[Nottingham] Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#

[Jim Moore]

the flip side of it involves specialised software - for example,
relational databases like 4D or Crystal. The software's free, yet is
of extremely high quality (down to the man-years behind the
development process). The training is provided exclusively by agents
of the people who wrote the software, hence they get a percentage. OK,
so the cost of training might seem to some to be a little prohibitive,
but then 4D and Crystal as given examples are corporate-level
packages, so budget for training would be expected to exist if the
company expects to fully utilise the software.

On your point and on topic, I wouldn't ever have considered
RedHat/Fedora or (Open)SuSE to be hard to use or by any means broken.
RHN and Novell both offer commercial training on all their current
releases, and they charge for their commercial releases (SuSE Pro and
RHEL/whatever). The training's there for inhouse administration since
not all companies have the budget to hire in a RedHat agent to take
care of their systems - training can be a cheaper alternative (ever
consider one of those 700+page volumes and a free release? I use
OpenSuSE and a copy of O'Reilly's. £40-odd for the book and it comes
/with/ the software).

I'll admit that in the early days (late 80's-early 90's for me) of
F/L/OSS, I did find a bagload of broken code, I wouldn't be too
surprised if there's proportionately even more out today, but I just
can't see it - I don't go looking for (broken) software anymore, I
have what I need (through two decades of looking, testing, filtering
out the crap and keeping the gold) and it works just the way I want it
to. Others' mileage may vary of course, they might go looking for that
nugget on Sourceforge and find that what they want doesn't do what
they expect or want. People have their own disparate and unique ways
of dealing with those situations, from screaming at their computers to
contacting the programmers directly to jumping on the forums to fix or
modify the odd line or ten of code...

Some of the best free or open source software I've ever come across
and still use:

FractINT (since 1990, v17, now on 20.0)
VistaPro (v3? Still got the magazine cover from 1991!)
rmorf (Targa bitmap morphing package from 1992)
MAME16/MAME32 (ever since it went public and oodles of roms to be had
all over the Net - now up over a thousand)
Boxplorer 1.1 (XBox hack/platform upgrade with a dozen emulators and
well over 2,000 roms from pretty much any classic console you can
think of - I've only ever bought 28 XBox titles)
all that wonderful video editing gear that comes bundled with OpenSuSE 10.3
Zoneminder (a Linux-based multichannel, multi-interface, IPCam-capable CCTV/DVR)
LMP (Linux Media Player, an ubermini* live distribution that loads
into and runs from RAM, freeing up the optical drive dor DVD Video or
CD Audio/MP3 discs) *base load is 28MB!

wow. Out of breath.

On 7/26/09, Michael Simms <michael at linuxgamepublishing.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> On 26 Jul 2009, at 02:18, Jim Moore <jmthelostpacket at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 7/20/09, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Folks,
>>>
>>> Rather an interesting post:
>>>
>>>
>>> Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#
>>>
>>> http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
>>>
>>>
>>> Fanciful?
>>> Extremist?
>>> A form of self-sabotage?
>>>
>>> ... But... Note also the ever increasing debacle for using VFAT...
>>> And
>>> the past silliness with mp3... And the very expensive SCO attacks...
>>>
>>> It's all a jungle out there!
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>>
>>
>> There's an extremely easy way to avoid  litigation - simply don't
>> charge  for any software you write. Charge instead for tech support
>
> Ive just been discussing that subject via a blog post - the problem
> with this is that it encourages open source to be harder to use or
> broken, compared to proprietary. If your only way of making money is
> support, it doesnt encourage good software
>
>> unless you're quoting lyrics in their fullness to an audience of more
>> than thirteen people and they have MAF/RIAA ties, they can't touch
>> you.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
>> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/nottingham
>
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