4 ms·

I agree. What matters is to write great software, how you finance it is irrelevant to the end user. Open source makes reverse engineering easier. Users don't c

I agree. What matters is to write great software, how you finance it is irrelevant to the end user. Open source makes reverse engineering easier. Users don't care about reverse engineering your software. They care about great software. My point of view is that great software comes from great engineers, not from a license.

lutorm 17y ago
What matters is to write great software I disagree. This is what I think of as the "Apple stance". Don't worry -- we write great apps and you will like them. However, no software is bug-free or suits everyone. People here are probably not typical end-users, and I can certainly think of the times when I've been forced to use software that didn't quite do what I wanted or that had some bug the vendor could not be bothered to fix. And because it was proprietary, I could not fix it regardless of my motivation to do so. If you say you're going to cater to everyone's needs and write perfect software, then maybe you're right. But if you're more realistic and aim at making the majority of your users happy and do a cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth your time to make the minority happy, you will not be producing great software in their eyes. And I'd bet you they'd be happier if they could just patch it themselves.
- shin_lao 17y ago
  If I know nothing about computers and software engineering and I have a problem with an open source software, I will have to pay someone to fix the bug (business) or rely on the goodwill of someone else to do it (charity).
  - sokoloff 17y ago
    Still, YOU having that choice is strictly better for you as a user than having the choice be dictated by the original author with you having no alternative, right? In the GPL case, if it's important enough to you and you alone, as defined by being worth you trading some resource you have (time and talent, or money) in exchange for the work, you can get the software modified. In a closed source case, it must be important enough to you to make the case and convince someone else as well.
  - NikkiA 17y ago
    You can pay someone other than the original developer, which is a HUGE difference. If you want some specific core feature in MS Office, you need to petition MS and hope they'll add it someday. If you want the same core feature in OpenOffice.org, there are experts in the OOo codebase that could do it all around the world, you could pay someone at Sun, someone at IBM, or someone that is freelance, it's your choice, and you have a free market to find who will make the change at the lowest price.
    - shin_lao 17y ago
      Sorry, no. Adding a feature in MS Office is extremely easy without the source code thanks to the powerful macros and plugins. There are companies making a living of this. It's much much easier to extend MS office than OOO.
DougBTX 17y ago
great software comes from great engineers Tautological, but fair enough. Could the choice of license affect which engineers work on your product?
davidw 17y ago
> I agree. What matters is to write great software, how you finance it is irrelevant to the end user. Well, yes and no. If, for instance, you have proprietary software, and your users depend on it and have no source code, and you go out of business, they are up a creek. Or, if you have released some open source software that people like and find useful, and you can't find a way to fund more than sporadic development, that may be a problem too: in an ideal world you'd spend more time working on it.
- axod 17y ago
  Come on. That's a silly theoritical argument. Dump 10MB of source code on the users and see if they bother to fix it or just move on to something else. If your customers are also programmers who don't mind going through other peoples code, then possibly.
  - davidw 17y ago
    The first scenario happens quite regularly. As for the second scenario, it happens quite often too, just that it's less visible: the software is still there, people use it, just that it doesn't get all the work it could because the main developer(s) have to make ends meet in other ways. Nothing 'theoretical' about it, it's something many open source developers face, and is, in part, why there's such a big hullabaloo around Mysql: Monty doesn't think it's possible to pay for (enough?) developers if they don't sell GPL exceptions. Of course he's angling to get back control of the project too, for free, using the European Union as his hit man, but that's another topic. In any case, paying for open source development is absolutely not a solved problem.
doki_pen 17y ago
Again, the FSF never claims that GPL creates better software. RMS has said time and time again that user freedom is more important to him then high-quality software. And that if someone were to prove that proprietary software was over higher quality then copyleft software, it would make no difference to him.

lutorm 17y ago

What matters is to write great software I disagree. This is what I think of as the "Apple stance". Don't worry -- we write great apps and you will like them. However, no software is bug-free or suits everyone. People here are probably not typical end-users, and I can certainly think of the times when I've been forced to use software that didn't quite do what I wanted or that had some bug the vendor could not be bothered to fix. And because it was proprietary, I could not fix it regardless of my motivation to do so. If you say you're going to cater to everyone's needs and write perfect software, then maybe you're right. But if you're more realistic and aim at making the majority of your users happy and do a cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth your time to make the minority happy, you will not be producing great software in their eyes. And I'd bet you they'd be happier if they could just patch it themselves.

shin_lao 17y ago
If I know nothing about computers and software engineering and I have a problem with an open source software, I will have to pay someone to fix the bug (business) or rely on the goodwill of someone else to do it (charity).
- sokoloff 17y ago
  Still, YOU having that choice is strictly better for you as a user than having the choice be dictated by the original author with you having no alternative, right? In the GPL case, if it's important enough to you and you alone, as defined by being worth you trading some resource you have (time and talent, or money) in exchange for the work, you can get the software modified. In a closed source case, it must be important enough to you to make the case and convince someone else as well.
- NikkiA 17y ago
  You can pay someone other than the original developer, which is a HUGE difference. If you want some specific core feature in MS Office, you need to petition MS and hope they'll add it someday. If you want the same core feature in OpenOffice.org, there are experts in the OOo codebase that could do it all around the world, you could pay someone at Sun, someone at IBM, or someone that is freelance, it's your choice, and you have a free market to find who will make the change at the lowest price.
  - shin_lao 17y ago
    Sorry, no. Adding a feature in MS Office is extremely easy without the source code thanks to the powerful macros and plugins. There are companies making a living of this. It's much much easier to extend MS office than OOO.

DougBTX 17y ago

great software comes from great engineers Tautological, but fair enough. Could the choice of license affect which engineers work on your product?

davidw 17y ago

> I agree. What matters is to write great software, how you finance it is irrelevant to the end user. Well, yes and no. If, for instance, you have proprietary software, and your users depend on it and have no source code, and you go out of business, they are up a creek. Or, if you have released some open source software that people like and find useful, and you can't find a way to fund more than sporadic development, that may be a problem too: in an ideal world you'd spend more time working on it.

axod 17y ago
Come on. That's a silly theoritical argument. Dump 10MB of source code on the users and see if they bother to fix it or just move on to something else. If your customers are also programmers who don't mind going through other peoples code, then possibly.
- davidw 17y ago
  The first scenario happens quite regularly. As for the second scenario, it happens quite often too, just that it's less visible: the software is still there, people use it, just that it doesn't get all the work it could because the main developer(s) have to make ends meet in other ways. Nothing 'theoretical' about it, it's something many open source developers face, and is, in part, why there's such a big hullabaloo around Mysql: Monty doesn't think it's possible to pay for (enough?) developers if they don't sell GPL exceptions. Of course he's angling to get back control of the project too, for free, using the European Union as his hit man, but that's another topic. In any case, paying for open source development is absolutely not a solved problem.

doki_pen 17y ago

Again, the FSF never claims that GPL creates better software. RMS has said time and time again that user freedom is more important to him then high-quality software. And that if someone were to prove that proprietary software was over higher quality then copyleft software, it would make no difference to him.