[josm-dev] Refactoring of the JOSM architecture vs. Plugins

[Frederik Ramm]

Brent,

> This statement pretty much sums up my experience with OSM in general and is the reason I no longer contribute.  The project leads pretty much do what they want and pour scorn onto anyone who doesn't agree with their point of view. It's not just JOSM, it seems to be the standard OSM culture. It is one of the most disagreeable projects I have ever had the misfortune to be involved in.

I'm sorry you feel this way. It was never my intention to "pour scorn" 
on anybody (at least not in the JOSM architecture discussion...); indeed 
I feel actually at the receiving end of that process ("what? you call 
this pile of crap a JAVA program when it disregards anything anybody 
ever teaches or learns about Java?").

I honestly believe that JOSM-NG is a clean, new, fine, and good 
approach, and I'm encouraging anyone unhappy with JOSM to work on 
JOSM-NG. I'm not at all hostile to this and I am perfectly happy to 
throw away JOSM once JOSM-NG is a workable replacement. I know that 
people often say this to discourage people (saying, in a way "har har, 
you can work on JOSM-NG all you want but you'll never catch up"). I 
promise that once we have JOSM-NG up and running (and, hopefully, with 
all the Java design experts united behind JOSM-NG and working on it!) I 
will help the migration from JOSM to JOSM-NG. I wouldn't even be 
offended if JOSM-NG was called JOSM2.0 or whatever. As soon as JOSM-NG 
is better than JOSM, I won't shed a tear for JOSM.

The reason I don't work with JOSM-NG myself, and the reason I came to 
JOSM in the first place, is that I am result oriented. I don't care for 
Java. I want the editor to be usable to the mappers, and I want to 
concentrate the little time I have on working on new *features* that 
make life easier for mappers, instead of a cleaner architecture (even if 
this possibly helps new features in the future - the whole of OSM is a 
"low hanging fruit" project, we don't usually do things that will help 
us the day after tomorrow, we do things that help us now).

So I will continue to work on JOSM but I don't do that to sabotage 
JOSM-NG or discourage people from taking JOSM-NG seriously. There's a 
German saying that goes "I'd rather have the sparrow in my hand than the 
dove on the roof" - and JOSM is my sparrow right now. You go get the 
dove and I won't need the sparrow no more.

Bye
Frederik