[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...`

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 @ 12:03 -0600, Doug McLaren said:

> ... or pay me to fix it?  For commercial software, the developer is
> paid to fix things.  For free software, you're at his whim to fix it
> ... but you can buy a lot of whim with money if you want.

Paying someone to fix their software is not practical for an end user.

In fact, it so far hasn't been practical for the likes of IBM and Sun
either.

Exactly who do you pay anyway? Most of the people on these projects will fight
you tooth and nail if you try to suggest they fix their bloated, broken, and
poorly designed code.

The Gnome project regularly does things like this:

    - move to new software that is not even ready for alpha status
    - a near complete refusal to freeze a release and work out the
      bugs and memory problems
    - routinely make massive and largely arbitrary changes to the
      user interface and configuration system
    - they use a poor design as a model to copy (Windows)

Who exactly are you going to pay to fix this?

The problem with the "this is free, so we don't have to fix it attitude" is
that it is completely false.

For one thing, these people promote the software as suitable for everyday use,
and there is a certain amount of ethical responsibility that comes with doing
something like that. How much I paid for it is irrelevant.

Also, the whole idea that this software is free is a complete lie.
Someone, somewhere, had to pay for it.  If they aren't starving, then
their "free" work is really subsidized by whoever pays them.

Also, keep in mind that a large part of the developers of "free
software" are actually paid directly for their work.

Sun, IBM, and other companyes have a ton of people on the payroll writing
"free software".

>    Free software: the developer may fix your problem will free.
>       Offer money, and he'll almost certainly fix it.

Sorry, but this is rarely ever true.

> To be fair, I almost never use Office.  But when I have, I've found it
> to work well.  It's too bad Microsoft won't port it to
> Linux/FreeBSD/whatever else (but of course they never will.)

I find it works well for looking pretty.

But for actually writing and creating content, it sucks.

For banging out words, it generally gets in the way.

I think their implementation of style sheets is cumbersome for a document
large enough to benefit from it, and doing large documents in Office (or
OpenOffice for that matter) is painful and sometimes impossible.

> But if you're not willing to pay for something, you'll have to either ask
> the developer nicely to fix it, or `fix it yourself'. People write OSS
> because it's fun, or because it scratches an itch that they have, or to gain
> experience or exposure -- very few do it for a living.

That was a fine way to look at it many years ago when open source software was
usually fairly simple stuff written for timesharing systems.

But now they are actively promoting it to compete with commercial software,
which is much more than just "scratching an itch".

Also, I think you are naive about just how many of them are getting paid to
write this stuff.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Well, I have entered the "metallic years." 
Silver in my hair, gold in my teeth, lead in my ass... -- Sheldon Hall in
the rescue list]