[Fsfe-ie] Princeton troll

[Niall Douglas]

On 5 Nov 2003 at 15:06, adam beecher wrote:

> This is the alluring pitch of open source software. We may have to
> give up project planning, quality control, coding standards,
> accountability, version control, and support, but it’s FREE and we get
> the ability to modify the source code ourselves, something that is
> extremely dangerous to do, was discredited decades ago, and few people
> do anyway.

Trolling aside, he has a point in some areas. Free software has 
better quality, better support for programmers and it comes with 
source which is always a good thing, plus you get the right to fork 
off improved versions.

However, I can't say too much for planning, accountability and 
support for end-users - plus free software projects usually deliver 
what's a good idea, not actually what the user wants (I personally 
think this is mostly a good thing as it encourages dumb users to 
improve themselves. But most people resist harder the more you 
encourage them eg; today I tried convincing someone to stop using 
Outlook Express and it backfired :(. Also, it genuinely is a bad 
thing especially when GPL believers refuse point blank to design 
their software to work on Windows :( )

It's very easy to get caught into thinking that free software is the 
panacea to cure all ills and it /is/ for *programmer's* ills. But for 
joe soap, he only cares because it's free - and that's dangerous, as 
like downloading music it means no work for programmers with time as 
work shifts entirely to the third world.

Cheers,
Niall




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