begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 10:17:50AM +0700: [snip] > Couldn't it be that you don't see dependency problems from proprietary > software because you don't get the code or the opportunity to compile it > for yourself?
Possibly. But I'm not really comparing along that axis; I'm comparing "modern" open-source projects with "old" open-source projects. I don't recall this sort of huge dependency graph when I first started using Linux. > I am pretty sure proprietary systems have even more > trouble in this area. They probably have different sorts of dependencies. But if you're paying money for software, they have to build in a certain amount of flexibility to reduce _their_ workload... they generally can't as easily demand that you go buy products X, Y, and Z. No doubt that is changing over time... > And if you want to complain about bad assumptions > and system-specific code and hard coded install paths (as I often hear > you complain about with GNU software) you have clearly never compiled > proprietary code! Not _quite_ true, albeit that most of my experience is with subcontractor code. And I'm not above giving someone an earful. (For example... code that had "d:\developername\" as a hard-coded prefix in a Java program.) > Free software/open source is heavenly in comparison! Some of it, yes. Some of it, no. If I appear to criticize open-source more than proprietary software, that's because I'm more dismayed by the failure of open-source to live up to its promise (and promises). The quality of OSS should be an order of magnitude _higher_, with a concomitant reduction in feature addition. -Stewart "Free/open-source software is.... uneven." Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
