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OSS Developers Provide A Glimmer of Hope

Posted by Zonk on from the making-things-that-suck-less dept.

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.'"

3 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. It's Coplien... by 0xC0FFEE · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Doesn't match reality ... by Titusdot+Groan · · Score: 3, Informative
    The two proprietary operating systems I use every day, Mac OS X and Windows XP are both much improved over their previous incarnations. So has FreeBSD which is my main development OS.

    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.

  3. Re:Why would anyone USE private software? by xiando · · Score: 3, Informative

    Closed source is in many cases better. If you are required to use the best software available to generate profit then obviously you will pay the price for private software if that is the best alternative for your needs. I personally prefer the Gimp over Photoshop, but after seeing what features the professional graphics artist use in their day to day work I fully understand that firms specialize in that field are willing to pay the extra money for the Adobe series of products. Gimp is still a joke in the eyes of the very professional users.

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