Re: Lets talk about GUI and sound libraries
- From: "Bill Atkins" <batkins57@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 31 Aug 2006 07:37:14 -0700
Javier wrote:
Ok, so you presume that you are correcting me, that you are a master,
and that you have the right to treat everybody which hasn't got the
same opinion and logic as you to be insulted.
But lets go with your original message:
Because my program is probably going to be Open Source, I cannot pay
for a comercial compiler.
Nonsense. You are just broke or cheap.
It is your logic that is broken, and take the right for insulting me.
There are several motivations for making a program free, and most of
them are very away from that things you say. I'm not going to tell
every of them (and there are a lot), but just take for example at any
company producing open source programs (almost any big software company
right now), and any person who makes open source programs too.
You must be confused and totally wrong about what you personally are,
as you write Cells, which is free software. Are you broke or cheap
anyway?
I'm going to think that you are, as you are producing free software and
you say that the motivations are only that being broke or cheap.
There's a difference between writing free software and saying, "My
whole application is going to depend on large free-software packages."
You mentioned earlier that you use free software because you're able to
"modify it" and not because it's distributed free of charge. I think
this is baloney. How often have you had to modify a free software
package? If it was simply to fix a bug, ask yourself if that bug would
have been fixed more easily by a company than by a user - or whether
that bug would have been there at all. What kinds of modifications are
you looking to make?
Put another way, if SBCL and Lispworks cost the same amount of money,
which would you use? If Linux and OS X cost the same amount of money,
which would you use? The answer should be the better software package
- even if you have to pay for it. If SBCL or Linux were licensed such
that you could only participate in development if you purchased a
license, would you still be so keen on it? This is something you
should seriously think about. Lots of people claim that free software
wins because of freedom, but when you get right down to it, they just
don't feel like paying for software.
People have trouble seeing the costs of software because software isn't
something you can hold in your hand, like, say, a piece of steak. Had
RMS launched a "free steak" movement, he would have gotten nowhere.
Why? Because it would have been too expensive to produce steak without
recouping the costs. Likewise with software. Open-source coders
assume that cost themselves. But the fact is that making solid
software costs money. This is why SBCL and CMUCL are only where they
are today because CMU funded development for several years. Or why
Firefox is so complete (Netscape paid for it). Likewise with Apache,
parts of the Linux kernel. Software costs money; good software costs a
lot. Regardless of RMS's rhetoric, the reason most people are using
open-source is the "free beer" aspect of it. They put up with shoddy
implementations (e.g. Ruby's interpreter is notoriously slow, as it
runs progams directly off the parse tree. Why is this accepted?
Because it's free. No one would pay money for such a
bizarrely-implemented interpreter) and endure all kinds of shortcomings
simply to avoid paying. Perhaps I'm generalizing here - perhaps there
are more people in the free software movement than I imagine who are
actually in it for the "freedom." In my own experience, though, most
people would not choose Linux if it cost money - even if it cost money
to get the "free speech" aspects of it. It is the lack of upfront cost
of Linux that keeps people using it - and ironically costs them much
more in wasted time. Since switching to OS X, I find I can do lots
more with my computer. I always wanted to manage my money on my
computer, but the only programs available for Linux in this department
were gnucash and grisbi (I believe that was the name), neither of which
were very good. Now it's as simple as paying thirty bucks for Quicken
and getting that functionality. Similarly, I used to get by with SLIME
and SBCL. Both of these are well-done products, but they don't compare
to LispWorks. Why aren't people using LispWorks then? Mostly because
SLIME and SBCL cost nothing upfront (OK, OK, there are other reasons
too - SLIME is easily extended, SBCL's compiler is very helpful, etc.).
The next time you claim that the "free beer" aspect of free software
is unimportant to you, compare the software in question with its
commercial counterpart and ask yourself which you'd pay for if they
both cost the same amount of money.
Bill Atkins
.
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