Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:33:33 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: OSS, Sun, GPL, random ramblings Message-ID: <20000822163333.B18365@hades.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20000821152013.05bb1e00@localhost>; from brett@lariat.org on Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 03:23:26PM -0600 References: <20000821140419.B13975@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <4.3.2.7.2.20000821152013.05bb1e00@localhost>
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On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 03:23:26PM -0600, Brett Glass wrote:
> At 07:04 AM 8/21/2000, j mckitrick wrote:
>
> >i've been reading and thinking lately (uh oh :)
> >
> >Once there are OSS versions of software available,
> >is it likely these will grow to dominate, and squash innovation? Sun is
> >releasing OSS applications like staroffice and others. what will be the
> >motivation to write a competing one from scratch?
>
> There is very little. It feels like (and is!) nothing but
> drudgery to reinvent the wheel from scratch when there's
> perfectly acceptable code out there already.
Ok, this time it was three entire lines of posting before a flame bait
for a new war between GPL and BSD types of licenses was (very elegantly,
I have to admit) thrown in by Brett.
Anyway, to give me $.02 of opinion on the original poster's question:
Even if an open sourced piece of software exists, motivation might still
arise for the development of a closed source replacement. I'll have to
support this opinion of mine now.
There are a lot of factors why one would prefer a closed source
solution, some of them--just those few that I can think of right
now--being:
* Effectiveness for the job at hand.
If a closed source solution does everything you want, and an open
source solution does *most* of it, but not all, then I'm afraid that
for your business you would choose the closed source solution.
* Quality of documentation.
Nobody likes using a program that has little or no documentation.
Some open source programs have close to nothing for documentation,
since they are actively being developed and their developers fail to
update the documentation as changes are commited.
* Support within and from outside the local environment.
The support contracts that are offered by many commercial vendors
are a major win when it comes to commercial environments. They do
believe that they will get timely and very helpful support, just
because they paid for it, which is not a rather unrealistic thing to
believe.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that some times
they discover that they paid but they get nothing but a few hints to
wait until the next major release is out. Ah well, life is unfair,
I guess.
Trying to provide your customers with a product that is better, or at
least as good, in some of the above points (and others that I probably
forgot to mention) will probably give you enough motivation for
developing and maintaining a commercial product that has similar
functionality with an open source solution.
--
Giorgos Keramidas, <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
For my public pgp2 key: finger -l keramida@diogenis.ceid.upatras.gr
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