On 9/27/07, Antonio Petrelli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 2007/9/27, Graham Leggett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > The idea that "it's free, what do you expect? quality?" undermines > > confidence in both maven and open source in general, and this doesn't do > > the maven project any favours at all. > > > > Well in fact I think open source software has a higher level of quality when > compared to proprietary software. > Probably we all have seen proprietary code that is badly documented, > written, engineered, etc. > For example, I remember the story of Interbase DBMS (I can't find the link, > sorry) when it was released as open source: the Firebird team had to fix > 25000 compilation warnings! > But think bigger: if you try to get docs from Oracle website, you will find > almost nothing. If you want docs, you have to go to AskTom or some ".edu" > websites :-(
I'd argue that software quality's independent of it's open-ness. For open source, you have the argument that anybody can go in and fix it. Of course, any nontrivial software requires quite an investment to go in & fix. For commercial software, you have someone that's got their paycheck depending on people's satisfaction with the software. Of course, you have monopolies where the customer has no choice. It really comes down to how the individual project is managed. Make quality a priority, and the software has high quality. Make it a low priority (e.g. "it's free, I'm doing it in my spare time, if you don't like it, don't use it"), and you won't have high quality. So, just b/c a project's open doesn't let people off the hook about quality. The open-source fairy won't come in one night and fix all your bugs or write your docs for you. -- H. Lally Singh Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science Virginia Tech --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
