RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Michael T. Richter]

On Sun, 2006-02-07 at 10:00 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> 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.


Well it was out if interests of fairness that I said post-alpha.  If you
think the line's drawn too early still, by all means take any code
labelled post-beta.  I still think the vast majority of it will be
inferior to similar commercial offerings.  The only real exception is in
programming languages, etc.  The free ones tend to rock in comparison to
commercial offerings.  Oddly enough.

--
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter at gmail.com, mtr1966 at hotpop.com
MSN: ttmrichter at hotmail.com, mtr1966 at hotmail.com; YIM:
michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber:
mtr1966 at jabber.cn

"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot [...]. I
think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor
people." --Mother Theresa
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