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OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope
sebFlyte writes "In a recent speech at the ACCU conference in Oxford, software design guru James Coplein said that unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary software would keep spiralling down. He was full of praise for open source though, saying 'The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger.'"
" He was full of praise for open source though, saying 'The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger.'""
Ah man. Now all the Open Sourcers are going to go around all day with a swelled head.
> unless consumers start demanding more and putting up with
> less crap from software firms, the quality of proprietary
> software would keep spiralling down.
I don't think it has far "down" to go. People are too used to the rubbish they've not only been served with currently at home, school or work, but they've grown up with bad software and expect it as a part of normality. If the machine crashes in the middle of something people are trained now not to get angry at it - it's expected. If it gets infested with spyware then it's running slow and needs fixing by a tech, or reinstalling by some techier users. If their internet drops out multiple times a day, they just re-dial or wait for their DSL/cable to come up again.
People are adaptable, and can get used to anything - and quickly, if they don't know better. Many software vendors take advantage of that.
Aww I feel so warm and fuzzy!
Open Source Viagra!
For those not in the know like me. He is/was a researcher at bell labs and worked on all things related to the activity of developing software.
Person1: "Open Source is better and is making Proprietary software obsolete."
Person2: "Is not! Open Source has the same problems as Proprietary."
Person1: "Does not!"
Person2: "Does too!"
Person1: "Does not!"
Person2: "Does too!"
[this goes on for a little while]
Person1: "Does not!"
Person2: "Does too!"
[end of article]
And there you have it! The first definitive answer in the history of mankind! Or... maybe not.
The reality is that software is software, and programmers are programmers. A really good piece of software will tend to get that way through the work of experienced and talented individuals. Projects lacking those individuals will produce poor software. Doesn't matter if it's open source or not.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Apart from the areas where there is no competition, the quality of software is pretty good. Even Windows has become fairly stable since Linux showed up.
The reason Free software appeals to me is simply that I don't have to agree to hand over my first born son to use it. I'd like it if consumers would get a bit more assertive over the stringent and really quite unfair licencing terms. Then we can worry about quality.
... that the general quality of EVERYTHING is on a downward spiral. Relentless commoditisation is forcing everyone to work on lower margins and wider tolerances.
Opensourceness itself does not mean that the software will be immediately high quality. There are lot of quality proprietary software as lot of open source projects not worth looking at them.
"I don't think it has far "down" to go. People are too used to the rubbish they've not only been served with currently at home, school or work, but they've grown up with bad software and expect it as a part of normality. If the machine crashes in the middle of something people are trained now not to get angry at it - it's expected."
Obviously a poster who hasn't seen that video of that guy beating the crap out of his computer.
..there's thousands of people who seemingly cannot..or will not come to a consensus on how to design an easy to use, one click installer packaging system that doesn't require the end user to hunt down dependency after dependency, thereby scaring away the non-geek..and sometimes even the geeks..that would otherwize be willing to be more open to using OSS in their places of work and home lives.
Seriously, I love the OSS movement, I really really do. It embodies so much spirit of what the internet, in an idealistic world should be. Free exchange of information and ideas..building one on top of the other in a collaborative effort that spans the globe..
Yet for some reason, the geeks in charge of bringing us this can't seem to get their acts together. Until that happens, *nix will never be as widely accepted as the geeks in this world dream of.
Get your acts together, because you're on to a good thing.
The statement only seems partly true for those who are really, really big and have a kind of monopoly (you know who I mean). For smaller, niche software, they have to make it good and even better for each version or the customers will demand something better by buying something else. So a company who neglects their customers needs will go broke and disappear, giving those companies who listen to their customers a higher market share. And even the biggest software companies are seeing that their market share drops when they do something bad, because even the biggest monopolies face competition from things like Linux.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
If it's not Open Source, why bother?
Seriously, it's not like anyone wants it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Seriously, I love the OSS movement, I really really do. It embodies so much spirit of what the internet, in an idealistic world should be. Free exchange of information and ideas..building one on top of the other in a collaborative effort that spans the globe.."
That fact that it's free doesn't hurt too.
The real problem with this kind of comparison is that versioning is black-and-white inbetween OSS and proprietary. OSS comes out with a new version once a week to incorporate all the bugfixes, while proprietary software aggregates them into many more patches. This doesn't seem like a big difference, but when it comes down to it a customer can write a large piece new version for OSS out of self-interest and have its fixes published to all other users of said software. This will be quite a bit rarer than Non-OSS. There are a lot of fringe benefits to this type of development.
Commercial quality software is getting better, though. People are expecting more. Look at OSX, it's higher quality than ever before, and I'd say that XP probably beats out 3.1. Game implementation HAS to be close to flawless these days, and installs are much more effective than they have been.
Regardless, I'm rooting for OSS to become a more accepted business model.
My little site.
I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.
It can even be taken as far as evolutionary delivery, which requires that the software be released into the market, and the feedback from that used to decide what will be in the next release. The time scales of this are much shorter than say, Apple releasing Panther and then Tiger, so not to be mixed up with major product releases.
I only wonder whether the success of Linux as a household brand is compromised by the fact that non-proprietory software does not follow IID and hence doesn't actually deliver what is the customer wants, but in fact what the developers think the customer wants. I know that Microsoft are very much for beta testing on thousands of individuals which is a step closer to this, but from the serious delays in Longhorn, it's also true that maybe they have missed the point as well.
There's no doubt the functionality is there in Linux as the guy mentions but I'm not so sure that the customer really fits into Linux like is required when moving beyond the waterfall model...
Ever looked at a new car? Well I just so happened to be in the market for one, and let's just say the amount of plastic used to build a car nowadays is astounding to me. Where I live (Louisville Ky), I've seen far too many cars with broken plastic parts all over town to care to buy one.
//This code was written by Mike *******
/*-NOTE: Mike was terminated; don't modify this code!!! */
Taking that idea to software, I can only imagine what I'd get if I bought from a company that didn't care such as Microsoft. My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good. Too many coders in a hurry to lay the groundwork for too many different ideas, meanwhile sacrificing the goodbits of the operating system.
The world needs more Software Engineers; people who will actually sit down and design the damned software before and after it's written. Yes it takes more time, but it's time well spent. Else you get comments like the few I've been working with this past month:
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I'm not sure where he's drawing this "death spiral" conclusion from because I'm not seeing it.
Now, vendor lockin, DRM abuses, etc. etc. THAT I am seeing and OSS may be our saviour there.
The thing that I always think about when I hear this argument for OSS, that there are thousands of developers who will find and fix the problem, is that the argument applies only to a very few of the "elite" OSS projects.
Sure, there are thousands of developers working on Linux or Apache in one way or another. But, if you look at sourceforge.net, for instance, while there are 100,000 projects, how many of those have more than, say, 5 active developers? How many have even more than 1 active developer?
The potential is there for thousands of developers to participate in any given OSS project, but the fact is that for probably 99.9% of OSS projects, it's still just one guy in his basement hacking away.
Are you the guy who said he was going to opensource his sex life?
I don't consider the activity of developing, testing, maintaining, and advocating FOSS and open systems to be "selfless".
It's how I pay for the stuff I get. I owe Linus for Linux, Tridge for SAMBA, RMS for GCC, etc. There's no accounting, to be sure, but that's how I think of it.
To whom much is given, much is asked.
sigs, as if you care.
"The reason Free software appeals to me is simply that I don't have to agree to hand over my first born son to use it."
Wow! Thirty plus years of closed software, and first born. Bet they could get out of the biz. and establish an adoption agency.
OSS is better than yada yada yada. I am perfectly happy to pay for several commercial development tools because they are far superior in terms of quality, functionality and performance than anything I have seen from OSS. When the OSS offering is better I use that.
Rather ironically the lie to the OSS is always better is provided by the recent Bitkeeper kerfuffle. Linus choose Bitkeeper because for him it was the best tool for the job. The zealots moan about it but do nothing so 2 years later when politics interfere there is still no superior OSS alternative, let alone a comparable one.
Lets just focus on letting the user choose the product that suits them best and let them get on with it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Uh ... you mean proprietary software such as ....
Apple's iLife suite? Horseshit. How about Apple's suite of professional video apps? Garbage. Hmm, Adobe's suite is also junk (along with the rancid piles of dung they'll be inheriting from Macromedia). ProTools? AutoCad? How about all of those proprietary games? All of them stinking and rotting piles of excrement. I'm sure I could go on and on but there's no question that proprietary software is uniformly crap.
Now, by contrast, we can place our hopes on OSS, all of which is completely bug-free, extremely easy to install, and documented by poorly paid but well intentioned doctoral students in English. OSS is our savior and gace. God Bless OSS.
Then why is most open source software complete shit?
Compare the usability of Photoshop and Gimp.
OS X and KDE|Gnome|Whatever
Setting up printing services.
This story is just pitching to the meme crowd. Have fun.
Was having a conversation with an "I only do Windows" manager who was trying to be agreeable with me (knowing I'm an "I don't do Windows" contractor). He said he thought Microsoft would be helping to boost Linux growth by their recent push to enforce licensing.
As much as I appreciated his sentiments, I had to respectfully disagree. I illustrated my perspective by pointing out how we had both spent the last six hours cleaning off spyware from the reception desk PC of one of his client's. (He needed my knowledge of Knoppix to pull important documents off the workstation, just in case.)
To summarize, I said, "People will put up with incredible amounts of discomfort and expense, rather than learn something new." I think Microsoft has figured this out, long ago. I'll add that it doesn't help that most business software (e.g. Quicken, QuickBooks, Point, etc.) is built for Windows and that that fact will probably never change.
Linux in the embedded world will grow. Linux in the server world will grow. Linux for the business desktops won't. Not for a long while -- if ever. After watching my friend scrape spyware dung off the Windows' registry, for hours, oh, how I wish it were not true.
> the quality of proprietary software would keep spiralling down.
How can a OSS prove that statement?
How can we make a compelling business case that OSS is worthing banking your business on?
And chances are high that you never used any Linux distro for more then a few hours, until you were fed up with your own inabilty to learn new stuff and switched back to your teletubbies 'computer'.
It says something about you, not about the software you tried.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
The problem is, consumers are demanding more---more features, more bells, more whistles. Prettier interfaces. If your new word processor doesn't have more features in it, why would anybody take it over what they already have?
The problem is that quality is suffering due to demand for quantity. Quality just doesn't sell. How's this sound on a box: "Now, more stable than ever!" If you're writing server software or industrial process controllers, it sounds great. But it won't impress the consumer market at all. This is how the market works: Quantity of features sells. Quality of software comes in the form of patches and service packs.
This is not my sandwich.
When does bloatware reach the critical mass ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
- Browser:Camino
- Text Editor: vi and Smultron
- Chat: Adium
- ftp: cyberduck
- terminal: iterm
Notable exception here is quicksilver, which is not open-source, but one app which I cannot live without.Quality:
Coming to the point, open source apps are necessarily not better quality than closed source apps, but open-source apps have a greater potential to become better.
Creativity:
Most of these apps use growl, which is a open source notification system for the mac.There are about 60 apps(grew from 10 apps to 50 or so in one week!) which are supported by growl, and it's basically a simple idea, A common notification system. Mindblowing results!
I am sure there are more parameters, but this is what came to mind immediately.
Nowadays, there is so much of development on the mac that I generally find open-source alternatives to closed source apps almost immediately.
Waiting for Tiger to release to see what new development it fosters!!
For me, Quality of software is important, but perhaps more important is the ability (as per the terms of the license) to fix the parts that are not doing what I want/need them to do, and to allow others to enjoy the same changes if they want to. With Closed Source ware, I often find myself with quality issues, and issues with getting the software to behave in a manner that I feel is important to the task at hand, without having to wait on some monolithic corporate firm to send me a binary patch I could have hacked out myself hours after finding the issue 5 years later. It's the ability to innovate existing packages that produces quality, and some giants have it right, but as impatient as I am I'd prefer to be able to have the quality now instead of never.
The underlying problem is that there is a short-term (and perhaps long-term) commercial advantage to shipping buggy, poor quality software "today" rather than higher quality software "tomorrow".
OSS has no advantage to shipping software before it's ready-- This can sometimes backfire, because if the OSS developers stop making updates/bugfixes, either other people pick it up, or the project is stalled. A commercial company would still need to do at least major bug fixes if they want to keep customers coming back for version 2.0.
Also, some projects just don't work well with the OSS model. Games, for instance-- some of them are more like movies, and needs $$$ to back them.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Spoken like a true zealot.
You should realize that this is exactly his problem. He might have spent more time on it if the software wasn't working intuitively to help him get it up and running in the first place.
Work on FOSS doesn't get assigned by the Kremlin. Rather than complain, get off your tail and do something about it.
If you can't program, learn. If that seems daunting, find an installer that almost works and ask the maintainers why such-and-such happens when you do so-and-so.
It's a misconception that only the most talented are able to contribute. If you send in a bug complaint, you have helped whether you do anything else to help fix it or not.
Many hands make light work.
sigs, as if you care.
Yup, that's software quality alright. I mean, look at windows for workgroups 3.11, and compare it with crap like XP or 2000 - we've lost so much stability, and performance, these modern OSes are just rubbish compared with the old ones. Don't get me started on how bad OSX is!
Another bit of software that's been getting worse is Photoshop. I mean, have you ever tried using version 1? You can do _so much_ more than you can with the current version. They just keep removing features with each new release, and the software gets worse!
It's the same with databases. It used to be that everything used fixed length fields, and really restrictive character sets. That meant that people like Mr Rénauld-Smythe could rely on always being refered to as Mr Renauldsmyth by their gas company. Nowadays, that kind of attention to detail and users is completely absent.
And it's not just in ways like this that software quality is going down-hill. Customer services is going to the dogs! I remember when, if I wanted an update to my software, I could write a letter, then wait for a week to get some floppy disks with a patch on. Nowadays I have to connect to some huge wide area high speed network and download the patches myself! Just because the software companies want to save the cost of postage! Well I ask you.
In every way, from speed, features, stability and customer service, software is getting worse and worse. I was so glad when Open Source came along and changed it! No sooner had Microsoft scrapped the excellent Windows 3.1 environment, and replaced it with the dreadfull Win95 one, but Linux came along with - X11 and twm! I thought quality and useability like that was dead!
And that's not all. I remember when configuring a PC let you insert your own IRQ numbers and decide what drivers were loaded into what RAM segments - and then, DUH, Microsft figured they should do all that for us - as if we weren't clever enough to resolve hardware addressing issues ourselves! Imagine my delight when I found Linux. I spent _many_ happy hours manually configuring my drivers, I can tell you! That's the kind of quality I wanted.
From the simplicity and ease of LaTeX, to the high performance and slick modernity of X11, there's nothing that OSS hasn't done better than their so-called rivals. It's true that some things are getting worse - ReiserFS instead of Ext2? I don't think so! But the for most important things, like printer configuration, and having a fully skinable CD player applet with it's own LISP based configuration language - well, Open Source is way out in front.
P.S. I was disappointed to see that Opera is making such poor software - that's why I'm sticking to Netscape 2.1
-----
The consumer always wants what they cannot have. The consumer will demand perfect software, without putting them out of the way financially, and they want it now. The attitude I get a lot is "I just spent $1500 on a laptop, why should I have to pay for software?".
I don't think the public gets an idea of just how much work goes into good software. There is a reason UNIX cost as much as it did; it was well designed from the ground up! Yet, sadly, the price-point led the market astray, and we're left with shoddy OSes now. The OS becomes the performance-benchmark, as the software only has to be as good as the OS its running on.
The consumers have only themselves to blame.
Although you're absolutely right, the situation is the same in the Windows world. There 99.9% of the projects are shareware, even if they look like the author just finished VB for dummies in 24 hours made easy.
The Mac software scene is slightly better.
that we can't have both? Why can't there just be apps that you pay for, and apps that you get from your good friend that wrote the shit? I have a friend that's a goddamn genus, but he's not got enough time to write a program for everything. I'm assuming that everyone else is like that too. If you want some software, then look for it. Like what you find for free? get that. Don't like what's free? Go buy something. There is something to be said about a relationship that only costs one party or the other, and I think that one thing is to be said very carefully.
We all dance, we all sing.
-The Streets
kthxbye
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
There's plenty of good software for Windows. But a lot of it is made by small companies, or even individuals. Neither of which have the marketing/distribution power of the software companies who have their products on Best Buy's shelf.
Unfortunately, the big, rich software companies have learned that you can sell the most broken crap to people if you bundle it with a PC, advertise the hell out of it, or give it a candy-coated (but annoying) interface.
So, the vast majority of "consumer-level" software is horrible. But people don't know that there is better stuff available. Add in the fact that the average computer user is terrified of having to "learn a new program", and you end up with a self-perpetuating prophecy- consumers buy crap, so software companies make crap.
Sarcasm is only funny when it's accurately applied, this is just nonsense.
That's consumer level stuff, and high quality consumer level stuff. Wave after wave of business level software that I've had to customize and support has been, out of the box, rubbish. Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.
We have a small dev team of 6, spread across numerous business projects. As a team, we all have some development experience using or creating Free software. Our managers are starting to feel the push we are making towards Free software, we really think it would make our life easier.
A roadblock however is being a pseudo-independant but wholey owned part of a larger corporation. They require us to shop around first, bringing in 3 separate vendors for software to be used in projects. Or often times even forcing coporate standards on us when those standards are irrelvant to our business, but not theirs.
Oh yeah, support contracts seem worthless too for software. So if we are customizing and supporting Proprietary software, why not make it easier for us and let us customize and support Free software?
"Although you're absolutely right, the situation is the same in the Windows world. There 99.9% of the projects are shareware, even if they look like the author just finished VB for dummies in 24 hours made easy."
Are you claiming that 99.9% of Windows projects are shareware based on counting published shareware projects and comparing them with the number of shrink-wrap, company internal development, and embedded systems?
Or is this just a knee-jerk defense of OSS projects?
"The complementary, independent, selfless acts of thousands of individuals can address system problems -- there are thousands of people making the system stronger."
How is it a selfless act to work on something you love to do and get paid for it? Many people making the major contributions to OSS are paid by groups such as OSDL, or companies such as IBM.
Vote for Pedro
What a bogus article! Windows and Windows software have become more robust, stable and feature-packed over the years, not less.
Case in point is the lack of examples in this article. What software is getting worse?
Like Photoshop, which works perfectly every time and never crashes, is fast, ties into web services, and is easy to use. Ditto with Windows XP. MS Office works great, only problem I have there is that the cost goes up and the new features aren't there, but then don't buy the upgrade! How about Quicken, which handles all of my accounts and transactions, tied into my banks, and again runs flawlessly.
And unlike the bad old days, we get free patches and upgrades for basically the life of the product, for no extra $$$. Businesses have to pay support contracts for this kind of service, but we buy a copy of Windows for $100, complain about it, and get free patches and web support for years.
I just don't see it guys! My windows box is all but flawless, day in and day out.
And honestly I have more trouble with the majority of OSS software, resolving endless dependencies, compilation failures, lack of documentation, poorly implemented GUIs and interfaces, blah blah. Open Office, Firefox and a few others besides, OSS is NOT better quality! Look at KOffice...years of development and still not terribly useful, and the functions that are there don't always work. Or KDevelop, looks nice but nowhere near the productivity of Dev Studio. Don't even get me started about the un-intuitive interface of the Gimp, or the utter lack of robusteness in GNUcash.
Gimmie a break!
I said almost the same thing in another post. Amen to this!
Here's a thought. Learn what a computer CAN do, without bothering to know how. Then look for software that does it most efficiently (that is, read a review, or two, of credible sources). The result: if you concider the most general functions of a computer (such as an OS), OSS is the best that's out there.
If, at this point, you are lost, then it really doesn't matter if you use OSS or not, because you still don't know how a computer functions on the OS layer. And that puts you in a disadvantage even with an XP system. In either case, you'd be paying (or convincing) someone else to do it eventually.
Respectfully, I fail to see your point.
All I read was a typical slashbot reply.
OSS has a problem as well. Program with crappy UI gets made and released into the wild. People go 'what a crappy UI' and maybe even make suggestions on how to improve it. Coders reply with 'f-off! it's free. it does what it's supposed to. fix it yourself', etc. People go 'we're not coders, we're users!' and 'what a bunch of elitist jerks', etc. New version comes out that's even more complex, with just as crappy a UI. Users go 'where's the docs? how do I use this, etc'. Coders go 'read the source!', or at best point to the man pages rather than non-existent introductory documentation.
That's because 90,000 of those projects are text editors.
The big problem here is that when people "get an itch" they don't "scratch" it by finding an existing project, but instead they start TextEditProPlus2005Extreme as a new project. There's a huge duplication of effort in the open source world.
The "elite" projects are projects that have had corporate support (to get the 'boring' work done; Netscape for Firefox, Sun for OpenOffice) and are relatively unique in the open source world. There aren't very many office suites in open source, so kOffice and OpenOffice get a lot of attention.
Comment of the year
Yeah, but it's not done right...because if it was, I'd be spending more of my time actually using the pc as a tool rather than trying to get the tool itself to work properly. Also, a core concept of creating a tool to help with various aspects of life (which computers, in their corest essence, are) is that it be intuitive.
I'll agree, it's always good to know how the internals of the tool work, but at the end of the day..I just need it to go and fulfill it's function properly. I shouldn't have to become a friggen developer to pull that off.
And that last paragraph in your post above is proof in the pudding that you're a Zealot and the same ilk as the guys who derided me for asking questions about BSD when I took interest in it a couple years back. How can you possibly assume that I have no concept of how the computer functions on a deeper level? You do that with all the people who try to reach out and say 'what can this do for me above and beyond a Microsoft product'? Do you take that attitude with anyone who points out something that's easy on Windows and harder on *nix alternatives? You must not be very good at converting people to the cause then.
Just to let you know, I've been using Fedora Core 3 for a while now, and 2 before it and I've gotten along nicely with both.
I guess my point in the original post was: There are certain aspects of computing..and this is gonna be hard to stomach if you're too wrapped up in your own Zealotry..but..there's certain aspects of computing that Microsoft did right..One of those things is making program installs damn near mindless (we can kvetch about how well it works after it's installed at a later time..'cuz God knows I have enough complaints of my own with that company). I like hitting next, next, next, and..the vast majority of the time..the computer not whining about this or that library file..or whatever..being missing.
Is that too much to ask? Seriously..I want an answer.
Coplein also ran a lunchtime birds of a feather session which was very well attended. I was running a parallel session involving a psychology experiment and only had 11 people show up (last year my 40 question packs ran out).
Herb Sutters talk was also very popular (the pdf of his slides is on the conference CD, as is the pdf of Angelika Langers interesting 60+ slides on wildcards in Java).
I've been just as tormented by bad, ugly GUI's in many commercial Windows software packages.
Not all software for Windows has been written by Adobe or Microsoft. And even the packages that are, aren't always as smooth as they could be. Of course this isn't to imply that you were implying it is all written by them.
I could say that the only thing which once made Windows easier to use to me was that it was what I was used to.
Most software I have written, was crap too ;-)
Morality is usually taught by the immoral.
I have no idea why you spend so much time trying to get it to work properly. I don't have such problems. I set things up, they work, they stay working. I focus on my work, using my tool, just like in your ideal situation. I suspect this really boils down to experience. Thus, we're both right, and wrong.
Just like the point I just made, this is not normal. I code, but I sure as hell won't call myself a "developer" just yet, but I don't need that much skill to pull a simple installation/configuration off.
Your perception of me as a "Zealot" is just that, your perception. Comparing me to someone you had negative experiences with on the basis of one post is hardly in good spirit. I didn't assume anything and you shouldn't have taken it personally. I am merely trying to illustrate one point or another. That said, I will answer your questions:
Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.
It's this attitude that makes commercial software a sure win over any open source alternative - know-it-all programmer wannabees that are stuck being admins (which is really just a glorified script kiddie doing something actually useful - I know, I was one once). And worse, they always have somethign to *prove*: that they can hack up the standard distributed source code to be unrecognizable and totally unsupportable by anyone else. They think this is "job security", then they get a real attitude, and decide to leave for another company where they don't have to put up with such inferior morons, leaving a trail of fetid, rotting code in their slimy wake. I've seen it *way* too many times...
For 99.999% of users of open source, they should never even *think* about looking at the source code. I've seen far more bad than good come of source tweaking, a lot of it from people that should have know better, but wanted to "scratch an itch" without regard for what it will cost to re-scratch that itch in the future, especially as the code of the underlying app changes and makes moving forward difficult or impossible. Commercial software is far from perfect, but it's can have some real advantages in the real world, where people actually have to pay for stuff, including maintaining thier wannabees' source hacks...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Actually the situation can be stated more simply than that.
Quality of features sells.
Of the three talks Cope gave, exactly NONE of them had ANYTHING to do with this - he spoke on the topics of symmetry in design, and organisational patterns.
;P
The linked article is actually about an _interview_ he gave whilst he was here.
Also, Linux is broken.
Thad