[PLUG] Kylix?

[Carla Schroder]

Well, I meant it as a loving but true jest. It is indisputable that a large part 
of Linux's appeal is that it, and other open source /free apps, can be 
legally obtained for no or very little cost. It is rather naive to believe 
otherwise. 

It is also naive to believe that Open Source/Free automatically = Good, and 
that commercial/proprietary = Evil. That's just plain silly. There's stars 
and stinkers in both worlds.

I've read the GPL, which is a work of genius, and nowhere does it say 
software should not cost money, or that programmers should not be paid for 
their efforts. 

Carla

On Saturday 11 May 2002 08:04 pm, you wrote:
> On Sat, 11 May 2002, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> > On Thu, 9 May 2002, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > > It costs money. Linux nerds are cheap, and would rather endlessly
> > > tweak a hunk of funky free software than pay for something that works.
> >
> > I need to say that I'm deeply offended by this characterization -- not
> > because it depicts us (I'm self-identifying with the dubious term "Linux
> > nerds" here) as frugal (or falsely frugal, as the example of driving all
> > over to save a dollar shows), but because it implies, to me, that the
> > appeal of Free Software is its (entirely incidental) free-as-in-beer
> > quality and ignores the fact that Kylix may have failed for its lack of a
> > free-as-in-freedom quality.
>
> As a long time Linux user, and one who has paid literally tens of
> thousands of dollars for software over the years, I have to say that the
> reason that I and many other Linux user's I know generally avoid buying
> commerical software products these days is not that it isn't "free", but
> rather that so much of it is junk as to not be worth the time to even try
> it out.  Sure, there are times when using free software that I have had to
> tweak it endlessly, but that is also often the case for commercial
> software that I have bought as well, so what's the point of buying
> commercial, particularly when it takes a lot less time to "tweak" the
> software when you have the source code.  To address the Borland/Inprise
> example (they changed their name for a while to Inprise and recently
> changed it back), I was a long time user of their products from about 1986
> through 1998, and while it was initially great software, towards the end
> of this time I was using their C++ compiler and it eventually reached the
> point where each minor bugfix update introduced more bugs than it fixed,
> and I would have to spend endless time in newsgroups trying to figure out
> what the problem was (support was virtually non-existant even when you
> paid for it), determine if I could work around it or have to downgrade
> the compiler and live with the bugs in the older version, etc.  At least
> with free software you have a real support option (do it yourself), and it
> would have taken me less time to find and fix the compiler bugs than I
> wasted dealing with their proprietary junk.  I have never looked at Kylix,
> it might be great, but my last couple years experience with Borland were
> so bad that I can't see wasting my time dealing with them again.  The
> same kind of experiences and reasoning applies to Microsoft and many
> other companies, and none of this even covers the problem that many
> commercial software vendors will abandon a product line with little or no
> notice, leaving you without any prospects for future upgrades/bug fixes,
> and ultimately forcing you to switch to a new vendor, learn their
> product's peculiarities and the proper way to "tweak" their software.
> Ultimately, no matter how much time I spend "tweaking" Linux, it has been
> my experience that in most cases I will have to spend more time "tweaking"
> the commercial stuff over the long haul.
>
> </end_rant_mode> :-)
>
> FWIW.
>
> Shannon C. Dealy      |               DeaTech Research Inc.
> dealy at deatech.com     |          - Custom Software Development -
>
>                       |    Embedded Systems, Real-time, Device Drivers
>
> Phone: (800) 467-5820 | Networking, Scientific & Engineering Applications
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>
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