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

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Tue, 07 Aug 2012 03:21:17 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Attila Kinali writes:
> 
>  > Any references to those papers?
> 
> Eric Raymond's papers "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading
> the Noosphere", and "The Magic Cauldron" are available from his home
> page (or one of them, anyway):
> 
>     http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/

These i know already.
 
> The Gang of Four response was Bollinger, Terry, Russell Nelson,
> Karsten Self, and Stephen J. Turnbull, ``Response: Open-Source
> Methods: Peering Through the Clutter,'' IEEE Software, July/August
> 1999, pp. 8--11.  Steve McConnell's leader is in the same issue.

Thanks, i'll have a look at them.

>  > Uhmm.. a prominent counter example would be libav/ffmpeg.
>  > It has been started by hobbists, and 10 years later it ist still
>  > run by hobbists.
> 
> You don't get to use counterexamples.  You're the one who made the
> sweeping claim that you'd expect a team of hobbyists to produce better
> software than a paid team.

Ok
 
>  > > The thing is, there never would have been a Mozilla without Netscape,
>  > > and no OpenOffice without Sun Microsystems.  
>  > 
>  > s/Sun Microsystems/Star Division/ ;-)
> 
> I stand by my spelling.  There was a piece of crap called Abiword,
> too.  It had some financial backing but it wasn't something that you
> could really substitute for MS Office.  These programs need a *lot* of
> muscle behind them.

Hmm.. It might be just me, but IMHO most of the things that Sun fixed
were UI stuff, and i dont think they made everything better. The functionallity
was already there when Star Division was bought out. I cannot comment on
the MS Office compatibility though, as i wasn't exposed to many word/excel
documents back then.
 
>  > But those that survive the first couple of years are of a lot
>  > better breed than their comercial counterparts.  IMHO
> 
> Perhaps if you're a hacker.  I doubt that very many non-programmers
> would agree with you.

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.
 
>  > Then you have a much better experience than i.
> 
> Learn Python so you can hang out with a better class of people and
> employers, and get a better job is all I can say. :-)

*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 ;-)

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...

>  > I've done that for MPlayer for a couple of years. Filter all incoming
>  > bug reports for stuff that would be real bugs (most of them were user
>  > errors) and pass them on to the developers. Unfortunately, nobody paid
>  > me anything for it...
> 
> And someday you'll quit and maybe somebody will pick up the slack and
> maybe they won't.

MPlayer is only used by a few freaks these days, who don't like VLC
for some reason or other. So the amount of user questions went down
quite considerably (and development speed too). And yes, i quit..
years ago...


				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