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RE[3]: Comment by stabbyjones
Care to come out with an example?
Besides if the source is available linux support in slightly longer term means basically universal support.
Exclusivity is exclusive to closed systems world.
The simple fact is ALL FOSS software suffers from the "busted toilet" problem. What is the busted toilet problem?
Its simple, if I ask you to paint me a picture or write me a song for free? i'll have dozens to choose from, some of which will probably be good. If I ask you to come and fix my nasty busted toilet? I hope I enjoy peeing in the sink because it ain't happening.
What does that have to do with software? Simple, regressions testing, bug fixing, QA and QC, all of these jobs are boring, tedious, thankless and dull jobs and in Linux...they just don't get done. Don't take My word for it, go to any bug tracker and see how old some of the bugs are, Ubuntu for example has 6+ year old bugs in their bug tracker.
The simple fact is with paid software if they don't fix? People don't buy and they go out of business. Apple and MS pay millions upon millions of dollars to do those lousy stinking jobs which is why your desktop doesn't crash when you switch from a video to a chat window like X-Server has been known to do, those kinds of bugs get fixed because the corp pays to have them fixed.
I really wish FOSS didn't have this problem, as a retailer I'd love a "third way" and frankly MS doesn't do us little guys ANY favors on pricing, but its simply human nature. The reason it works on servers and Android works on phones? Google spends a billion a year on Android, corps spend hundreds of millions on Linux server so those bugs ARE being paid to be fixed. Its just because there is really no money to be made on the desktop (MS makes money by selling licenses by the hundreds of millions, without that kind of scale you can't compete) nobody is sinking that money into it and the bugs just don't get fixed.
Every year the desktop gets prettier, because again creating pretty things is a natural part of the human animal, but better? Nope, not really.
Sweeping generalization, it's the new fact. This is bullshit. There's good OSS software and bad OSS software, just like how there's good closed-source software and bad closed-source software.
Because Linux is the only OSS software in the world and even if it isn't we can extrapolate from it to everything else. There are many OSS projects with rigorous testing, both manual and automated, and there are many closed-source companies that does neither.
Wow, really. This is just as much nonsense as "all OSs software is crap". It's simply not true. Sometimes bugs get fixed in a timely manner, sometimes it takes forever and sometimes it never happens. This is regardless of if the software is closed or open.
Yes, naturally. Closed-source is bug free and when it isn't all bugs are fixed in a timely manner. Hmm..yeah, maybe in some alternate reality.
I've never had this problem, EVER, on my OSS desktops; be it Linux or BSD.
Wait, are you talking about OSS or closed-source software?
It seems to me that you're missing the core ingredient of lock-in here.
A large part of today's dominant proprietary software is so buggy and painful to use that it surely never goes through serious QA anymore. Why do people keep buying then ? Because they need something to support their proprietary formats, their proprietary protocols, their proprietary hardware...
Software actors are not fairly competing in a free market with flying unicorns, glittery rainbows, and happiness all around. Everyone has its dirty weapons that the others cannot compete with, and will not hesitate to use it. Including the open-source actors.
The White House, for example, uses Linux and Drupal and it's there working in spite of usual attacks.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=whitehouse.gov
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/07/24/white_house_web_site_moves/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/developers
People can see by themselves how it doesn't happen with good software. Don't take my word for it, if people want to try it by themselves, there's a "Virtual machine of Kubuntu 11.04 i386 Desktop, stable version" on
https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B2UJmdRmDlL1VmRWZ3dfaGdJTUU/edit
to conduct experiments on it. Just don't update it to an upper version of Kubuntu and, before updating a GUI program, close that program.
I usually employ a copy of it as a virtual machine and it works stably, too.
About it, there is a README.txt on the same web address.
If someone has any doubt, on this thread you can make questions.
The same argumenthave been repeated times an again in the last 20 years, every time OSS software is meant to be drployed in direct competition agains software of some corp.
In fact im niw working in a system that has both closed and open components (both mainyained by the same company) but thanks to Java closed libs are easy to decompile. Guess which one has better quality and which better handles corner cases ans has less bugs.
You are confused.
People being payed to write software does not mean closed software.
What you are talking about is business paying for developing software, that has nothing to do with closed software.
Of couse there are old bugs in Ubuntu, this is the first bug and it still hasn't been fixed:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1




Member since:
2009-08-21
Whoa, let's be careful with proprietary software bashing or we could cause society grat trouble!
Now "the world would be much worse" is an assumption you must be very insightful - almost omniscient - to make, as it's quite a demanding task to guess how a world without proprietary software would be. Anyway that hypoetical world has absolutely nothing to do with the topic here. It's so far-fetched you must have felt at least on the edge of bad faith writing your comment.
Nobody would freakin ever complain about proprietary software if there wasn't the suspicion - as in this case - that someone's trying to compete outside the boundaries of what's legitimate this way damaging other entities.
What the heck has this to do with hating proprietary software? All players should just play fair, but maybe that's outside the scope for some of them. The details aren't known yet, but I would get very annoyed by a hypotetical company making it more difficult for an open source OS to support a new processor. It sounds like a steer from the usual Intel policy and as such it does not seem to be happening just by chance.
If you think this shows how bad free software supporters are (the vast majority of which I'm sure don't want proprietary software to disappear but just like having more choice and the possibility to know what the code they're using really does) feel free to voice your personal reality, but be aware it sounds quite crazy.