On 6/15/05, Evan Lavelle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, not quite. First they calculate if it will bring in enough money > to pay their employees, so that their employees can feed their children, > and pay their hospital bills and mortages.
This is very true. But, THEN they calculate what kind of profit potential is inherent in a bugfix or new feature request. You might hear it expressed more politically correct as "Prioritizing" feature requests. > This is the basic founding principle of organised groups, and of society > in general. Free software development, on the other hand, has no such > organising principle. That's because open source development isn't organized. > This activity is essentially selfish: development > is carried out for personal goals, and to further a nebulous and > ill-defined concept of the advancement of technology. Well, it isn't necessarily nebulous, and it isn't necessarily ill-defined. But it IS selfish. Ayn Rand would be proud. > So, which is more 'humane'? I'll leave that as an exercise for you. I think they each have their merits, and both have their place. A lot of times, it takes a corporation with investment capital to produce a product and get it half-way decent, even if it is broken when taken as a whole. Once it becomes a commodity item (or when people feel it *should* be a commodity item) then open source takes over, and provides additional development resources, albeit at the expense of time. Just my two cents. -- Samuel A. Falvo II
