[Edu-sig] On case sensitivity

[Skip Montanaro]

    me> The more serious point is that majority rule accepted blindly can
    me> have substantial negative consequences for minority members of the
    me> population.  It frustrates me to no end to see people release
    me> software that *only* runs on Windows, even though I know that
    me> "majority rules" or "the VCs have never heard of Unix".

    Dave> How much open-source software is there that doesn't run on Unix?

Not quite the point I was trying to make.  In the commercial software arena
we see people making decisions strictly on the basis of numbers.  That same
thing can happen in the open source arena.  If Guido decides to make some
future version of Python case-insensitive using strictly a numbers argument,
then the same problem exists, open source or not.  The only difference would
be that I'd have the freedom to create my own version of Python that was
still case-sensitive.  Of course, it would have no real chance of survival,
because it wouldn't be able to reliably use modules written for ci-python.

Skip