RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 16:18 +0800, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> > 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.

I do get your meaning - compare evince to acroread for a good example.
On the whole the areas are just too different in their end goals for a
meaningful comparison.

As for the languages, that might be because non-technical people get
involved in the design....