Free Software, Get What You Pay For?

An anonymous reader writes "The Xooglers blog is running an interesting article on how big businesses may start out running free software but there is always the continued question of 'Should we go with something "real"?' at some point in their evolution. How often are technologies like PHP, Perl, and MySQL being pushed out once startups get managers who know nothing about the technology and only worry about name brands?"

Comments

sometimes that's the only criterion

[yagu]

I think it's unfortunate but in the IT world it is generally true there is no relationship between quality of software and cost . Some of the best software I've ever used has been free, some of the worst software I've ever used has been expensive.

IT and technology and particularly software can be (is) difficult to understand on many levels: functionality; efficiency; ergonomics; stability; etc. In a book (and God, I wish I could remember the title of this book -- one of my faves) talking about manipulating perceptions one of the discussions centered on the fact that when all other criteria are indeterminate or unavailable, it is human nature to assign credibility and worth based on price or cost. This is rife in the world of software.

Unfortunately, I see this as something taken advantage of rather that properly addressed.... sigh.

Free Software has already been paid for.

[Lendrick]

Time is money.

Free and/or open source software such as Linux, the GNU tools, Mozilla, Open Office, GNOME, KDE, MySQL, Apache, Postgres, and many other wildly successful tools have been worked on for countless hours by skilled programmers and designers. Whether out of the kindness of their own hearts, desire for recognition, or a business investment, people have spent millions of hours designing, developing, testing, and documenting Free Software. Consider for a moment how much it woud have cost to pay each and every one of those people for their time. That's the amount of money that hass been put into Free Software.

If someone gives you a mansion, you don't assume it's worthless because you didn't pay for it. The worth is still there; someone else already paid for it.

Re:And how often...

[moro_666]

Java is so clumsy that, if you are doing something with it, you always start by doing a lot of design before you code.


Come again? You code without software design ? Tell me exactly how do you write C or C++ code without designing, or python code ? (and who let you near a computer in the first place ...)

Yeah you can definitely write a 5-line perl hack without designing, but if you write just about anything that is worth a dime, you better plan first and dont fix/patch/alter the stuff afterwards for years. Maybe it's just that i have not had 1-day or 1-week projects for a while, but i usually don't write one line of code on the first day at all. I prefer brainstorming, research and analyzing that will save me a headache and hopefully give me a few extra days at the end of the project to polish stuff.

Java is not slow when code goes into millions of lines, it's the coders who mess it up. I have seen working huge java code, i have written huge working java code which is fast. You are still being fooled around the fact that the swing gui used by java is slow and that java is often used along with oracle that is slow. Don't let this fool you. Java is as fast as C++ in pure arithmetics. If you really need some freaky speed boost, you can write the speedwhore code in C and JNI to it. You can also have your pointer tribble there if you need it, but Java is designed so that it would avoid the need pointers in the first place (all the regular objects in java are actually pointers). Besides, Java is the only thing that will work on almost any platform. And this is what counts in year 2005.

C and C++ are not platform independant and that is what you rarely want to use nowadays. You can never know if your stupid management wants to run this on windows or linux or even sun tomorrow. And once you get your code compatible with all major os's , the source is so #define'd that it's nearly impossible to manage. I won't even start about the library dependancies.

Just use every language where it belongs and don't go around bashing java or anyone else with accusations that can't take 1 mm of water.


Oh well, ok, you can bash php, i have nothing against that.