Re: Lets talk about GUI and sound libraries

joh wrote:
Bill Atkins wrote:
joh wrote:
No, it costs time. They are equivalent in some contexts, but not all.

See my answer to Rob Thorpe.

There is something to what you say there (that companies can buy work
people won't contribute), but I maintain that the history of open
source proves you wrong. It's the "... all bugs are shallow" thing.
Companies can pay QA people to slog through tests, but that turns out
to be a worse testing procedure than giving away your software to
anyone who's interested in it and letting them find (and often help
fix) errors.

In my experience, I've noticed that exactly the opposite is the case.
I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.

And by the way, you claim that because corporations have contributed to
all the really high-profile open source projects, that shows great open
software can't be made without companies footing the bill. The same
evidence would support the view that open source is so much better than
what companies can do for themselves, that they invariably get involved
with good open source projects.

Good point.

I'm sure Rails would have gotten along quite nicely had it been
closed-source and commercially-supported. Have you seen how excited
people are about it? Paying some money for what's claimed to be huge
productivity benefits is not ridiculous, as long as you think those
claims are backed up.

Personally, I very much doubt it. I have seen a lot of commercial
products that claim exactly what Rails claims: to remove almost all the
work from development. Most of these fail to achieve any attention,
because no one believes their claims, and they won't shell out money
based on a self-interested claim that's highly doubtful.

Although I'm no Rails enthusiast, I do think Rails gets closer to
living up to these claims than other frameworks - mostly because other
frameworks are writting in Java. Rails does stand out from the crowd
as far as the amount of code it takes to do things, the lack of XML
configuration files, etc.

Being free
really helps you gain critical mass.

I agree. I think open source is a neat way of getting ideas out into
the world and a good way to play with ideas that probably can't be
sold. I just disagree that the alleged "freedom" always makes your
life better. In my experience, the immaturity of some open-source
programs makes getting certain things done so hassleful that it's just
not worth the time. A lot of these same things are done trivially with
commercial software. I think there is some truth to the idea that the
availablity of FLOSS software hurts the commercial sector. A company
now has to produce software that not only works, but works so well that
it beats free software that mostly works. IMO, this is taking the
software world (or at least our part of it) backwards. People are
settling for immature or buggy software because it's "free" (in either
sense of the word), so solid commercial software is harder to sell.

I once saw RMS speak in Manhattan. An audience member asked him if he
thought freedom or progress was more important. He answered,
"Freedom." If not for his authorship of Emacs, I would have lost all
respect for him on the spot. Freedom (in RMS's view) is an interesting
idea, but it certainly doesn't trump writing better and more powerful
software.

So what we're really talking about here is your preference for OSX.

No we aren't. Where did you get confused? I'm citing an example of a
professionally-written piece of software that beats its open-source
competitors.

"Beats" how? There simply aren't objective criteria that show one OS,
or application, or software philosophy is better than another. It's a
matter of priorities, and often just of preference. The original poster
stated he was looking for open source -- you assume that he's somehow
deluded. Face it: we ARE talking about preference.

We are, but that was not the point of my entire post - and that's what
I interpreted your comment to mean. Sorry if that was my mistake.

To answer your question: OS X beats Linux in terms of ease-of-setup
(i.e. none), included (functional) software, the amount of compatible
and useful software, aesthetics, and hardware support (though better
hardware support is to be expected). This is indeed just my preference.

Sweet. That should help you save up the hundreds you'll be shelling out
for OS upgrades.

$130 every two or three years? Am I really supposed to be worried
about that?

That was a joke -- I'd just gotten through explaining that it's not
always about money -- apologies if it didn't come through as such.

Oops. :-) Sorry.

.

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