Sparrow's acquisition highlights the dangers of closed source
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 21st Jul 2012 23:06 UTC
In the News Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".
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No it isnt
Member since:
2005-11-14

So Nero stopped sucking again? Last time I used it, it was an overly complex resource hog.

I'm also not sure what you imagine "professionals" expect from video playing applications. MPlayer and VLC are popular for what they are, not for how well they work in some imaginary professional video watching market. Microsoft's and Apple's offerings aren't nearly as good.

Reply Parent Score: 7

Nth_Man Member since:
2010-05-16

True.

Reply Parent Score: 1

lucas_maximus Member since:
2009-08-18

Way to fail an reading comprehension.

He was talking about the amount of money those developers were getting.

Oh well.

Reply Parent Score: 0

rr7.num7 Member since:
2010-04-30

Was he? I suppose you didn0t catch the plural. Here it is:

GIMP, VLC, Mplayer are developers get their money from other sources and lets be honest they are way off what professionals expect.


Plural. It is much more likely that he was refering to "those applications". Specially if you consider that it was a reply to a comment quoting his (moondevil's) own opinion that "most open source desktop applications suck".

So, I'd check my reading comprehension skills if I were you.

Reply Parent Score: 1

Savior Member since:
2006-09-02

I'm also not sure what you imagine "professionals" expect from video playing applications. MPlayer and VLC are popular for what they are, not for how well they work in some imaginary professional video watching market.


I am no video professional, yet I needn't be one to see how VLC cannot get something as elementary as DVD playback right. While the movie is usually OK, the menu handling is abysmal.

About the article: I agree with the people who say open source is not the solution. It is a possibility, and nothing more. For an easy glimpse of how an OSS email client (just to stay on topic) can mess up, have a look at Kmail 2.

Reply Parent Score: 2

zima Member since:
2005-07-06

I am no video professional, yet I needn't be one to see how VLC cannot get something as elementary as DVD playback right. While the movie is usually OK, the menu handling is abysmal.

Also performance and seeking ( http://kyon.pl/img/9115.html ) tend to be somewhat inconsistent. Mplayer behaviour seems much nicer overall, but it's the VLC that got so much more traction - and probably for being, for a long time, an all-in-one installer for... Windows.

Reply Parent Score: 2