On 7/18/06, Dean Michael Berris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/17/06, Rogelio Serrano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just curious, why do you have to put it under an open source license? Why not a proprietary _source available_ license? Government needs to _use_ the software -- not redistribute nor modify it. If government was an IT company, perhaps it would be alright for it to shoulder the cost of modifying and maintaining the software -- but last I checked, the government's role is not to write software.
because i will not have access to it. my neighbour will not have access to it. the computer science students will not have access to it. we can not get components that we use in other projects. and i can not study it and make better version.
> If im the one paying and im the government its just as well. > other government branches can use it and that good for everybody. > government pay only once. and nobody can change the price on me later > or manage to shoot themselves in the foot and disappear with me left > holding the bag with a dead end product. > I don't get the point in this one...
nobody can fix my problems when the vendor is gone. no source code.
> nobody is being asked to code for free. the more urgent the need the > greater the willingness to pay. its just that the benefits are not > limited to those who payed for it. you all think its all or nothing. > nobody paid for software nobody get software. its not like that. a lot > of people code for free for various reasons. come on people are not > just about food shelter and clothing. people do get paid write > software but everybody get to use the software. thats the rub for most > people. its acceptable for some not to others. on the average though > it benefits everybody. Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, and may not reflect anybody else's opinion. Read at your own risk. [Start of Opinion] I write open source (and even Free as in Freedom) software because I _can_ and _want to_. Now, expecting everybody else to be like me is just immature and unrealistic. Yes, I work on non-open source projects, and am a project director with a US based company but the reality is: I need to eat, live in a comfortable home, and clothe myself. Only since I can afford and am inclined to do so that I write code for everybody to use. Not everybody is as altruistic as me, some are even more altruistic and more capable -- but the reason why free software is out there is because of the people who have the time and capability to make them.
im paid to write open source software. where does the revenue come from? from the service we provide using open source software. we undercut all our competition because we can sell our services at prices far below everybody elses. inmarsat gave up their sms project because the roaming and license fees are too much. the software development costs itself were already too much. so thats how i get paid. and thats how open source software is growing. there is no business selling open source software period. its all about services. and averages. we dont expect everybody to contribute and im not taking it against anyone for not contributing. i would like to put together a distribution for oems. they pay me for making it work on the pcs they sell. thats how it can work. ultimately i would like to put up my own store. integration is a key service.
What are you talking about? The point of writing extensible/reusable software is so that you _anticipate_ that your software _will change_. So from the start of the project, you already anticipate change -- only then can you prepare for it.
thats totally unrelated to providing more than what is needed. ok somebody said build an smtp api. then because you anticipate somebody want to connect to your server directly with a modem you start coding for modem connection and satellite communications too? i did that. and i got burned for it. i did not have equipment to test this at all and i ended up deploying servers with totally untested code paths. i have seen that happen all too often in other companies. and you might say i should have bought an sdk for the stacom. how much did you say?
[snipped stuff not related to open source software] > > come on nobody has a monopoly on good clean code. the advantage with > this case is that i can post it on the net and have everybody look at > it. and tell me what could be wrong. Why can't you post your code on the net and have everybody look at it and tell you what's wrong if your code wasn't released under an open source license? Nobody has a monopoly on good clean code, yes -- but what does that have to do with open source software? Have you actually bothered reading the design of a lot of the open source software you use? I did try for a while when I had time to spare and found a few things: and the gtk+ toolkit is brain-damaged, the Qt toolkit is too bloated/inefficient for my taste, and there are only a handful of open source libraries that are worth your efforts to use and not one of them is under the GNU GPL.
i thought you were saying proprietary code == good clean code and open source code == bad code. i dont use gtk or qt for the same reason. and i cant look at other non free code. the owners might run after me when they see me doing something similar. and i dont have enough money to tell them i did not steal it from them.
Have you ever heard of Refactoring? How about Design Patterns? How about Domain Driven Development? Test Driven Development? Continuous Integration?
of course. i practice those. the misunderstanding is really unnecessary. the distinction between refactoring and rewriting is vague. and sometimes there is not enough context to make it clear. refactoring is rewriting.
You don't _always_ need to re-write -- you just need to do your best so that software you write can withstand major surgery in the future. > and thats the killer. many people think this is where the development > process must spend the most. well my professor told me that. oh > well... > And you think better?
maybe. look, a lot of other programmers say that it does not work. its just not me. thats what the extreme programming experts say in every xp seminars i been too. i dont spend as much time with a debugger than my IDE using colleagues. and they spend much more time debugging code that they think might be needed in the future. yeah generic code. and they are the ones demanding more people. one to write docs, a couple to write a manual and a couple of assistants to do the unimportant stuff like putting together installers. big company big code practices. costly. the one of the reasons why people outsource code. the reason why software companies thrive. -- things i hate about my linux pc: 1. it takes more than a second to boot up 2. keeps asking about filenames and directories 3. does not remember what i was working on yesterday 4. does not remember all the changes i have ever made 5.cannot figure out necessary settings by itself _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
