On Jul 18, 2007, at 3:46 PM, Justin Darnell wrote:
> "They would indeed be motivated enough to look at the code, track
> down the
> bug and fix it."
>
> I agree, they would. However, would they actually take on the
> whole project
> and start adding features? Or would it just feature freeze forever
> with
> random bug fixes from the community and eventually vanish into
> obscurity?
Why would that be necessary? It's working fine; why would new
features be a requirement for something to continue to work?
I can understand that PHBs would want to see newer buzzwords, but
real developers just need something that works. Did all your VFP apps
suddenly stop working when Microsoft made it official that no new
features would be added to it?
> "If you were a regular Dabo user, you would feel insulted by this?
> You
> would feel like a 'second-class citizen'?"
>
> What you described is fine. You're not purposefully stalling your
> non-paying clients on buggy builds of Dabo as to make them pay for the
> latest and greatest.
Of course I'm stalling them. They aren't getting the level of
development that they would if I were focusing on everyone instead of
paying customers. Or do you somehow imagine that getting paying
clients adds more hours to the day?
There is only so much development work I can do. If someone's paying
me, I'm going to do their stuff. Once that's all done, I would think
about doing the free stuff again. Or do you think I am morally
compelled to forego billable hours in order to honor the "unspoken
bond" you mention below?
> Here's a related blog entry from a MySQL expert:
> http://jcole.us/blog/archives/2007/05/14/breakdown-in-mysql-
> enterprise-process/
Oh, I see where you're going. You find a case where a company that
has some open source product doesn't do a good job of handling bug
fixes, and then conclude that all open source is therefore suspect.
Did you Google for all the times that Microsoft has purposely ignored
or suppressed information about far worse vulnerabilities? And those
are only the ones that they got caught with; without access to their
source code, you don't know how many are still lurking.
> "What would give you "warm fuzzies"?"
>
> They should continue the unspoken bond they previously had with the
> community. Everyone gets the same release. If you need support
> you pay for
> it, but they shouldn't keep you from using the latest and greatest
> just
> because you don't pay for support.
The "latest and greatest" may have only been tested in a single
environment, or only focused on optimizing for a particular setup.
Developing for a particular client is very different than developing
for a general audience. The "support" you cite isn't just hand-
holding or answering tech questions; it typically is custom development.
> "The communities are stronger than ever."
>
> Googling "mysql free binaries" and finding that 4 of the 5 top hits
> are
> people talking about the change tells me "the community" isn't
> happy about
And now you see a surge in the growth of PostgreSQL as a result. The
net effect of stupid actions by MySQL is not a migration away from
open source; rather, it is a migration to a better product.
If a restaurant in your neighborhood starts serving bad food or
being rude to their customers, do you then rant about how all
restaurants suck? Or do you simply stop going there, and go to one
that is more to your liking?
-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
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