Re: [tlug] GPL vs. paid version and ethics

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:57:09 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:


>  > Given that quite a bit of my environment consists of psychology students...
>  > And those who do not use a Mac use Ubuntu (the number of Windows machines
>  > is quite small). So i guess, that for those students, who are admitably
>  > everything but hackers, ubuntu and OSS seems to be good enough.
> 
> Excuse me, but Mac and Ubuntu are commercial products.  Some of my
> best friends are paid (rather well, to boot) by Apple and Canonical.
> *We're not talking about closed source here.  We're talking about dual
> licensing by commercial entities.*

Hmm.. Ubuntu might be a comercial product, but beside the package
managment frontends and the distribution itself, they do not develop
much software (i completely disregard here the fact that a lot of package
maintainers are part of the upstream developers)
 
>  > *g*
>  > I tried Python, but it somehow never stuck to me. I always switched
>  > back to C and perl ^^; And i think that learning Haskell is enough
>  > for the moment ;-)
> 
> "perl"!?  Well, I know why you don't believe that anybody ever has a
> good process. ;-)

Hey! "Roll your armadillo left and right over the keyboard" is a valid
and good process! ;-)


>  > But then again, i don't know any company that uses Haskell or even
>  > Python in a larger scale around here. The only one might be big
>  > G... but they thought about hiring me as a mere sysadmin...
> 
> Haskell is probably still pretty rare, although I gather financial
> hackers use it a fair amount.  But I'd be very surprised if there
> aren't a lot more Python shops (not to mention shops that adhere to
> best practices) than you think.  Maybe you hang out in academia too
> much (heaven knows the last thing anybody around here is interested in
> is best practices!)

Maybe. I haven't heard of them. I know many Java and C++ shops.
C is already quite rare and only used in embedded systems.
Other languages are for all practical puproses inexistent around here.

And dont misunderstand me, a lot of these companies i've seen from
the inside are interested in best practices. But all of them fail
to implement them correctly. They follow some kind of rule book,
that tells you what to do. But good practices are not rule books.
They are a style of living and working. Follwing the rules will
not make your code magically good. It will be conforming to the
rules. It might work well, but most likely it will just work for
the one case you've tested it. And the most important point all
of them miss is that programming is a craft, best taught from cratsman
to cratsfman.

			Attila Kinali


-- 
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
		-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin