Re: What's the story with the "end of XP"?

In article <467664c6$0$1440$8404b019@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
With an open source product, you are much safer. *I* may not understand much of the source code for GPG (an open source alternative to PGP), but I can be confident that there are plenty of people around the world who *do* understand it.

I doubt that.

If flaws are found, they will be fixed quickly - open source developers can't hide flaws in the same way closed source developers can.

This is also not true.

All your arguments previously seems to imply there is a difference between closed source and open source programmers.

When you are looking at embedded development tools, the situation is a little different - there is a much lower ratio of users to developers, and the users themselves are programmers. Here the source code can be very useful - I've often found source code useful to understand what is going on, or while debugging difficult problems.

I agree. But it does not need to be FOSS. Most of the commercial SW I know where having the source would be useful it is provided.

I'm not too bothered about having source code for a compiler or debugger

But the rest of the FOSS brigade seem to thing it is essential.

Looking at your case where the customer attempted to fix the software flaw themselves, there are a number of ways to view it. You could say that the customer made a mistake by trying to fix the compiler themselves - tools like compilers are pretty specialised, and it is hard for an outsider to jump in and make successful changes.

Not according to many FOSS devotees we get around here. Though strangely the commercial compiler writers I know would agree with you.

But it's important to consider what might have happened, especially if they did *not* have access to the code. The supplier could well have claimed there was no bug, they could have decided that fixing the bug was low priority and would be done in the next version, they could have agreed to fix the bug but taken too long, they could have been bought up by a rival company and stopped all product development - there are any number of plausible scenarios where the customer would have been in big trouble. Having the source code themselves gave them an escape clause - they could always get out of the problem, albeit at a cost. It turns out that in this case, with hindsight, fixing (or trying to fix) the problem themselves cost a lot - but it was perhaps a sensible risk management decision to maximise the chances of having working software in time for delivery. Having the source code available is not a cost or a burden to the customer - it gives them more freedom and more choice.

I am not convinced. I have seen cases where it was a a hindrance.

There does seem to be an implied line in most of the FOSS rants. They usually claim that commercial pay ware is buggy and thereby imply that Sw Engineers working for these companies are less capable than the FOSS community. This always amuses me especially as many of them are actually paid to write SW for some one else.




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\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
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