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User talk:Juxo: Difference between revisions
story of spindletop
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You should lead that, as you're the most visible figure and have an identity. | You should lead that, as you're the most visible figure and have an identity. | ||
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== A personal story and a request for Juxo == | |||
A couple years ago, I was personally involved in an effort to create a database of hardware that was compatible with free software (i.e. does it have open specs? does it have drivers? are they released as free software or binary? etc.) A whole bunch of software people got involved. They started designing a database--should we use a relational database or an object database? We should let people input all the components of their computer and see whether they're compatible. They had design discussions, built software prototypes, etc. At this point, they got a personal rebuke from Richard Stallman: you've been working for six months on a database of hardware compatibility, and all you've produced was a piece of software. The project fell apart, because they had no idea how to proceed on to the only important part: gathering the data. | |||
The moral of my story is that, while implementing barcode scanning is fun, it leaves the hardest and most important part of the problem (getting data about companies, products, etc.) totally untouched. This is the only part of the problem I want to touch, at least for now. I want to gather data, from all the sources on the [[essential projects]] and [[interesting projects]] and many other places. Is there any way that you can provide me an area where I can start on this? | |||