For a good case for opensource
I think it makes a better case than Stallman’s
Why Software Should Be Free - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
you’re right. thanks for pointing that out.
Anyone can be a hacker with openSuSE! OpenSuSE was made to rock everyone like a Hurricane. You need OpenSuSE to show your friends that you’re cool like Super Villain Steve.
::uberGeek::Toons::Switch to Linux()](http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54)
If I wanted a Mac and OS X; I’d dress up like a Californian and hang out in the lobby of an insurance company trying to make friends. Blizzard made me keep using Windows XP. HP gave me a copy of Vista, for free, with my last new computer. BSD is cool… but I’m addicted to KDE 3.5.10. Solaris is a ‘real’ Unix; but it doesn’t have KDE 3.5.10.
I’m too cool for Gnome!
I have to have KDE.
Thank you for those links. Worth it to read.
Solaris ships KDE as part of the Solaris Freeware Companion CD. Solaris Operating System - Freeware
not sure if it is 3.5.10 though
Why don’t you need open source?
Because too many cooks spoil the soup.
Because you get a hundred different ideas about how to implement something, and some of those people decide to actually go ahead and write a completely different way to do it.
This now gives the end-user who is coming from Windows XP and doesn’t care about any of this the problem of picking one of these minorly different choices with minor but significant differences from other choices and hoping it will work for them.
And if the chosen package isn’t supported in some way, the end-user’s only hope is that perhaps some nerd will come by to fix whatever the niggling little problem is with this particular reimplementation of the same problem that another package claims to solve.
But the end-user can’t really pick and choose like this because each reimplementation develops its own following and its own habits, to the point that if the end-user wants this or that to work, they find that they HAVE to use whatever minorly different reimplementation of a similar function that some other reimplementation does … because the particular software they want to use is based on this other slightly different reimplementation of the same functions that something else does.
Or hope that some still some other nerd has spliced together an adaptation package to make the desired software work with some other reimplementation of functions that in this particular case the end-user doesn’t want to use, because of some other favored reimplementation of those same functions used by the end-user.
Or just go with a commercial OS option where there is one choice and if you don’t like it, there is one choice.
A single unified standard implementation makes end-user support easier because those hundred cooks all have to follow the same recipe.
This way we don’t have brain power of a hundred people sqandered by trying to provide user support for a hundred different reimplementations each with niggling little differences, that trip people up for no particularly good reason.
Genuine concern, but wrong conclusion. Open Source is not the culprit for incompatibility, lack of standards is. There are good examples for standardised platforms such as the two major desktops, the Internet Protocols, and so forth. Standardisation doesn’t have to come from fiat, it can also come from cooperation and collaboration. And there should be some room for dissent and experimentation, otherwise creativity dies.
One of the things that I have seen over the years as both a user and programmer is that Open Source tends to put the End Users and Programmers is closer communication. Instead of communicating with the company and the information changing hands and before the programmers get their hands on the problem. Open Source applications have the communities of users that work together to identify issues and test for root causes before the programmers are involved. The programmers are involved in these types of discussion between users and can identify new features or user interface methods to improve the performance or usability of the software. The open minds that you have working on and with project the better the open source. Plus you get programmer who add features because it is what they and the users wants as opposed to what the company wants to draw more money.
I wish that was the case all the time. Every so often you need an effort that starts with a single vision which ends with exactly that same vision.
Then again… sometimes Chaos theory works results in a beautiful conception of order!