Beat Rubischon wrote:
Hello!
Am 07.10.08 14:33 schrieb "Jeroen Massar" unter <jeroen(a)unfix.org>rg>:
Better then to pay the closed source folks and
let them do it, as they
will also maintain the changes for yo.
Each day I work with Open Source and Closed Source tools and applications.
Usually I see commercial software coming with a better usability and
OpenSource with better stability and performance.
I think it all depends on where it comes from and how much the authors
of the tool love it and how much time they can spend on it.
The major advantage for OpenSource is the visibility
of the code - no code
monkey is able to hide 20 years old buggy crap when he needs to provide the
sources. Believe me, this is a great motivation for a lot of coders out
there ;-)
Which is why for instance that great Open Source thing called Linux
contains so much junk I guess ;)
Yes, the visibility is there, but there are only few people who can
actually understands what it does. That nice Debian prng issue of late
comes to mind as an awesome example here, even though it was very
visible that it was changed, clearly nobody ever really checked upto
then, thus it went completely unnoticed.
Even more, when you pay licenses host or by CPU, which
means today
_per_core_, why should a commercial software supplier optimize their
binaries?
To be better, cheaper, faster etc than the competition?
Or to just make sure that there is no competition as they suck compared
to what you do. Some people pride their work ;)
Even simple tasks like using a commercial compiler
instead of gcc,
which gives 10-100% additional performance, is often not done as the
compiler costs $1000 extra - compare this with the several hundred thousends
the scoftware company usually earns per year...
ICC++
But gcc is getting quite upto par actually as a certain company has
donated a lot of code to the compiler to beef it up quite a bit. I am
one of those 'commercial' folks who also does open source stuff, and for
a certain project has one single challenge: be better than everybody
else. That includes making it very scalable and very fast. If those
components where not in there, then what would be the fun.
Again, it all depends where you get your stuff from, and like mostly
everything you can vote by not using it.
Greets,
Jeroen