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Proprietary vs. open source | |
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| Time: 04:11 EST/09:11 GMT | News Source: ZDNet | Posted By: Jonathan Tigner | ||
|
This is part 2 in a four-part series of articles that is roughly a response to "The Magic Cauldron," the seminal work on open source economics written by Eric Raymond. This article discusses points relating to the comparative merits of open source and proprietary software. | ||
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| #1 By 135 (208.186.90.168) at 5/15/2004 11:15:57 AM |
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Very well written, and raises a number of good intelligent points.
And those damn popups are back. |
| #2 By 8589 (66.169.175.39) at 5/15/2004 8:41:23 PM |
| Sodablue, I use Ad-Trashcan in Norton's Internet Security to add the new pop-ups. It is sad that they have chosen to find a way to circumvent normal pop-up blockers. |
| #3 By 5912 (82.74.70.225) at 5/16/2004 7:16:34 AM |
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"As noted in the first installment of this series, one of the advantages of proprietary software is close contact with real-world customers."
Hmm... and open source projects do not? Actually I think that this is one of the biggest advantages of open source: the fact that you, as a user, can very directly communicatie with the developers of software. Most open source projects have forums available where you can come into contact with the people developing an application. This makes it way easier to share idea's and give comment on the functionality of software. The writer makes it sound as though everyone can actually speak directly to a Microsoft-developer: I have yet to get into contact with one. This post was edited by rnmboon on Sunday, May 16, 2004 at 07:18. |
| #4 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 5/16/2004 9:15:54 AM |
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#5: I would agree that you have more communication with OSS developers, but do they listen?
In some projects, the developers are very responsive and work on issues, but in others, they usually ignore your requests or bugs unless they're interested in addressing it. OTOH, with proprietary, you may not have a much direct access to the developers, but the company as a whole is much more interested in your feedback. They spend lots of times at big customer sites observing their software in use and addressing issues immediately. So if you're interested in being heard, but not necessarily being acted upon, OSS is the way to go. If you're interested in having problems addressed, but not necessarily having direct access to developers, then proprietary is the way to go. I think most people are interested in the later. Another interesting point is that the level of responsiveness of an OSS project is directly proportional to the free time the project members have. And if they have more time, they're generally unemployed or probably not as good for some reason and the project isn't that great. There are some good projects where the developers have lots of time to address issues, but they're usually subsidised by a larger corporation in which case the model isn't sustainable. So you either have not-so-great developers with lots of free time, or good developers with no free time, or good developers who are being paid through an unsusstainable business model. I don't see how any of those are good things. |
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