On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 14:40, Adrian Midgley wrote: > http://www.defoam.net/wiki/tavi-0.22/index.php?page=FUD-Busting > > There are a number of recurrent memes - the one about everyone using OSS > having to rewrite it, compile it and maintain it themselves is one, and > paradoxically the one about how everyone _would_ immediately alter it, > recompile it and give us many many unmaintainable variants the following > morning is another.
Please keep in mind, I am a big opensource supporter and talking from the developers perspective :) This is what I do when an opensource community is not responsive enough, I start forking. With eg apache maven that is not an huge problem, since it works with plugins, but it is pretty hard to keep up with changes in other projects (eg jakarta commons, although since I am committer there, I don't have such issues), where you have to start maintaining your fork to keep up with development. So forking is definitely a solution, but you have to ask yourself the question if forking takes you more time than making patches and waiting for them to get applied. Although if I find a bug in a commercial package, I have to wait untill a next release, which is a big downside, if you want to stay in control of your development proces. > > We could do with a a set of good replies although I fear these bits of FUD > will carry on being whispered into ears regardless. I see an heavy increase in fud about open source lately. Some is just about having fun, but most is about fear of being held accountable for (bad) choices (it's harder pointing fingers at opensource communities than pointing fingers to a commercial vendor). You also have a category of people who call themselves programmers, but aren't worth that title and start spreading fud just because they don't get the stuff they are trying to use.. > > I'd also invite a check as to facts in the link given... Looks ok, but I can come up with a lot more :) - Oracle (a lot java that is open source based and integrated apache httpd) - IBM (a lot of java and linux open source) (eg Xerces, located at apache). Linux runs on all platforms nowadays afaik. - Sun Although their jdk is not yet open source (though sources are available) the jdk (and j2ee) ships with numerous opensource projects (tomcat, ant, xml parsers). Sun boxes all support Linux nowadays.. Most people don't even know that they are using open source.. -- Mvgr, Martin
