Hello Bob, Monday, September 22, 2003, 2:56:55 PM, you wrote:
BG> "At any time" is may be particulary important to those of us interested BG> in making maximum use of older systems. Unlike commercial software BG> development, a "dead" project can be brought back to life so long as BG> somebody is around who is interested enough to maintain it. It needen't BG> be "viable" in the commercial sense. There needn't BE the legion of BG> programmers around to keep something up and going. I think Stephen's BG> BasicLinux is a good example of this. The lone codesmith can keep things BG> running just fine. I lot of the programs I use are dinky little things, developed and maintained either by lone programmers, or little groups of programmers. I enjoy paying a small amount, that I can afford, for 'use and updates'. BG> Hehe. We'll have to see what SCO comes up with here. :) Heh!!! BG> A mixed blessing sometimes perhaps! As Frederick Brooks made clear, it's BG> not the NUMBER of programmers that determines quality. Open Source -- BG> WITH good peer review and quality -- can yield good results (i.e. BG> OpenBSD and relatives, Debian). However, if the same "release date" BG> mentality gets applied (i.e. RedHat), it's no guarantee of superior BG> quality OR security. I have to groan when I hear the marketeers starting BG> up about these things! The thing that attracted me to open source, was that the dev tools and docs were free for the downloading, and that there was a lot of source code out there to study, and learn from, by changing it, and then recompiling it, and seeing what happened. The thing that eventually 'sold' me on the Open Source idea, was what happened with Microsoft, once the lawyers (or whoever) really took over and got greedy, and ugly. During the past 3 years (the main extent of my serious study in the computer sciences), Linux has moved ahead considerably on all fronts, and Microsoft has sued people, threatened people, raised their prices, been embroiled in angry litigation, invented 'XP anti-piracy operating system', invented 'smart tags', to add their content and tags to other people's websites, when their browser was used to visit those sites (so far, still withdrawn, but not forgotten), and made their MSIE 6 browser incapable of offering the user the option of not running scripts... or of having the 'prompt' option, where scripts were concerned... and I can't think of any new software that they have come up with, during this three year time period. So, I guess I could say that it was Microsoft, that made the strongest case, for me to adopt the Open Source ethic. -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/ -weblog http://radio.weblogs.com/0128450/ A business is as honest as its advertising. . To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
