On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 11:02:20 AM +0100, Gianluca Turconi ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> ...the article present on your news site: > > http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1660763,00.html?gusrc=rss > > ...includes misleading and false assertions, which I consider > harmful for both my professionalism and my efforts in favor of the > OpenOffice.org Free Software Community. > > In the quoted article, I read: > > "As far as I know, in the five years it has been available as open > source, not one contribution to the program has come from amateurs." > > and > > "The outsiders who have provided input have been full-time > professionals employed by Linux companies to help make the software > credible." I agree that, as Gianluca's example proves, those two statements could have been written in a less categorical way ("*almost* no contribution to the program" and "*almost* all the outsiders who have provided input..."). I also think that this specific paragraph: > Most software has similar irritations. But complex open source > projects seem uniquely badly placed to fix them. They rely on a very > small group of programmers relative to the user base, and who have > no direct incentive to work on the bugs that are important to users. applies in the same way to proprietary software, because: 1) even there the programmers team is much smaller than the user base 2) programmers have direct monetary incentive to work on what product management says it's important for company strategy, which only partially overlaps with the most common pressing user requests. Said this, I find the rest of the article objective. It says things that are actual problems and needed to be said, things which I too was planning to write sometime. Overall, good work, Andrew. Ciao, Marco -- Marco Fioretti mfioretti, at the server mclink.it Fedora Core 3 for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/ A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. R. A. Heinlein --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
