Why Use Free/Open Source Software?

An Anonymous Coward writes "I came across Why Use Open Source / Free Software? at Linux Today. As the author says in his intro: "This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using Open Source / Free Source software is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures." Good to see stuff we've known / suspected for some time backed up by real data...."

Comments

Re:The article is missinformed.

[burtonator]

Any objective person will see that IE was the better browser then "Netscape Communicator" and it was gaining incredible popularity well before IE was "integrated" into the OS.


You are both wrong... There are a number of issues here.

First off... there is no single reason why IE won the browser wars. It was a combination of numerous issues.

1. Netscape was having Engineering problems by the time IE was released. Microsoft had an advantage because they started with a fresh code base right when everyone was learning from Netscape's mistakes.

Netscape had plans for Netscape 5.0 but obviously this didn't happen (hint: keep reading)

2. Netscape had near 100% market share of the browser space when IE 3.0 came on the scene (IE 2.0 sucked). Obviously the choice of an alternative made some people switch.

3. Microsoft shipped IE 3.0 with Windows 95b (OSR2). This was making it into the OS on OEM machines VERY early on. At this point MS was gaining a lot of market share.

4. Netscape 4.x sucked... face it. It did...

5. Because MS was giving IE away for free (which has now been ruled illegal) this destroyed Netscape's revenue stream which essentially prohibited their future development.

6. Microsoft started basing all their products on libraries provided by IE. For example IIS, Office, etc, all required IE 3.0, 4.0, etc. Even though they might not have had modern IE versions on base 95a and NT machines; this situation quickly changed.

So anyway... yes... Netscape screwed up. They aren't perfect.

The important thing here is that Microsoft really played hardball! ... the bastards broke the law and now are making a mockery of our justice system!

Yes... Netscape sucked... but this was only a small part of the reason they lost!


It's amazing how religious "computer scientists" can be about technology.


It's not religion, it's politics! Quite frankly we need more people paying attention to this stuff!

Peace!

Kevin

Open Source? More like Openly Terrorist

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to bring to the attention of my fellow Slashdot readers some troubling news: Linux is being used by Al Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf, and other terrorist organizations with equally cool sounding names as an affordable and powerful tool for purposes of recruitment, passing coded messages regarding planned terrorist operations, and other insidious purposes. I will attempt to show some of the more obvious proofs I have discovered to back up my arguments.

• The presence of an Islamic calendar (cal-islam.elc) as included with the xemacs package. This calendar is likely being used for determining significant dates (such as September 11) for terrorist attacks.
• The word "terror" is mentioned several times in the Linux kernel source code (svr4.c in the abi/svr4 directory). This file was written by Mike "Jagdis" whose name itself is an obvious Islamic reference to terrorism.
• The phrase, "terrorist act" is actually present in drivers/char/ip2main.c.
• There are several references to the WTC buildings, again in the Linux kernel source code (in the drivers/scsi directory).
• The freetype code includes the file internal/tterrors.h -- an obvious reference to "international terrorism".
• Various files in drivers/char and drivers/scsi refer to "religious disputes" and "religious issues" (likely, the issues between God fearing American christians and evil Islamic terror mongers).
• The word "plane" (a reference to the tragic airplane hijackings of September 11th) appears in several places in the drivers/char/drm directory.
• Various references to the words "evil", "destroy", "bomb", "warrior", and "hate" scattered in places too numerous to mention.
• The word "hijack" appears in Documentation/kernel-docs.txt, and "hijacking" in drivers/char/ChangeLog, which is also an obvious suggestion for future attacks.
• The file fs/jffs/intrep.c contains the phrase, "Might as well commit suicide", which is an obvious suggestion to would-be terrorists to commit suicide bombings.
• One of the maintainers goes by the name, "Andreas Bombe", with the e-mail address, andreas.bombe@munich.netsurf.de. Obviously this is a hidden message indicating the next target for terrorist bombings is some place in Munich, Germany.
• Take a look at the book cover of ``Professional Linux Programming'' and decide for yourself which of the 15 authors has obvious terrorist links.

I am sure I have only scratched the surface of this disturbing conspiracy. I strongly urge the Slashdot readership to support American companies such as Microsoft who only hire patriotic American citizens and to boycott any company which is involved with Linux (as they are directly supporting terrorists). I sincerely hope the CIA or FBI can look into the actions of open source developers. People like Linus Torvalds should be taken into custody and have all assets seized.

Act now before it is too late!

Re:The Funny Thing About Statistics and Anecdotes

[JimDabell]

I trie dusing ASP and it made me want to stick needles in my eye with it's horrible error messages and inability to return values from functions.

I'm not vbscript's biggest fan (I assume you are talking about vbscript, since asp is language independent, and so doesn't control things like return values). However, it's trivial to return a value from a function, just assign the value to the function name, i.e.:

function foo(bar)
foo = bar * 2
end function

response.write("10 x 2 = " & foo(10))

OK, so it's not exactly the clearest syntax, but it gets the job done. Error messages, on the other hand, also drive me nuts, since half the time, it reports the line number of the error as being '?', or in a completely different file to where the problem is.