🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <dupuy.89Dec21131227@cs.columbia.edu> dupuy@cs.columbia.edu writes:
    In article <8300@stiatl.UUCP> meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal) writes:
    
       1) If I release good, quality software, that meets a real need, that
       doesn't need lots of support (I *said* quality*), with good
       documentation, then why on earth would people buy it if they could
       get it free?
    
       2) A lot of other people, such as 103% of all the MIS-heads in the
       world, are going to lump it in with all that "public domain bulletin
       board stuff"- useless garbage and probably full of viruses, or at
       least nasty bugs (their perceptions, not mine). They would summarily
       have someone on their staff shot who even LET the stuff in the door.
    
    It seems to me that there's a bit of a contradiction lurking here -
    first Miles says "why buy it if you can get it for free?" nad then says
    that there are lots of people ("MIS-heads") who won't use anything they
    don't have to pay for.

As I never cease to observe, the software you pay for is explicitly
disclaimed against any claim of performance, and is typically buggy, full of
funny things (e.g. the trojan horse in a SunOS daemon that was exploited by
the Internet worm, or the backdoor in many BBSes, or the obnoxious serial
number broadcasts of many commercial LAN/TCP packages), and even comes with
reverse warranties, in which the customer pays for the privilege of
indemnifying the supplier against all claims by third parties.

Just as an example, somebody from an otherwise excellent company, ISC,
beloved by MIS-heads, excused the very high price of their products with the
alleged extra QA effort they put in their Unix product, beyond that already
done by AT&T; but significantly their product does not seem to be very much
less bug ridden than AT&T's, and most importantly their "warranty" does not
reflect this "effort", only their prices does.

The same company is a major example of software hoarding; they make you pay
$795 for a single *binary* copy of the X11 libraries, which are 100% free,
but not copylefted, high quality code, being constantly maintained and used
by a hoarde of programmers, without in any way warranting anything about it.
And if you want to apply publicly available upgrades, patches, extensions to
the libraries, you cannot; you have to pay ISC for doing this for you, at
their own pace, and again with no promises.

The MIS-heads that work under the delusion that they are paying for the
suppliers to stand behind their products while in the real world they are
paying a lot of money for defect free tapes or floppies, and for insuring the
supplier against trouble, should get some counselling...

As a rational executive, knowing that I would have to bear all the risks,
I'd rather get FSF software, whose source is freely available, which is used
and maintained by a lot of competent people, that is freely discussed on the
net, and that costs me nothing, rather than proprietary software that is
equally not warranted against anything but is a black box about which the
supplier has a monopoly on support, that it may even be incapable to exploit.

The FSF actively encourages people to provide support and maintenance of its
software for a fee, as they are not prepared to it themselves, because they
prefer to do development than handholding.

To me FSF software is then zero cost, *controllable* risk alternative for
executives concerned about support and security. Commercial software is for
those who don't care about either.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk