared about running dillo on Windows with CIGWIN. (http://www.hyperborea.org/software/dillo/cygwin.html)
To what point?
I don't know, it was Mr. Rowe who invented this false accusation and blamed me for it.
You can't think it could hurt Microsoft.
And he suggests what I think too! Amazing.
You must know they aren't going to give me a refund.
Please search for the keyword "refund" in the interview. You will not find it. It is just another invention that I'm accused for by Mr. Rowe.
If you change your mind and decide to answer my questions about what a few troublesome pieces of Dillo code are intended to do that would be nice.
Gentle words after the bashing. (this can confuse the careless reader, and make him think he's going through valid statements.)
But, if you prefer not to it is no big deal.
Interesting. Then why did he take the time to prepare a set of false statements to attack me?
I've ported much more difficult programs without help.
To some extent, this is a compliment (I believe in Raph Levien's words that "SW design is a constant struggle against complexity"), but frankly I think his intention wasn't that. ...and as if this wasn't material enough, here are some other quotes from the next emails he sent:
In response to my request for technical information about Dillo to make it easier for me to debug the Windows port, Jorge sent me an email off-list last week in which he told me, "you're on your own" and directed me to his interview at http://www.dillo.org/interview.html for the reason why. What Jorge says there is he is opposed to supporting Windows users as a matter of personal politics.
Another lie! He says: "Jorge says there is he is opposed to supporting Windows users as a matter of personal politics". Here's my email: <q> On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Robin Rowe wrote:
Jorge,
I have Dillo built now as a native Windows VC++ 6 project and am debugging it. Seems to be my unstable 1.14 version of GTK for Windows that is causing Dillo to hang on load. By the way, I'm the new GTK1 for Windows maintainer. Tor and GIMP for Windows are moving to GTK2, but CinePaint is staying with GTK1.
Can we talk about Dillo design portability a bit?
Dillo is designed to run on POSIX compatible systems. If CYGWIN provides that, let it be (as stated in Kelson's doc). Now, if you want to make dillo run on M$ Windoze natively, you're on your own. Some of the reasons may be found in the interview page: http://www.dillo.org/interview.html (search for "windows", is quite a large text). Cheers Jorge.- </q> ------------------------------------- and here's my previous answer to him: ------------------------------------- <q> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Robin Rowe wrote:
Hi. I'm the project leader for CinePaint, an open source paint program used mainly by the motion picture industry. Our code was branched from GIMP in 1998.
Hi! Yes, I knew about your project by the time we were applying to LinuxFund...
How would the Dillo project feel about Dillo being embedded in another application as a help browser?
Very good. In fact it has been done in the past with the Sylpheed-claws email client: it embeds dillo for secure HTML mail viewing. In fact we're working in a remote control plugin for dillo to allow better support for this kind of functionality. Currently applications can launch Dillo and let the user navigate the help docs without problems. Now, if the app. wants to provide context sensitive help, it needs to end dillo and launch another instance to make it display the required page (quite fast, but not optimal), and here's where we're improving it.
We're looking for a new help system browser and considering Dillo. We are impressed how compact your implementation is. We only need a limited set of HTML features: links, images, tables, bullet lists, number lists, headings, ordinary text, bold, and italic. In these features we need the browser to be absolutely stable. Any issues there?
None! You'll hardly find a browser that's more stable. And for any issue that may arise, you can email us back for support.
We support all platforms, including Windows. One of the first things I would intend to do is port Dillo to Windows. I saw in your archives that you had made some effort in that direction, but it seemed to peter out. What are the problems?
If you need dillo to run on the dark side, take a look at: http://www.hyperborea.org/software/dillo/cygwin.html Cheers Jorge.- </q> ----------- Now, please excuse me if I don't want to answer any other email from Mr. Robin Rowe. I refuse to answer to Mr. Rowe because he has not the minimal manners to communicate politely and objectively (at least with me), and he attacks me upon false statements. ----------- Now, onto the technical reasons why I decided to aim dillo for POSIX and not for Windows (the use of advanced features of POSIX is a fact documented in a paper I wrote the year 2000). From Dillo project objectives perspective: The project objectives are: * The democratization of Internet information access. * Security and personal privacy. * High software efficiency. 1.- The democratization of Internet information access. Windows requires a modern machine to run (at least supported versions of it), and the pay of a licence fee. People with such a HW/SW configuration already have the means to afford their internet access. Now considering what happened to Netscape when trying to run on Windiws platforms it was quite clear there was no much future on that line. 2.- Security and personal privacy. Definitively a hard conflict with the windows platforms. A lot has been written about this topic, but let me suggest: http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm 3.- High software efficiency. A carefully crafted browser, with every single bit of speed we could think of, running over a bloated monster that makes modern computers feel slow? Now, as a tiny client for help documents, it may be, but Explorer is already loaded so... If someone someday makes dillo run on windows, I'll ask him to warn the users that they don't have the Security and personal privacy the original Dillo strives for (one of the best ways to spy any browser is to do in the internal firewall. You have all the HTTP traffic, the user IDs, etc.) Judge yourselves, I've had enough of it. Sincerely Jorge.-