Tim Ward wrote: > Yes indeed. This is why I often go for commercial software in preference > fo "free" - it took me a day and a half to get a working Visual Studio > 2005 debug DLL built, at a cost to my client of ... er ... well ... none > of anyone else's business really, but lots more than any software > package I remember buying. If instead of the "free" OpenSSL there'd been > available a non-"free" product that cost £500 with normal commercial > standards of installation and documentation and support we'd be laughing > all the way to the bank.
I go the opposite way - the risk of encountering an un-solveable problem due to lack of access to source code means the potential to be forced to throw away and reimplement code is always present. This factor increases with time, as with age it becomes more and more certain that the code will either be updated outside of your control or no longer supported. A greater cost with a lower risk is always preferable to me in the long run. In the really big corporates I have been involved with, they have all demanded either source code with the product or the source in escrow before they will consider using it. Some of the in house systems I encountered started out life as commercial software whose vendors had ceased supporting the software. > One thing I still haven't found anywhere, it's not even in the O'Reilly > book, is a description of the "object" system - I've sort-of picked up > that if you XXX_new() something you maybe ought to XXX_free() it > sometime later, and there's some sort of use counting going on, but I've > not found any documentation for any of this yet. Use the source: while not the easiest to read it is the most accurate documentation available at any given time. (No, this is not a justification for a lack of or bad documentation). Regards, Graham -- ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
