Re: is free, open source software ethical?

On Fri, 7 Mar 2008 10:53:40 -0600, Richard Heathfield wrote
(in article <58CdnbqtPu6s70zanZ2dnUVZ8vqdnZ2d@xxxxxx>):

Randy Howard said:

GUI: given the progressively sluggish OS, Win32 is pretty nippy (that
is, it's not the bottleneck). X, on the other hand, always strikes me as
being rather a crawler.

Because it was designed to run over a network to a bunch of X
terminals or remote low-powered systems from a big powerful server.
That underlying protocol overhead should have been ripped out long ago,
and let those that still need it use something like VNC instead.

Agreed. But it ain't gonna happen though, is it?

I don't know why it wouldn't. It would instantly make all but about 23
out of all the people running Linux see a performance improvement.

But the cut/paste/propagate community isn't a huge fan of doing
anything from scratch anymore if some hack is extant already, even if
much better approaches are well known.

For a concrete example:

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

I don't see how comparing 32- and 64-bit
compilers to an ancient, unsupported 16-bit compiler is even
applicable, frankly.

Oh, my dear chap - Turbo C on a modern box is just *awesome*. It was
designed to be bearable on an 8088. On a bigN86, it simply flies.

Oh, I'm sure it can swallow lines of code quickly, but that's hardly
the main feature I look for in a compiler.

Image processor: I'm no image processing expert, but I generally find
that the GIMP can do what I want more quickly than Photoshop can.

Here we part company in a major way. Gimp is total crap compared to
photoshop if you actually /need/ the advanced features.

But I don't. :-)

Well, you form a decent argument for the notion that open source is
"good enough" for amateur usage. I suspect that wasn't your intent,
but that is the result of the above. ;-)

I note that after the very first little bit of this post you said
almost nothing about performance, and a great deal about preference,
stability, and "oh look, more crappy MS software".

For me, stability is the most important thing, and greatly affects my
preference.

But you didn't even mention the most important thing originally, you
said it was faster. Not to worry, it usually takes a bit of digging to
uncover the root of these things.

Speed is a bonus, although of course there is such a thing as
too slow. Most of the time, after all, I'm running *my* programs, and they
(almost) always run quickly enough for me.

Yes, since most of us have far and away more computing horsepower than
we need today (a most happy change from the systems of the past) this
is generally the case. That said, stability has gotten worse, not
better, perhaps because of too much dependence upon faster hardware
curing the ills of poorly written code.

Perhaps if your
comparison was extended to commercial software other than out of date
versions of Photoshop and all things Microsoft, your impressions might
be different.

Perhaps - but in fact I hardly use commercial software at all nowadays.

If that is the case, it makes your opinions on it worthy of somewhat
less weight, would you agree?

Also, if you looked at more than the very small group of "top tier"
open source apps, it might be a bit more balanced as well.

No point. Sturgeon's Law applies. :-)

I'm guessing you actually mean Sturgeon's Revelation here, often
misattributed as Sturgeon's Law.


--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw





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