> Why do you use (obviously flawed) research methods?
>
> My method is to ask other people to do it for me. I use that method
> because it is efficient. Its results are accurate, too.
>
> However, when a person tells me his OS is free, I have not always
> checked. Sometimes I just took his word for it. The problems that
> have been reported here in various free systems (and, mostly,
> corrected) show I need to discuss the criteria more carefully with
> them.
You contradict yourself. You say it's efficient and accurate and then
point out its inefficiency inaccuracy. I find it stunning that you can
reconcile this.
There is nothing to reconcile -- you have combined two statements
about two different things, so the resulting contradiction didn't come
from me.
When I want research, I ask people to do it. That is efficient, and
we have not seen any errors in it.
In the case of AROS, it's possible I did not ask anyone to do
research. I might have just taken the developers' word that the
system is free. It was years ago and I do not know what happened.
However, most of these problems had nothing to do with quality of
research, because they did not arise until after I had decided to
endorse a program. Research can only check the present, not the
future. For instance, the reference to unrar on BLAG's site was in a
wiki; it was posted by a user in the recent past. (It is possible
that this happened with AROS too.) Likewise for the GNU/Darwin
problem. I think this occurred in several others too.
My conclusion is that I should do more detailed discussions with the
developers of the FSF-endorsed systems about these specific possible
problems and how to avoid them.
