From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2010-03-13T22:12:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Why no TextMate for Linux?

On 13 March 2010 07:05, Seebs <usenet-nospam@seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-03-13, David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com> wrote:
>> On Friday 12 March 2010 07:00:06 pm Seebs wrote:

>> I haven't seen much of that, not that it matters -- the point is that
>> generally, open code that has a userbase of programmers will be maintained
>> across those versions, and even the old, unpopular versions are often forked
>> and maintained. Neither of these is guaranteed for proprietary software.
>
> Neither of them is guaranteed for anything.  I'd say, though, that I've
> seen a lot better support for five-year-old proprietary software than I
> usually have for two-year old open source -- because open source users
> tend to be a lot more willing to upgrade, since it's close to free to do
> so.
>
> People whose livelihood depends on the quality of their support have
> an incentive to meet user demands.

If you are willing to pay the money you did for the proprietary
support I am sure you would get support for any opensource application
of you choice as well.

>> It's also an argument against considering Windows to be the basis of your
>> business or livelihood, unless you're willing to accept that upgrade
>> treadmill. Again, before Win7, the choice was likely between XP and Vista, and
>> many savvier consumers disliked Vista with a passion.
>
> Yes.
>
> But for some users, that upgrade treadmill may be worth it -- especially if,
> say, you gain enough benefit from a particular Windows-only app that it
> is more efficient to upgrade frequently than to make do with something else.
>
>> And the only way out? Win7. But that was, again, depending wholly on Microsoft
>> to solve the issue.
>
> Sure.
>
> But so what?  People in general know that going in, and sometimes they make
> the decision that it's the right tradeoff.  I'm not trying to argue that
> there's no downside to a proprietary solution -- only that it's not at all
> obvious that it'll always, or even usually, be foolish to pick one.

The problem is that people often do not do this decision. They just
have something on their computer like the MS Access/Office environment
so they write their application in it not realizing that in 1-2 years
there will be a new MS Office version and their application will no
longer work. So bringing this up is important but it is quite a bit
offtopic here.

>
>> I'm arguing that it is a huge benefit, and I'm puzzled that people place so
>> little value on it, especially when I presume it's exactly this kind of
>> benefit that would lead someone to Ruby in the first place.
>
> Not really.  What leads me to Ruby in the first place is that it's pleasant
> to work with.  If I wanted something less vendor-dependant or less likely
> to be suddenly changed out from under me, leaving me with no practical
> support, there are probably half a dozen languages I'd be better off with.
>
> Keep in mind, an option you can't actually use is not a real option.  I'm
> comfortable enough with C to have diagnosed an arcane memory management bug
> in the pgsql driver.  Not many other people I know would have had a good
> chance of finding that bug -- meaning that in practice, access to the
> source would not really be useful to them.
>
> For many, many, people, the direct advantages of open source are a pure
> non-issue.  I'd bet that most Ruby developers would not be usefully able
> to modify the Ruby source to fix a language-implementation bug.  So why
> should they care whether they have source or not?

There is also the option of hiring somebody who does have the required
C skill. This is an option you don't have with proprietary software.
Still some opensource software (such as Firefox mentioned earlier) is
likely so horrible that it's easier to write a new one than to fix it
so the advantage of it being opnsource is not that clear.

>
>> Adium was good. I like Kopete, these days.
>
> I try KDE occasionally.  Around 4.x, they had a wonderful feature, which
> was that they never in any way saved user keybindings, such that every
> login got you all the defaults again.  I guess maybe I'll try again sometime,
> but that's a level of quality control I would normally associate with
> Microsoft...
>

Stuff happens. It might be that the distribution you used forgot to
install some piece which was required for this feature to work.

I generally find opensource and proprietary software suffers from
different class of bugs.

Commercial software vendors (who sell almost exclusively proprietary
products) tend to focus on the experience of the average user so that
most users can have most things done smoothly with their product. They
tend to ignore bugs which only affect a corner case experienced by
minority of users, even when these would be trivial to fix for anybody
who has the source. There are just too many of these, and their
development resources are limited.

On the other hand, bugs in opensource software tend to get fixed only
if they cause enough annoyance to a single user that somebody invests
the effort required to fix them. However, many bugs are experienced at
least occasionally by the majority of users but require fundamental
changes to the application in question.

A prime example of such bug would be the broken HTML parser in Firefox
which uses fixed sized stack to store nested elements. Given
sufficiently complex page the parser fails but changing it to a
dynamic stack is too fundamental for anybody to do it. This means that
Firefox cannot parse pages generated by some popular web site editors
which produce needlessly complex HTML code if the page is edited too
much. AFAIK this bug is known for more than a decade (and is older
than Firefox itself) and not fixed yet as are many others in Firefox.

Thanks

Michal