So, what you're saying is that your boss aquired the source code under some agreement with the original vendor? The proprietary software got fixed. Seems you've just proven the opposite of what you intended.
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Oh. My. Gawd. RMS has ventured into the deep end without his waterwings again. Please understand I have a huge amount of repect for the man(aside from his assinine insistance of prepending GNU to linux), but lately he seems to just be getting weird.
First off, most of the systems that companies of >20 people run are either custom (especially Fortune 1000 corps), or the licensing agreements are fine tuned to the individual purchasor. Almost all have a source escrow provision, in case the vendor goes out of business, and almost all vendors of business systems have been Y2K compliant for at least the last year. Conclusion: companies either need to upgrade their own software, that of a defunct vendor's, or move to the latest rev of an existing vendor.
The biggest problem most companies have isn't with systems that were purchased, but with their own in-house developed software. Between a lack of resources to wade through the code and sloppy configuration management over the years (I have the binary, has anybody seen the source?), most business system problems are *internal* to a company's IT department, not to an external supplier. Obviously, there are exceptions, but for RMS to make a blanket statement like that is just one more demonstration that he has never lived in the real world.
Besides, the Y2K stuff that really worries me isn't the big business "mission critical" stuff, but all that code out there floating around in embedded systems. I'd hate to have my VCR get confused and not record "Friends" when I'm hiding in the mountains around Dec 31!
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So, what you're saying is that your boss aquired the source code under some agreement with the original vendor? The proprietary software got fixed. Seems you've just proven the opposite of what you intended.
-Bzzzz-
Thanks for playing. Please try again later.
Oh. My. Gawd. RMS has ventured into the deep end without his waterwings again. Please understand I have a huge amount of repect for the man(aside from his assinine insistance of prepending GNU to linux), but lately he seems to just be getting weird.
First off, most of the systems that companies of >20 people run are either custom (especially Fortune 1000 corps), or the licensing agreements are fine tuned to the individual purchasor. Almost all have a source escrow provision, in case the vendor goes out of business, and almost all vendors of business systems have been Y2K compliant for at least the last year. Conclusion: companies either need to upgrade their own software, that of a defunct vendor's, or move to the latest rev of an existing vendor.
The biggest problem most companies have isn't with systems that were purchased, but with their own in-house developed software. Between a lack of resources to wade through the code and sloppy configuration management over the years (I have the binary, has anybody seen the source?), most business system problems are *internal* to a company's IT department, not to an external supplier. Obviously, there are exceptions, but for RMS to make a blanket statement like that is just one more demonstration that he has never lived in the real world.
Besides, the Y2K stuff that really worries me isn't the big business "mission critical" stuff, but all that code out there floating around in embedded systems. I'd hate to have my VCR get confused and not record "Friends" when I'm hiding in the mountains around Dec 31!