Slashdot Mirror
Developers Lose With Proprietary Software
An anonymous reader writes "Appgen looked like a nice cross-platform accounting program independent software developers could use as a base for custom applications, and lots of them paid $2000 or more for the company's development kits. Then Appgen went out of business and left all those developers stranded. They can't even generate license keys, and their support has disappeared. Nobody knows who now owns Appgen's code, so it looks like all those developers and their clients are screwed. This couldn't happen if Appgen was Open Source. There's a strong lesson in this story for those who choose to listen." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
...and commercial software doesn't bankrupt businesses. The problem here is the unethical behavior of the Appgen principals. To excoriate closed source software because of this is ridiculous. Yes, had the code been open this would have been prevented but that argument makes no sense. Because there is no open source alternative today I submit that the code could only exist in closed source...clearly there is neither a need nor advantage to having this product be open source (or it would already exist that way). Opening the source now would benefit those who paid money for the dev kit but that would be taking the work of others and giving it away without regards to the authors' rights.
Why not just switch to Python? It's an awesome language.
This sounds like another Stallman rant. See this page for more BS like this . . .
Windows is considered proprietary (because it's not part of that open source software movement bullshit) but it's a perfectly fine operating system. Just look at the alternatives: Linux and MacOS. MacOS is nice, I'll give it that. It's just not my cup of tea. Linux, on the other hand. Don't even get me started. Let's just say, I don't have the required amount of "homosexuality" to meet the minimum operator requirements.