This is a fascinating debate, especially in light of Stallman's speech. I was trained in my last job in the Pragmatic Marketing way of technology product management www.pragmaticmarketing.com where the central idea is that a problem has be both urgent and important for your customer base for it to be worth investing in. Otherwise, you don't have a profitable business.
I've been thinking a lot about that concept in the context of RMS' philosophy and I think it translates well. A problem has to be urgent and important for enough people to want to find the time to get together and solve it. Software freedom gives us the opportunity to fix what we dont like, but as someone else said, you might still have to pay for it if you cant find enough people willing to give up their time for nothing. MS (and many other commercial software houses) also follow the Pragmatic methodology. They go the extra mile for usability because they know that for the mass market, usability is everything, even at the expense of functionality or technical purity. I dont know where I'm ending up here except to defend developers that we think dont care about users. The big question is whether free(dom) software can ever compete with those that don't care about standards. I'ts going to be a big ask. I'm with Vik - if we knew/know HOW Skype makes it easy, it should be doable - but only if enough people see it as being worth the effort. - D On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Vik Olliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > On Mon, 2008-08-25 at 15:37 +1200, Don Gould wrote: > > Programmers in the MS Windows space are willing to go to the end mile > > to > > just make applications work for the user and don't care whos > > technical > > foot they stand on along the way. > > The obvious riposte to that is, of course, "If we all did that then > standards would be useless." > > I hope to head off a bit of sidetracking here, and push the concept of > improving on a standard in an Open way to benefit users as being very > distinct from the pig-headed > I'll-dick-with-this-to-completely-break-it-for-everyone-but-me approach. > > Vik :v) > > >
