More Sun news: Sun promises to open-source Java

[Robert Collins]

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 21:23 +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> On Sunday 21 May 2006 21:02, Pete Ryland wrote:
> > The whole world can now improve on it and maybe even make it work, and port
> > it to other platforms; they may actually acheive their goal of write once,
> > run anywhere!
> I don't think that they really want people to be writing source cod for them, 
> and I don't honestly think that people will. For example, nobody really the 
> uses the rpm code, even though redhat has open sourced it. They use the 
> application, but the code doesn't seem to get used (please correct me if I'm 
> wrong). Another well known one is yast in suse, again nobody really uses that 
> code. A third example is the HP printer drivers.
> 
> It seems that most of the time when companies open source something, people 
> trust them to program it.

By 'use the code' I guess you mean 'make regular patches to it' ? I
think one complicating factor here is that the apps you mention - rpm,
yast, hp printer drivers, are largely complete. They work. So there is
no significant motivation to be getting in an patching them for the
average hacker-user.

Its a real comfort to me though, that if I have a driver problem with my
HP, I can fix it.

Rob

-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/attachments/20060521/1e726849/attachment.pgp