Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 02:49:55 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Bill Moran" <wmoran@iowna.com>, "Cynic" <cynic@mail.cz> Cc: "rootman" <rootman@xmission.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Ethics and nature (was Re: Justification for using FreeBSD) Message-ID: <002f01c0f580$88634500$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3B298A29.D6DF874D@iowna.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Bill Moran >Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 9:08 PM >To: Cynic >Cc: rootman; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: OT: Ethics and nature (was Re: Justification for using FreeBSD) > > >Cynic wrote: >An insteresting point, however, is that I feel Open Source is so popular >because it allows people to feel good about themselves by really doing >the best work they're capable of. For all it's dumbass efforts to >discredit and destroy the open-source movement, Microsoft has never had >the balls to do the one thing that would make them just as powerful: >Give their employees a way to feel REALLY good about themselves by >producing an honestly quality product ... and collecting their ample pay >as well. I don't think this was always the case. In the beginning, I think that Microsoft did have and allow employees to produce an honestly quality product. The problem is that the good software developers that can and do produce this kind of code are a valuable commodity. In short, they can work where they want for how much they want and doing what they want. Microsoft's problem with this is that their customers build these big expensive systems with their software, then expect the software to be maintained forever. As a result, a lot of what Microsoft does is drudgery, hack work of chasing bugs and maintaining old, backwardsly compatible code. This is work that isn't very fun and your best developers don't want to do it. But, it needs to be done so you end up hiring a bunch of inexperienced and incompetent programmers, and of course your not going to pay them much, and of course they are going to hate you and hate the work but they don't have anything else they can do so they stay and crank out crummy code. If good programmers ran Microsoft, then every new version of Windows would be brand-new and have little backwards compatibility. But if that were the case the wealthy customers would revolt and Microsoft would disintegrate. >M$ has all kinds of theories as to why highly qualified hackers would >work on projects and give their code away for free. They speculate that >hackers get an ego trip when a piece of their code gets committed. Did >it ever occur to Microsoft that sitting back and watching the >performance specs on a FreeBSD system makes the hacker proud? That >working back and forth with some other hackers on a coding problem is >fun? Is it unbelieveable to them that some of these hackers fall asleep >at night with big grins on their faces thinking "Boy ... I REALLY got >that new VM code optomized!" Actually, yes they know all about this. The problem is that there is simply no way you can campaign effectively against this, if you admit that the Open Source programmers are proud of their effort, then the second you say anything against it your basically criticizing quality as well as turning the debate into a personality conflict, and there is not a snowballs chance in hell you will win this kind of argument. The only chance they have of fighting Open Source is if they criticize the code itself, and it's license. Comments like the "ego trip" are basically statements that FreeBSD is written by amateurs, and thus is full of problems. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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