Sudharsan S.N. wrote on Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 09:33:20PM +0100:
,----
| You argument favoring MS seems to come more out of fascination than
| facts!! You might have to dump ur processor/monitor/graphics card in
| the not-so-distant future, I sure presume u will do that to see the
| "Long-Horn". No counter-plan for OSS, just design a much more
| friendlier GUI, constant improvisation -as we call it!!
`----
so does your argument. It stems from a fascination about the OSS
philosophy. The point of this entire thread is whether source being
open is really necessary (and advantageous) than a closed source
system (which in our example is Microsoft -- a bad example since an
operating system that has its roots from DOS/Win3.1 will obviously
have difficulty scaling to the modern day security / extensibility
requirements). Let me bet that IF GNU was not based on Unix and say it
was based on some other fancy idea, it might not have become this
successful.
Let us consider, SAP for example. Its almost going to beat
GnuEnterprise hands down. The point being, SAP has been in development
for ages. Its become perfect over X years with an N-thousand people
working / giving feedback / fixing it. Given the closed source model
SAP uses, its refinement cycle is not faster. But with a free software
/ open source development cycle, GNU enterprise will reach the same
level of 'maturity' in less than X years if N-squared-thousand+ people
work on it. (ok, dont bring in the million monkeys jumping on a
keyboard analogy -- A large fraction of Open Source developers work on
a said project because they are interested in it and they almost
certainly would know what they are doing). Take emacs for instance,
its older than me! I'm sure the man hours that went into
writing/refining emacs is *huge*.
The disadvantages I see of the open source model is when:
a. the software needs not just programming expertise but ALSO
functional knowledge (like SAP for example)
b. the software is considered "uncool" by the majority (like
'accounting packages' for example).
There are over a hundred different types of audio-player software and
shoot-em-up types games. Why aren't there that many Enterprise
software or say an Encyclopaedia encarta thats got flashy animations?
The technical stabilitiy / excellence argument will almost always see
most proprietary software as advanced / better than the Free/open
source equivalents simply because lots of man hours have gone into its
making (although, things have changed radically now (especially on the
server side)).
Certainly I do see a lot of good (good == software gets better. Not a
single individual's pocket) due to Free/Open Source software.
,----
| "Ignorance is bliss!!" and for the others
`----
Atleast my office accountant thinks so. :) (especially after he sees
all of us running between BSD boxes and occasionally tripping over a
bunch of cables)
cheers,
-Suraj
--
,-----------------[http://www.symonds.net/~suraj/]---o
| Although the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, it appears the same size
| in the sky because it is 400 times farther away.
`------------------------------[suraj@xxxxxxxxxxx]---o