[Gllug] "Open source has its own problems" - article in Computing

[Rev Simon Rumble]

On 4/8/2005, "Rob Crowther" <robertc at boogdesign.com> wrote:

>Intellectual Property - he states that all work done when in full time
>employment, whether at work or at home on personal time, is property of
>the employer, the natural conclusion of this is that most OSS is
>actually stolen from people's employers.

That's just bollocks.  And certainly I've always insisted on my
contract stating otherwise explicitely.  Never had a company have a
problem with it.  Current employer asks that I keep a list with them
updated of what I'm working on outside work.

>Conceptual integrity - good software needs a single designer with a
>clear vision, and this can't happen with OSS

Someone who's obviously never worked in a commercially-driven software
vendor.  Sure, you've got designs, but then you've got everyone else
putting in their two cents: marketing, customers, partners, testers. 
And then there's the quick-and-dirty hacks you have to do to make it
ship on time.  That "clear vision" gets pretty cloudy pretty damn
quick.

I've always found that free software developers are much happier to
scrap a codebase and completely refactor than commercially-driven
developers.  After all, they don't have to worry about the money.

>Professionalism - he likens the OSS movement to the games industry of
>the early 1980s, where apparently bedroom coders produced really bad
>games which nearly ruined the whole industry

Bad games nearly ruined what industry?  How?  I think this might have
lost something in the summary.

>Innovation - OSS is mostly just rip offs of proprietary software

Certainly things like Mono and Jakarta, but there are plenty of
contra-examples.  Firefox being the one we all use every day!
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug