Open Source is 'Not Reliable or Dependable'

Exter-C writes "News.com is reporting that Jonathan Murray, the vice president and chief technology officer of Microsoft Europe has made claims that 'some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model.'"

Comments

Re:SourceSafe vs CVS

[xtracto]

Because it is easy to setup?

And it is not really that slow and unreliable that for a lot of companies who preffer to run a setup wizzard instead of trying to figure out how to setup CVS or SV.

Just a week ago I tried to install CVS or subversion to make a Latex document repository, after reading the fucking manual and downloading this Explorer shell extension programs (dont remember their name) I got fed up and gave up, I supposedly made a repository directory and tried to create a new tree or whatever it is called but the darn shit just could not work.

No, I do not have the time to lose for that, I preffer software that *solves my problems* and not software that gets in my way

Re:*boggle*

[ultranova]

Hmmm...Since I moved to using completely free/libre open source software 4 years ago, the number of system crashes I've experienced can be counted on one hand, I have not needed to waste resources with a virus checker, and yet I've somehow still managed. I've not experienced this "unreliability" that is mentioned for nearly four years. But this is just my personal experience.

Linux is unreliable. Once, in the 90's, I ran it from a bootable floppy, which also contained a swap file. I removed the floppy while it was accessing that swap, and the kernel crashed.

Honestly - how hard can it be to code a simple "Please reinsert the disk" message for such occasion ? You can't simply trust the swap file not disappearing suddenly, that's unreliable. How are you going to answer to a CEO asking you how its possible that hours of irreplaceable unsaved mission-critical business data was lost simply because someone removed the swap floppy ? How are you going to explain it to the customers whos orders were lost ? I know I couldn't.

It's this kind of gaping holes that still confines Linux to the realm of penguins in Antarctic and prevents it from being adopted by anyone but the few researches living there. Once it has matured to the point where swap floppies can be safely swapped (for how else are you going to multitask ? You can't fit a lot of data to a 1.44 MB floppy, you know), and perhaps even learned to use swap CDRWs safely, it might be ready for enterprise use.