Star Microsoft menaced by Open Source
Linked by David Adams on Tue 5th Aug 2008 21:20 UTC, submitted by JCooper
Microsoft Microsoft . . . complained in its annual report that it was facing increasing pressure from open source companies. It claims they are stealing its ideas and benefiting from its intellectual property. "A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products." Also see analysis at Microsoft Watch.
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lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

"If I am but a lowly "random person on the inetrweb", and I download a piece of open source software (say KDE 4.0, for example), and I read and understand that I am being offered the software at no cost to me but with no guarantees as to its performance, and I then try out the software, notice a problem with it and I submit a bug report ... have I not tested the software?
No, you have discovered a bug. Testing the software is boring as hell, because it is basically hammering at the interface in a methodical fashion to hit every combination of inputs possible. It is also very effective, because given enough users, chances are those combinations will get hit eventually. You could argue that with enough users, software will be well tested, but that would be considered absolute lunacy in every single other industry in the world right now, except for some reason, programming. The whole point is to address these things before the lemur2's of the world get their hands on it. The only people who even come close to being testers in the open source world are those who run trunk builds on a daily basis, are active on the mailing lists with feedback, and submit proper bug reports. Everyone else is just users of untested software "

Again you fail to understand, so again I will patiently try to explain it to you.

Open source code release is not delivery of finished product to consumers in exachnage for money.

Open source code release is collaborative field testing of product in development.

Since the code is tested far and wide by millions of participants in a wide variety of field conditions, by the time it has become mature (called a "stable release") it is far better tested, and greater quality, than closed source code tested only in-house by the same company that produces the code in the first place and which is (as a whole) under considerable market pressure to release product.

Case in point ... Vista.

QED.

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jbauer Member since:
2005-07-06


Since the code is tested far and wide by millions of participants in a wide variety of field conditions, by the time it has become mature (called a "stable release") it is far better tested, and greater quality, than closed source code tested only in-house by the same company that produces the code in the first place and which is (as a whole) under considerable market pressure to release product.


Case in point... KDE 4.0? ;-)

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lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

"
Since the code is tested far and wide by millions of participants in a wide variety of field conditions, by the time it has become mature (called a "stable release") it is far better tested, and greater quality, than closed source code tested only in-house by the same company that produces the code in the first place and which is (as a whole) under considerable market pressure to release product.


Case in point... KDE 4.0? ;-) "

KDE 4.0, like any .0 release, was not a "stable release". It was actually the first time out. I am using KDE 4.1 right now, and it is a vast improvement, with significant additional functionality, and nearing stability.

It wouldn't get to that point anywhere near as quickly if it was constrained to be tested only by the KDE team ... it doesn't achieve that rapid open-source improvement characteristic without the extensive testing by the widest audience possible.

http://community.joomla.org/magazine/article/517-involvement-why-i-...
Involvement: Why I Love Open Source
A thoughtful perspective on participation

Just about every enterprise makes nice noises about how they listen to their customers and how customer service is important to them, but the odds are very low that comments about small irritations will result in code changes. This is partially because most companies don't actually care as much about customer service as they pretend to, and partially because tracking these small things and then sorting through them, removing duplicates, and distilling them down to something that can be easily understood is a very complex and expensive task. Most of the time the effort involved simply doesn't justify the results.

This is something that always attracted me to open source. As a developer, the odds are pretty good that I can find a fix for that thing that irritates me. Then I can change the code to fix my version. If the irritation is idiosyncratic - basically if I'm the only one who doesn't like it the way it is - then that's where the process ends, and I'm happy.

The first credo of open source is that you try to give back to the community. So even as a non-developer there is an incentive to find the bug tracker or support forum for the project and to suggest a change.


Edited 2008-08-06 14:42 UTC

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