Ed Leafe wrote: > On Jan 31, 2008, at 12:16 PM, Rick Schummer wrote: > >> I am not asking >> them to continue the development of a tool on a completely different >> platform and commit resource >> expenses for a long period of time. I am talking about a short >> effort with limited resources and a >> huge long term impact to the community. Different all together in my >> opinion. > > > They are not at all different. In the VFP/Mac case, I had a list of > over two dozen documented bugs that were known during the beta (yes, I > had the cookies to show for them) that remained in the released > product. All I had asked was for the top 6 (the ones that prevented it > from being usable) to be fixed. No promise for future development was > requested; just a few bugs to be fixed. I think the fact that they > knowingly released a buggy product showed that marketing decisions > were far more important than technical considerations.
I wish I could find that glitzy marketing material announcing VFP for Mac. The marketing material in no way matched the experience of actually using the product. A familiar story and Microsoft is hardly the only offender in this regard. I remember feeling strung along, too, with hints of service packs to address the issues. The VFP/Mac disaster is a case study of what can happen in the closed-source proprietary application model - a vendor just shutting a project down with no recourse available to anyone in the community. With open source there's always a recourse: find and fix the problems yourself, and share your fix with the community. Paul -- http://paulmcnett.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
