Richard Chycoski <[email protected]> writes: > Please, it's time to 'get real'. > > Sure, some of these companies offend my sensibilities when they > trample existing standards - but just avoiding them does not fix the > problem.
Sure it does. well, only you avoiding them does not solve the problem, but if enough of us do so, then yes, that company goes under, and the other companies hopefully become fearful, maybe fearful enough to respect their customers. to give us a useful product at a reasonable price. This is part of the reason for lists like this, so we can talk about what works and what does not work. > There are truly moral issues for not dealing with a person, company, > organisation, government, whatever. It's not a matter of morals, it's a matter of self interest. screw me once, shame on you, screw me twice, well, you can't screw me twice because I'm not doing business with you anymore. > If I attempted to avoid everyone who had ever offended my > sensibilities in any way, I'd never get out of bed in the morning - > after all, I offend myself sometimes! Right, they say the best strategy is 'tit for tat with forgiveness' but sharing information is essential to a free and fair market. Would you buy a DB server if the license terms said you could not share the results of tests you rain against it? I wouldn't. But it has nothing to do with being a commie, and everything to do with being an informed consumer. The biggest advantage of open-source software is that even if the original entity that wrote the software starts engaging in practices that hurt you, the customer, the codebase can be forked. worst comes to worst, I can hire someone to write security updates and maintain it myself. > However, please don't expect everyone to follow your code for avoiding > anything non-completely-open, non-standard-fanatic, > non-overly-corporate. The rest of us have to live in the real world, > and make compromises of some of these issues to get: I think all of us are trying to make money here. I'm closer to the dollars than most, as the company is mine, so the dollars I spend on software come directly out of my own paycheque. hell, I essentially am a corporation. I don't mind buying software, if it earns or saves me more money than it costs, I just want a good value for my money. (and in my space, most of the good stuff is free. I recognize that this is different in other spaces.) I'm not saying you should never pay for closed-source software; I am saying that it is important to share your experiences with your peers when a company screws you. I'm also saying that if a company develops a reputation for screwing developers or sysadmins, that is also a valid thing to express. Reputations are important things in markets; if reputations did not matter, then 'always defect' would be the dominant strategy. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
