1 Feb 2001 found Every Man writing:
>I just elect not to complain since I'm getting my money's worth.
you elected not to but also attempted to discourage others
from complaining. my point is that that kind of thinking is
counterproductive. encouraging the idea that free software
must neccesarily suck and nonfree software is better is
wrong and destructive. the entire infrastructure of the
internet is based on free software. the entire open source
movement is based on the idea that free software is BETTER.
the way that free software gets better is by having lots of
people look at it and find problems and report them (i.e.
"complain").
As Eric Raymond said in his famous "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar" paper: ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow''
(
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
)
I agree that when a company has a proprietary, for-money
product and they release a free version it will probably be
worse than the regular version, but this is due to the
greed of the particular company, not the nature of software.
but this started with a discussion of napster and there is
no non-free napster yet. or with, for example Apache, the
most popular web server software in the world, which got so
good and so popular because a bunch of geeks looked at the
free server written by the National Center of Supercomputing
Applications and they said, hey there's some problems with
this. the NCSA couldnt keep up with all the problems people
were finding. eventually they said, nah, we arent going to
maintain this anymore. so the geeks started patching the
code themselves. they didnt say "oh it's free so to hell
with it." more and more people thought of ways to make it
better, and it got better and better and turned into the
Apache project ( apache.org ). If it werent for them the
world would be probably be running all on Microsoft web
servers and the slow pages you just mentioned would be even
slower and we'd all be fucked.
I could go on and on with more examples but everyone's
probably tired waiting for this message to download.
smh
Steev Hise, Wannabe Has-Been
steevATdetritus.net http://detritus.net/steev
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