From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Mar 30 11:50:44 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from chopper.Poohsticks.ORG (chopper.poohsticks.org [63.227.60.73]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9492137B71D for ; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 11:50:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drew@chopper.Poohsticks.ORG) Received: from chopper.Poohsticks.ORG (drew@localhost.poohsticks.org [127.0.0.1]) by chopper.Poohsticks.ORG (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id f2UJoNO26356; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 12:50:23 -0700 Message-Id: <200103301950.f2UJoNO26356@chopper.Poohsticks.ORG> To: Dennis Cc: seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach), hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: if_fxp - the real point In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 30 Mar 2001 14:06:51 EST." <5.0.0.25.0.20010330134837.03f30d20@mail.etinc.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <26352.985981822.1@chopper.Poohsticks.ORG> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 12:50:23 -0700 From: Drew Eckhardt Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <5.0.0.25.0.20010330134837.03f30d20@mail.etinc.com>, dennis@etinc.co m writes: >And lets face it. If MS had a good product, they would have a much larger >market share and linux would be a non-issue. MS just makes shitty stuff. >Its not about "open source". Directly, it isn't. Indirectly, it is. >its about how well it works. Although that comes from the software being open source. If it's open source and broken enough to affect me or my employer, I can and will fix it, and send patches back to the maintainers. If it's not, the higher the hurdles are the more likely I/we will spend time finding a workarround or switching products instead. Regardless of how good your test team and tools are, there are going to cases you don't test for, and bugs are going to escape into the field. With more competant people in the field that have source you're more likely to have the bug manifest in a situation where someone can and will do something about it. Open source has the potential to make software more stable than its closed counterparts, and often does in practice. By virtue of having more people able to make changes, open source also increases your chances of someone being able to justify the expense (time, opportunity cost from not applying talent elsewhere, money, etc) to add a feature. >>important, open specs are a competitive advantage. Over time, they are >>likely to win if all else is equal... and in the long run, all else *is* >>equal. > > >Open specs are a competitive disadvantage, because all players are equal. It depends entirely on the circumstances. With small niche markets, you're much more likely to run into situations where open specs can make a huge difference in the number of sales you make. Look at what happened to the PC multiport serial board market. OTOH, with millions of sales for Wintel PCs, sales increases in the thousands of units aren't going to make a difference in your bottom line. If you're selling black boxes, it may not matter. Or your customers may find it reasuring that if you go belly up or discontinue the product they can still buy support from some one else. -- Home Page For those who do, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, no explanation is possible. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message