RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 11:03 +0800, Michael T. Richter wrote:

> Here's a clue as to the right answer, though: go to Sourceforge and
> find a random project.  (To be fair select a random project that's out
> of "Alpha" stage.)  Compare that project to similar commercial
> offerings.  I'd guess that at least 8 times out of 10 the free version
> isn't as good.  To quote a wise man: ;)

But that's not a fair comparison Michael. Commercial offering tends to
not see the light of a public day till late in the dev cycle. Stuff on
SourceForge is the very opposite - in many cases you can still download
the very first commit (and get exactly one empty file).

What constitutes "beta" is also very different. For commercial it's
"when we are almost at the point where someone will pay good $ for this
thing". For FLOSS it's "when it can be gotten to work at all, so the
user will send us patches and bug reports". So by definition a
commercial beta will almost always be more advanced than a similar FLOSS
beta.

alan