ferrarif50
Journeyman
The title of this post is a quote from sci-fi scribe and Infoquake author David Louis Edelman. he elborates:
So why am I down on open source’s prospects for the long term? A few reasons:
1. Open source hasn’t proven it can produce better products, just comparable ones.
The reality of the matter is that most open source software is not
entirely ready for prime time. It’s buggy, its usability is generally
wretched, and the documentation tends to be rather slapdash and hard to
follow. In short: pretty much like regular, proprietary software.
2. Software is too cheap to worry about saving money on it.
Windows costs $150 or so out of the box; less if you upgrade or buy it
pre-installed on a new computer. And it comes with almost everything
the general user needs: basic word processing, web browsing, a media
player, e-mail. So if I’m a business owner, the question is, why shouldn’t I pay $100 per user for a product with complete user documentation and technical support?
3. As software gets more complicated, open source will have a problem keeping up.
We’ve got limited space here on Earth for people, and only a limited
percentage of the population qualified to write software. But with
quantum computing on the horizon, there’s nearly unlimited potential
for software and no reason that programs won’t get more and more
complicated. Do the math: eventually there will be far too
much code out there for us to have a population of open source experts
on every piece of it. And when it becomes a million times easier to
exploit software than to fix it, the first obvious precaution is to
lock up access to all those exploits.
Read the complete article at
*blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=350&tag=nl.e138
So why am I down on open source’s prospects for the long term? A few reasons:
1. Open source hasn’t proven it can produce better products, just comparable ones.
The reality of the matter is that most open source software is not
entirely ready for prime time. It’s buggy, its usability is generally
wretched, and the documentation tends to be rather slapdash and hard to
follow. In short: pretty much like regular, proprietary software.
2. Software is too cheap to worry about saving money on it.
Windows costs $150 or so out of the box; less if you upgrade or buy it
pre-installed on a new computer. And it comes with almost everything
the general user needs: basic word processing, web browsing, a media
player, e-mail. So if I’m a business owner, the question is, why shouldn’t I pay $100 per user for a product with complete user documentation and technical support?
3. As software gets more complicated, open source will have a problem keeping up.
We’ve got limited space here on Earth for people, and only a limited
percentage of the population qualified to write software. But with
quantum computing on the horizon, there’s nearly unlimited potential
for software and no reason that programs won’t get more and more
complicated. Do the math: eventually there will be far too
much code out there for us to have a population of open source experts
on every piece of it. And when it becomes a million times easier to
exploit software than to fix it, the first obvious precaution is to
lock up access to all those exploits.
Read the complete article at
*blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=350&tag=nl.e138